They say art imitates life, that cultural tastes and trends serve as a looking glass for what's really going on in a given society at a given time.

Certain people, Oscar Wilde included, like to say that life imitates art.

Those people are perverse.

But enough of the peccadilloes of mid-19th-century Irish literary titans....

Art does imitate life, and professional sports today is as much a part of the cultural landscape as any gallery opening or theatre premier. So to see the owners and players in two of the largest grossing sports enterprises essentially seeing who can hold their breath the longest is, while absurd, hardly surprising. The case of the NFL lockout (and never forget it was a lockout and not a strike), resolved by the time you read this, is the silliest of all. At a time when the national unemployment rate hovers stubbornly above 9%, at a time when people are gladly earning less so they can be sure they earn anything at all, the lack of empathy and commonsense displayed by the NFL's owners is beyond comprehension.

A "league" that generates over $9 billion a year, a cabal with only 32 paying members, should at least be able to sign off an agreement they don't have to preemptively blow up years before its expiration. But that's exactly what the NFL owners did in this case and it's exactly why all the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing that's taken place over the past four months has gone on. The owners were apparently so unhappy with the piece of the pie they saw themselves giving to the players every year that they simply had to throw the whole thing in the trash and start all over.

Never you mind that it was the biggest pie the American sporting public had ever seen. Did I mention nine billion dollars? Never you mind that, really, for the players anyway, it was more like an $8 billion pie because the owners got to magically skim a billion off the top before the accountants got to get involved. So of the real pie, the nine billion dollar pie, the players were only entitled to $4.8 billion. The owners were saving themselves a little more than half-a-billion dollars, but guess what?

They wanted more.

So, like pigs too long at a trough, the owners got greedier and greedier, until finally it was too much. They blew up their league and tried to take their ball home.

Except now, unlike in 1987, the owners realized that consumers (you and me) and resellers (TV) probably wouldn't stand for paying full freight for replacement players. And as actual revenue-generating dates started popping up on the calendar (Did you know that one week of PRE-season NFL football generates around $250 million for the league? Have you ever seen an NFL pre-season game? They should pay you to watch that dreck!) the owners started getting more and more nervous.

Maybe they had overplayed their hands.

Maybe you really can't make silk purses out of tin ears.

Maybe the players weren't going to blink first after all.

As my two-year-old likes to say, oops.

So the situation resolved itself, clumsily, as always, like the first time you kissed your first crush and you knew you hadn't gotten it quite right. The players (boohoo…) were hurt by the fumbling gotcha! play pulled off by the owners (what, me worry?) and everybody danced around and acted put upon and "disrespected" and "hoodwinked."

All love of a good hoodwinking aside, it was petty playground behavior, a lot of finger pointing and tattle-taling by a bunch of grown men making very grown up money. They had to wait until the 11th hour, or at least 11th hour as far as revenue-generation is concerned, and really, is there really any other 11th hour that matters, but they got it done.

It would have been too incredibly stupid not to.

Nobody, not one single person on the face of the planet, could have been sympathetic to a group of adults that committed such spectacularly selfish, misguided, fallacious, deluded, ill-advised, unexplainable, mass professional suicide. (Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill....)

The NBA lockout is less misguided, if only marginally so, but the parties involved seem so far apart that a speedy (yes, the NFL's 4-monther counts as "speedy") resolution looks more and more unlikely. The NBA simply wants to make sure that, like all other businesses in a capitalist society, every one of its members is profitable.

Sounds like a traditional capitalist model, right? No? Oh…. Well. That's what the owners there want.

And they want to do it by rolling player salaries back by 50% or so. Including the salaries of those players who've already signed contracts.

Those contracts, by the way, that were signed off on by the owners too, but they all get very touchy when anyone points out they might have spent themselves into this hole.

But I'm sure they'll pass those cost savings on to you, the paying basketball consumer....

I'm sure we'll have plenty of chances to talk more about the NBA's suicide watch over the coming months.

Right now, I know just what I need.

Now where is that trusty tack hammer…?.