The Left has quietly colonized the retreats that average Americans beat into the safe zone" of sports. Sometimes its agenda leaks out.
Probably because I parse words for a living I pick up on shades of meaning that most people dont noticeand that may not be there in some cases. Maybe I just cant help making my life miserable.
Take a bit of blabber that I heard on July 28 from the busy mouth of Brian Kenny on the MLB Network. To be fair Kenny and his roundtable of cud-chewing analysts" were merely piling on the laudation wagon with regard to Roger Angell a human factory of baseball books just inducted into the Hall of Fame as a writer. The comments that made me twitch were Angells own from a book titled... well heres a snippet of the original
Sports Illustrated article (by Tom Verducci The Passion of Roger Angell" 23 July 2014) from which the passage was culledalong with the passage itself:
Angells greatest contribution to the game is that in his writing he has preserved the great people and moments with such grace and care. He is the curator of our baseball souls. Reading Angell on Fisks home run is as different from seeing the highlight as falling deeply in love is from speed dating. The beauty of these words in Agincourt and After (1975) is the amber to preserve our emotional connection to the game:
It is foolish and childish on the face of it to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this lookI know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation it seems to me is the business of caringcaring deeply and passionately really caringwhich is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about how frail or foolish is the object of that concern as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Navetthe infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ballseems a small price to pay for such a gift.
On cue the MLBN crew responded as if they had just heard the lost lines of a Hamlet soliloquy. My reaction was What acid misanthropy! What snide cynicism! Wow!" Evidently Angell and his circle are fully convinced that normal human relations in the USA since World War II have grown grotesquely predatory. Now we must retreat to the highly staged artifice of a childs game to show any degree of overt caring. Since the game is just a pretext a contrived" outlet we must conclude further that at NO moment of our mortal coil do we encounter any person or situation truly deserving of our care. All is fraud hoax and delusion. Like good little existentialists we cheer at games because the counterfeiting of a care-worthy environment makes barely tolerable an indefinite string of days swimming in nullity.
Shees. Ill take Hamlet.
And if I may lodge a mild protest on behalf of baseball fans... most of us do NOT go to the park to participate in some Bacchic deliriumnot the true votaries of the game. To the extent that we flee to baseball (and I admit that the extent may be considerable) we do so for the order the symmetry. Life has grown so chaotic and art so impoverished that we can find intimations of transcending purpose almost nowhere else. A fair ball is a fair ball: the umpire isnt allowed to take his pen and phone and move the foul lines by Executive Order. Baseball is also scientific. A more level swing produces more contact (something todays players with their topheavy metal-clone bats cant seem to figure out). If you design improvements on the basis of observation and experimentation you can excel even in a relatively small body. Baseball finally is Zen. It requires explosive movements issuing from a completely relaxed yet utterly focused mind. This is why the true fan doesnt scream at those players whom he wishes to see succeed. Super-excitation is a shortcut to failure.
I almost wonder if Roger Angell and the MLBN crew have ever actually played the game of baseball. You can get pickled in a bar for a lot less than at the ballpark if thats your objective.
But then even at the Hall of Fame level is anything in baseball about baseball any longer? Or in football either? Are not all of the most popular sports with the largest blue-collar audiences now a vast new province that politically correct propagandists are seeking to colonize? Isnt the behind-the-scenes plan to transform all those Archie Bunkers on their couches into Elizabeth Warrens? Rush Limbaughs remarks throughout the redskin" saga have been spot-on. None of that farce is really about hurt feelings. A minor-league Atlanta team used to call itself the Crackers and a GPAC college team styles itself the Terrible Swedes": odd isnt it that players can heap such insults upon themselves and still survive? On the other side of the coin I get pretty offended by all the vagina emblems that now mosey around college campuses and nobody gives a fig leaf for my blushes. (An idea: should San Franciscos baseball club become the Vagiants to avoid offending dwarves?) As Rush says the real purpose here is to condition us to having our speech reviewed and edited by thought-police. When you can ban the word redskin" because it makes some neurotic exhibitionist break down and snivel then you can ban the word illegal" because it stirs fears of racism in the same kind of person. Eventually you can pretty nearly dehydrate the pith from any public discussion on any issue.
Angells Sartrean nightmare of America a no exit" hell where everything is commercialized and all relations are exploitative comes from the same playbook. If Joe Schmoe stretching in the seventh inning to hear God Bless America" can be convinced that the old America was a pile of crapthat she whose flag he sees waving in center field is a shiny new progressive state dedicated to building public works upon the refuse heapthen a small battle will have been won. If he can be persuaded that Tony Dungy deserves Siberia for hinting however elliptically that homosexual behavior is sinfulif he accepts that Dungys commonly recognized adherence to the Christian faith is already cause for ostracismthen another piece falls on the chessboard. If he grows vaguely uncomfortable with all of this but dare not even use certain words around parking lot or water cooler or picnic tableredskin" illegal" pervert" welfare"... Constitution" self-defense" isolation" tea"then old Joe God help him will never figure out anything. In the Newspeak which he is allowed to use concentration camps will become Adult Education Centers and mass graves will be Contamination Zones.
I love baseball and it delights me to see how miserably inept the thought-police assigned to colonizing it are at understanding its simplest dynamic. I have never visited the Hall of Fame and now I have resolved forever to avoid it: my own reading and memories are quite adequate to me. I have plenty of misanthropy in me I admitbut it doesnt come from misdefining navet" as infantile and ignoble joy". And by the way Mr. Angell... haphazard" is already an adjective without the suffix. Enjoy your progressive heavenn.
The Left has quietly colonized the retreats that average Americans beat into the safe zone" of sports. Sometimes its agenda leaks out.
Probably because I parse words for a living I pick up on shades of meaning that most people dont noticeand that may not be there in some cases. Maybe I just cant help making my life miserable.
Take a bit of blabber that I heard on July 28 from the busy mouth of Brian Kenny on the MLB Network. To be fair Kenny and his roundtable of cud-chewing analysts" were merely piling on the laudation wagon with regard to Roger Angell a human factory of baseball books just inducted into the Hall of Fame as a writer. The comments that made me twitch were Angells own from a book titled... well heres a snippet of the original Sports Illustrated article (by Tom Verducci The Passion of Roger Angell" 23 July 2014) from which the passage was culledalong with the passage itself: