Throw the Bums Out
Every red-blooded American male lives and dies with his favorite
team. As a rite of passage, he masters the lineups, statistics and intricate
details of strategy, tactics, player strengths and weaknesses. Put two fans
in a room, and they'll launch into a debate as passionate and subtle as
anything you'll hear at the UN.
While other teams are attacked, each fan saves his greatest
resentment for his
own team's foul-ups. As they break his heart, he'll boo their errors,
misses, whiffs, boners, blunders
and failure
to appreciate
the infinite
subtleties
of the game–details fans master without prompting. Just as hitting
a fastball is arguably the hardest act in sports (here come the arguments!),
so is mastery
of any sport's arcana one of the great feats of human intelligence.
These are obvious truths that even George Bush understands
and embraces. He probably understands why Red Sox management fired Manager
Grady Little yesterday, just for the
hope that things could
get
even
better. Based on the Sox' love affair with the stats, it was a responsible
decision, loyalty notwithstanding. When you're running an enterprise as important
as a baseball club, there's no room for fuzzy thinking.
Such clear-headedness is clearly unwelcome
at the national level. Bush feels that, unlike Grady Little, his contract
should be renewed even though every stat
that the Republicans have ever embraced is in the
toilet.
And traditional principles? We can only remember with nostalgia the good old
days when our team seemed to do all the right things every time they stepped
on
the
field. Wouldn't it be great to sit in the stands with Dad again, and look
at our national team through his eyes?
The only
reason the voters could
conceivably retain the country's current management would be some vague
gut feeling like the one that caused Little to hang in there with Pedro Martinez
in the seventh
game of the AL
championship.
And isn't this game a bigger one than baseball, too important
for sentimentality? When you put a gun or fighting vehicle in a person's
hands, it's time to pay attention
to
the
larger
game.
The game
of
life and
death.
Rational
society is in a life and death battle with religious fundamentalism.
Rationality–Enlightenment,
literally–is the great thought behind our nation's founding, inspired by
a movement that grew out of their great technical communications breakthrough,
local newspaper publishing and the technical mastery of its user interface
(literacy). We have fuzzy-headed thinkers all around the world, basing
their livelihoods on the eyeballs and anger of people who prefer a simple
wrong answer to
a a more nuanced correct one. This demagoguery is the root of "evil" in the
mid east and here in the US.
It's the Entertainment, Stupid!
To feed our partisan passion, most of us have lined up behind
one of the two dominant political sports teams. We attack each others' party
and position with a passion and incivility that divides families and makes
us dumb ourselves down to meaningless chat at Thanksgiving.
We do it for the same reasons that we argue about teams–entertainment.
We'd
rather argue politics with someone close enough to attack than to reason
together in support of the larger team called
America. The cost to our society and progress is immeasurable. It's not
because the issues, statistics and concepts are too difficult to master,
they're nothing compared to sports stats. The problem is the superstition
that you're a bad fan of your country if you criticize its management.
10:42:56 AM 
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