April may be the cruelest month, but this past March has proved devastating to the American way of life. No, I am not talking about the John Tower fiasco, updates on the impending greenhouse effect, the FSX debate or even our current whistling past the graveyard of inflation.
I am talking about the demise of the Big Three of the American Credo: baseball, apple pie and motherhood. No one of them escaped the month of March unscathed.Take baseball. The new season is upon us. We should be oiling old gloves, studying big league rosters, anticipating the first important developments of the spring - the team that puts together a hot streak of consecutive wins, or, alternatively, the team that is the Baltimore Orioles of 1989.
Instead we are mired in sex and gambling, Wade Boggs and Pete Rose. Two of the game's all-time best hitters have brought us to an all-time low. The season has barely begun and all we have to consider are the empty-headed misadventures of a self-proclaimed sex addict and the sad specter of a reputed gambling addict.
This March, the sports pages look like The National Enquirer, and breakfast table conversation with 11-year-old Adam consists of trying to explain why Boston's third baseman had a mistress and why Cincinnati's manager once got a dead fish in the mail.
Apple pie fared no better. In one short month, apples went from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden to the Poison Control Center's list of suspect substances. Across America, parents were plucking apples out of children's lunch boxes; apple juice became the new synonym for toxic waste. Saying that something was "as American as apple pie" took on a grim new twist.
At breakfast my wife explains to 7-year-old Amanda that an apple a day no longer keeps the doctor away. An apple a day means you're eating poison spray. "Oh," says Amanda, "kind of like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Life imitates art.
That leaves motherhood. Let's face it. It was a tough month for motherhood, too. America spent much of March arguing over the mommy track. Was motherhood harmful to corporate America's health? Were women managers who became mothers to be banished to a lesser role? Interestingly, even those who attacked the idea of a mommy track didn't get around to defending the idea of motherhood. Women's rights, yes. Mothers' rights, no.
To make matters worse, in March the controversy over abortion grew so heated that Operation Rescue demonstrators were threatened with a RICO lawsuit as a tactic for discouraging their costly protests. Now breakfast table conversation consists of me trying to explain what motherhood and the Mafia have in common.
Let's face it, it's time to embrace a new Big Three, a triumvirate that is more fitting to the 1990s and America's new role in the world. We need to reflect on sports as theater, the globalization of food and the new health concerns. How about pro wrestling, tofu and celibacy? Welcome to the new American Credo.
(Alan M. Webber is managing editor of The Harvard Business Review.)