Today I heard on MPR that Ray Christensen, “the voice of the Minnesota Gophers,” has passed away at age 92. I grew up listening to him broadcasting many University of Minnesota Golden Gopher sports (Dad was an alumnus and liked to listen), and Ray is the only broadcaster who made any sort of impression on me. He had a drone of a voice that modulated to the words he wanted in a rather memorable way – a voice that really matched up to the imagined immensity of the football stadium, or the old Barn for basketball.
But more importantly, Ray was a good role model, and it’s very simple to sum it up: he rejected tribalism. For all that he was an inveterate Gophers fan, he was also a very fair person. More than once he expressed the sentiment, “Hey, I’m a Gophers fan, but, boy, Penn State is sure playing well today.” Sounds meaningless? Compare that to, say, modern GOP behavior, a take-no-prisoners, say nothing good about the enemy approach, which denies any kind of common bond which we should share across this nation. Reading the partisans of both sides, I cannot imagine them getting together over a beer to discuss the problem of today. But Ray? Just listening to how he conducted himself, you knew he didn’t hesitate to share a meal with his colleagues from Penn State, or Indiana, or the coaches of those teams.
And that’s vitally important. Our technology may be advancing at a breath-taking pace, but culturally speaking, we’re regressing. The entire GOP appears to have sunk back to the level of pre-World War I, where epithets were applied to all other countries, and the idea of dealing fairly with other countries was considered radical. And from my exposure to leftist “progressives”, they seem to be following the GOP down that same hellish rat hole. By contrast, Obama conducted himself in the old style of believing we all had something to contribute, continually offering to work with the GOP.
I have no idea what Ray’s politics might have been, but I suspect sitting down with Ray and talking about them would not have been a traumatic experience. And I don’t have that hope for the partisans of today. I can only hope they die off quickly enough so that we can return to the task of maturing – as a nation.
