Where will Barry Bonds play this year? That was the question on the minds of sportswriters as Bonds appeared in a San Francisco federal court room in early December to publicly answer the government's charges against him. Would it be Oakland, where the A's might risk public relations fallout to capitalize on Bonds fame – and his infamy? The Yankees, perhaps? Or had he played his last game of baseball in any uniform?

Bonds' plea came a little less than a week before the release of the long-awaited report by former Senator George Mitchell on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. ESPN devoted four hours of coverage of the report's entry into the public dialogue; however, the network's denizens avoided any discussion of their role in hyping the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa home run duel that got us into this mess in the first place. They correctly raised questions about Commissioner Bud Selig's promise to retroactively punish the more than 75 transgressors, but failed to note that Selig acted, at the very least, as the unwitting tour guide on the Steroids Express in the late 90's, in hopes that baseball would complete its miraculous recovery from the 1994 players strike.

In a scene reminiscent of the gaggle of reporters hastily reading the Supreme Court's ruling in 2000 that stopped the recount in Florida and gave George W. Bush the Presidency, sportswriters scoured the Mitchell Report for names – big names, less prominent names, names of players who barely played. Sprinkled among these context-free factoids were predictions of punishment, pronouncements by experts that evidence in the report would never hold up if the players were tried in court, and grandiose assessments of baseball's future – even brighter than before, now that users have been exposed, and their punishments, at least in Selig's mind, are being negotiated.

Life, and baseball, goes on. Owners will lie about losing money as their coffers overflow. Free agents will be signed, and those same owners will complain with what has to be mock sincerity about the damage done by those bloated contracts to the game's competitive balance. And Bonds will find a place to play – or not. We will shrug our shoulders and wait for next season's tickets to become available, and plan our purchases of yet another iteration of "gear."

I experienced this same curious lack of indignation when, from my cozy bed on an August morning, I groggily watched the Today Show replay of Bonds' record-setting 756th home run off Washington Nationals pitcher Mike Bacsik. I didn't think about what the home run meant, or whether Bonds' actions had tainted the new record. My decision about an asterisk next to his name would have to wait. I didn't think about Hank Aaron and his classy but firm refusal to travel to San Francisco to witness the historic home run. I didn't think about watching Aaron's historic 715th home run off Al Downing in April 1974 with my mother on our battered Admiral television set with the peeling veneer.

Instead, I thought about the Broadway show A Chorus Line, specifically, the character of Morales, a diminutive struggling actress who takes a class with an irascible Method acting devotee named Karp. Despite her earnest attempts to transform herself into a sled, a table, and an ice cream cone in order to both please Karp and purportedly hone her acting skills, she feels "nothing". Morales tries desperately to improve her performance, to feel what Karp wants her to feel. She contemplates dropping the class, and sings in "Nothing" of her frustration and of her deepening hatred of Karp.

At song's end, Morales tells the audience about learning months after taking the class that Karp had died. "And I dug right down to the bottom of my soul and cried," she sings mournfully. Morales' tears didn't stem from a recently realized respect for the man. She hadn't suddenly concluded that Karp was an impactful teacher despite his stern and dismissive tactics. She didn't seem, from my vantage point in the audience in 1978 anyway, in the mood to forgive. She cried because she felt nothing, just as I felt nothing as I watched Bonds' blast rise in the Bay Area night and plummet into a waiting throng of fans, most of them prepared to cash in if the ball found its way into their outstretched hands.

For a few days, I didn't understand my reaction. Why didn't I feel as I did when Aaron homered off Downing? I was thrilled for Aaron. I was nearly paralyzed by the elation. I had a real sense that I, along with millions of other folks watching the game that night, had witnessed something truly significant. I had only a limited sense of the bigotry Aaron and his family had gone through in the months prior to his historic feat, or the bravery he showed in the face of it, but I cheered loudly for him, and felt sorry for Downing, who would be remembered only for Aaron's historic home run, not for an otherwise solid pitching career which included a 20-win season in 1971.

But as Bonds' home run was replayed repeatedly, and the cadre of overheated commentators yet again staked out their positions about what Bonds' accomplishment meant for baseball's present and future, my indifference heightened. The irony of my foggy mental leap to Morales was lost on me for some time, too.

Finally, a moment of clarity: Bonds' record-setting home run, and his less than admirable actions, just doesn't register with us. They have been stripped of all their meaning. Unlike Aaron's home run, or the moon landing in 1969, or Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech – even our disastrous foray into Iraq, allegedly in the name of spreading democracy – Bonds' home run was not an event that reached out, grabbed us by the collective collar, and slapped us in the face with its significance.

The reason? This is where Morales comes in. We don't pay attention to events outside our own little worlds unless they are packaged and delivered to us as spectacle, as theater. Everything, we are told by the media, qualifies as an event; everything comes to us at the same brash volume. Everything is deemed relevant, and we try to accommodate it all with multitasking fervor on our iPods and iPhones. We have lost our ability to discern scale.

A quick story: an hour or so before the annual CBS broadcast of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, my mother would light up the Christmas decorations in our living room, turn off the matching Sears colonial lamps, and make hot chocolate for my brother and me before we settled in to watch the show. For a half-hour – and another half-hour when A Charlie Brown Christmas came on, and one more hour for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer – we paid rapt attention, chins tucked in hands over bent elbows nestled in our apple red carpet; we were willing participants in these significant events, events whose contours are clear to me even today. Even receiving a call on our then brand new heavy red Bell System touchtone phone, positioned under one of those Sears lamps, was special.

Awash in information from the media and frantically juggling the platforms and devices on which we try to make sense of it, our lives run together. Everything feels the same, and we feel at the same level about everything. It's probably not accurate to say that "larger than life" figures no longer exist, but instead of finding them ourselves, contributing to their prominence, we simply receive them, packaged neatly, from the media. No thought required. And, if my preliminary research on media-anointed heroes is right, no minorities and few women need apply. We get a lot of white male firefighters instead.

We are told that everyone is a hero, that everyone is special – and not in the loving Mister Rogers "be your own person" sense. Everyone, to quote the best known song from A Chorus Line, is a "singular sensation." For that matter, everything is a "singular sensation." Our heroes and leaders are packaged, field-tested, focus-grouped, handled individuals made purposely devoid of originality. The compelling sports figures of even one generation past – Muhammad Ali, for example – and their antics seem outdated, quaint. It's not their athletic skill on which we focus; it's their ability to entertain us, to show us they've mastered the art of packaging.

No matter what the vocation, these figures all follow a proscribed course, and act in proscribed fashion. They are told not to risk being caught off guard, lest a verbal faux-pas find its way into the viral morass of YouTube or on to someone's blog. As a result, mediocrity is amplified – and achievements, to borrow a word from a wise friend, are neutralized.

But steroids or no, I should have felt something – done something – when Bonds hit his home run, but the best I could was think a resounding "Who cares?"

Maybe these are the rantings of an artificially busy Boomer poised on the precipice of a mid-life crisis. But the human heart can't be that falsely intense all the time. It needs lulls; it needs boredom; it needs originality, so that when a truly significant event unfolds in front of us, we can actually get excited.

Morales tries to be true to herself, but in class Karp beats the drums of conformity to a set of principles designed by an alleged expert (a clear reference to Stanislavsky) to make everyone behave the same way. To be an actor, the Method goes, you have to first show you can imagine being a table. The parties to the performance, like Morales, end up numb.

As do we. We don't get angry when politicians spit out the same talking points at every public appearance, when journalists transform debates into overheated cage-match press conferences. We barely raise an eyebrow when an NBC reporter rows a small boat through flood waters in New Jersey to suggest their treacherous depth, and later we learn the water is ankle-deep. We are concerned with ethics breached and morals besmirched, when James Frey lies and Jayson Blair fabricates, but we feel more comfortable dissecting, deconstructing, rambling on about process. After all, we pay a lot to be entertained, and we don't care how the performers do what they do – just so they do it to our satisfaction. I can't say for sure if sustaining dissection is part of a strategic plan by media types to keep us engaged with their product, but it seems to be working.

This, then, is the tragedy of Barry Bonds. We feel nothing, but argue incessantly about nearly everything. We deliberate about the process, but miss the significance – of everything. We enthusiastically consume the mediated hero, but rarely check credentials. We should be angered, livid, incensed, outraged, pissed off, but we aren't. I barely am. When Bonds pled not guilty to the charges in the indictment, I stood in my family room and muttered something to myself about what a bad day for baseball it was – that was about it.

I don't think we should launch a full-scale, temperance-union style campaign about the evils of steroid use. I don't even think the players who used steroids should be punished that severely; they were only responding to the implied orders – and the avarice – of the sport's governing figures. And even though Bonds, along with seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, could head up an association of athletes who rail about how misdirected overexposure has damaged them, yet deploy overexposure with dazzling precision, I wish them well.

I just want us to be pissed, flat out pissed, if only for a moment.

I'll work on it.

Ron Bishop is an associate professor in the Department of Culture and Communication, where he teaches courses in news writing, sports writing, news media law, and the cultural history of fame. A former sports writer and newspaper editor, he holds a Ph.D. in communication from Temple University in Philadelphia.