A couple of things come to mind:

1) We the people are called out as idiotic rabble and maybe rightly so. Ignorant, most definitely, but why shouldn't we be ignorant? Everything almost all of us knows about Henry Aaron comes from media sources. If an assortment of mean dry-drunk buffet hounds tell us of Mr. Aaron's grace and dignity, how are we to know different? If SI tells us Barry Bonds is a puppy-strangling villain who derives not only his power but his batting eye and preparation from pills and syringes, well, GIGO again. There's no practical way for us to 'just know' that the tropes and praxes of hegemony from sportswriters are 'really' allegorical complaints about the cheap blended versus single malt scotch in their hotel mini-bar.

2) Times don't just change; we change the times. Jackie Robinson's ballsy journey and the contemporaneous de-segregation of the military were as much reflections of as they were motor for America's slow cultural journey.