The playing field is more sacred than the stock exchange, more blessed than Capital Hill or the vaults of Fort Knox. The diamond and the gridiron – and, to a lesser degree, the court, the rink, the track, and the ring – embody the American dream of Eden.

Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.

Seeing is believing, and if an American success is to count for anything in the world it must be clothed in the raiment of property. As often as not it isn’t the money itself that means anything; it is the use of money as the currency of the soul.

Label celebrity a consumer society’s most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society’s art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.

It isn’t money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.

As a child growing up in the precincts of wealth, and later as a college student, newspaper reporter and resident of New York’s Upper East Side, I got used to listening to the talk of financial killings and sexual misalliance that animates the conversation of the rich and the familiars of the rich.

The gentlemen who wrote the Constitution were as suspicious of efficient government as they were wary of democracy, a “turbulence and a folly” that was associated with the unruly ignorance of an urban mob.

But the line of thought that I’d been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it’s a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

Let the corporations do as they please – pillage the environment, falsify their advertising, rig the securities markets – and it is none of the federal government’s business to interfere with the will of heaven.