Life's Persistent Questions

All's fair in Love and War...

This year marks a significant transition in my life. What it is, you ask? Well, speaking of LOVE and WAR. I have loved baseball for over an entire cycle of the Chinese zodiac. I love the intricate strategy of the game, the numerical beauty of the records and stats, the Homeric history of the past, and oh do I love the mischievous Oakland A's. They break your heart so many times, yet you keep coming back to them like your first crush in the fifth grade. Yet this year, I feel myself been slowly pulled away from this decade-long love, and been sucked into this year-long raging WAR, otherwise known as the 2004 U.S. Presidential Campaign.

As my A's took a dive at the end of the season--what else do you call losing 9 out of last 13 games--I found myself increasingly distracted by the partisan warfare that have been waged on this country by people from the left and right. In a way, it feels like a loss of innocence (I know at 27, sad, but true). In baseball, hope springs eternal. Your team choked again this year, no problem, there's always next year. And the year after that. And the year after that... Until one day you wake up and find yourself in one of two eerily similar yet fundamentally different shoes--the Boston Red Sox "we are cursed, but maybe this year is finally our year" glass slipper or the Chicago Cubs "we are cursed, but let's see if they found a new way to extricate our heart from our chest cavity this year" CFM boots--BUT of course, there's always the year after that.

This optimism is non-existent in the War of Political Supremacy. Every election, every appointment, every court case and every decision is seen as the Armageddon. Four more years of Bush? Well, we would have, depending who to talk to, either staved off the Rapture or trumpeted the end of the world as we know it. (though surprisingly the Judgement day of the Religious Right is quite similar to the calamitous environmental collapse feared by the left.) Yet, it's exactly because the stakes seem so high, that I get sucked into these righteous screaming matches that have come to permeate every corner of the mass media. Case in point, I used to love a blog by Will Carroll on baseball, but for about three months (july-september) it became the battleground for the debate whether John Kerry lied about his medals. But what about the two guys who are fighting over Barry Bond's 700th home run ball? Isn't it more important to know whether someone could claim possession of a ball by sitting on the ball and having it completely controlled by his thighs?

So who do I blame for robbing my innocence and first love? Well, EVERYONE but me. The people on the baseball blogs that feel the need to bring their politics. The big corporate news that had to make every political contest into a horserace. The 527s that think two wrongs could make a right. And my girlfriend. Yes, her. The uninhibited, whole-hearted, irrational, personal, moral and grammatical disdain that she displays for Bush 43 made my own running hatred of the NY Yankees pale in comparison. It's shocking, yet, admirable for I have never imagined that one could come to dispise something and someone, which is so obviously a fraud, with such force and conscience that can become so empowering. So I said to myself, I want to feel that way. The truth is that I never felt this odd combination of utter hopelessness and pure ectasy when following the Oakland A's baseball. Love for baseball, I realize, that's child's play. The war for the control of "Team America, World Police," with everything on the line, now that's a fight worth losing your sleep over. That is, until the next telecast of Iron Chef Battle America.

posted by hedgehog @ 3:38 PM