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Saturday, November 3, 2007 12:00 AM

How Oprah ruined the marathon

America's competitive spirit has been wrecked by feel-good amateurs like Oprah whose only goal is to stagger across the finish line.

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  • Saturday, November 3, 2007 06:23 AM

    More Mediocrity in America

    I am equally disturbed by all this feel good stuff. It seems that these days how an individual feels about him/herself is the only thing that matters. I have actually heard managers tell their employees that the most important thing is that they have fun - not a word about competence or quality of performance. You see it everywhere in pop culture today. On American Idol, it does not matter that the wanna-bees can't sing or dance, what matters is that THEY ENJOYED THEIR OWN PERFORMANCE no matter how painful it was for the rest of us. While it is true that not everyone can win, and most of us are left to judge our performance based on personal best achievements, achieving personal bests still requires intense dedication, training, and a high level of competiteness - something which is at odds with the "feel good" and "if it was fun for me, then I was successful" mentality. I think this explains a lot of the problems we have here in America. Mediocrity is not only acceptable, is it the expected outcome. That we seem to be increasingly okay with that as a culture is disturbing.

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