Media Musings: Living the dream through horses
Somehow, in my mind’s eye, I thought I saw the ghost of the great Sea Biscuit running alongside Funny Cide at the Preakness, the hope being that once again a horse would become a symbol around which we could gather during a time of trouble and war.
In so many ways, even in losing, Funny Cide still delivered for us, for the gelding showed our dreams and myths about ourselves – which we so desperately need now – were still possible.
Here we had a bunch of guys buying a horse for $75,000 in upstate New York seeing their horse win two legs of the Triple Crown. They went to all the races in a yellow school bus and the colors they chose belonged to the high school. To say the obvious, they weren’t the millionaires club found in Lexington, Ky.
Across the media, the phrase that sought to summarize it all – this is the American dream – was uttered to the point it became Funny Cide’s second name. Yet, as we all know, there is no real definition of “The American Dream” and that’s the beauty of it.
Perhaps it’s a simple as believing that unimagined success can strike those of us called “ordinary people” who go to work, teaching, building, paying taxes and wanting the better for our children, who don’t enjoy the life of wealth and fame. They are the solid rock of the nation, but they never see headlines about their lives, only when they die.
Perhaps it’s this form of lottery that freedom can bring. I will never forget a Mexican who’d paid and fought to enter the United State illegally who turned to the camera recently and said, so quietly, “You don’t know what you have.” To him, the American dream was simple: freedom and opportunity and some hope for his family.
Seabiscuit’s story was much richer, of course, than Funny Cide’s. Seabiscuit’s gait was terrible; he wasn’t regal and imperial, but homely and ordinary. He was ridden by a has-been jockey and trained by a man who’d never known any kind of sustained success. His owner was in love with Seabiscuit, and at the height of his glory, he was ranked by Walter Winchell as one of the 10 best stories of the year.
There’s the grit of the champion. Perhaps that’s the dream – you take the punches of life, pick yourself up and fight another day. Many a Texan boasts of the number of failed businesses and bankruptcies and how he or she and his family fought on to reach new wealth.
That’s, in some ways, where we are now. This time the winds of fear again blow across the land, our youth stand guard in strange, hostile places like South Korea, Iraq, Saudi Arabia. We struggle to forge foreign policy with Iran and North Korea. We strain our relationships with Europe. We spend our fortune to protect ourselves at home and aboard and wear the crushing burden of being “The World’s Last Super Power.”
In this process, we cannot seem to find the balance between protecting our civil liberties and being able to secure our freedom at home.
Seabiscuit and Funny Cide are great champions and, because Funny Cide is a gelding, he will run for many years to come and hopefully, by the time his world becomes one of clover and rolling on the gentle grass on a summer day, the American dream of personal freedom will be rebalanced, and the FBI won’t have the power to check library records in secret.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)