On baseball

For the first time in 15 years, I was back watching the Red Sox last night. And, biting into my bunless hot dog, I longed to belong to a place I had long rejected. When the Cincinnati Reds hit a grand slam in the fifth inning, my younger brother grieved with the men next to him, shouting at their favorite players who had fallen from such grace in only a few minutes. My younger brother -- sometimes, I don’t know where he came from, or how we're related -- a true Boston sports fan, told me once about a bar fight he got into while watching the Celtics play... and another, wearing a Patriots Jersey at the Chiefs game. And god damn it, I want that. Not to get beat up in the bull pen, but to feel the kind of primal loyalty that spurs up in the heat of a moment with a little bit of beer.

 

Maybe it’d be easier if I was a boy. Actually, definitely. (At the moment, he’s told me he’s off to go shooting with his friends, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table writing this down.)

 

Still, the story is, in all my global citizenship, in my fluttering between philosophies of modern Germany and ancient India, driving to one specialty store for loomi, another for Gluten Free gochujang, getting dressed up in my pashmina over the trickled down trends of French fashion houses, the baseball game revealed my own cultural uprootedness. Sure, I’m this and that, a great admirer of canonical culture, but the sort of local, sports based, lingo-fied, “this is who we are,” culture feels so foreign to me. And yet, some days, I want it, albeit making no effort to sacrifice my individuality for it, nor forcing my mind to settle on this place and this place only. I’m in the want it all mindset of so many of the cosmopolitans that came before me: We wish for both. The warmth of belonging. The glamour of transcendence.

 

At its best, the Dionysian, cosmopolitan spirit creates something from others. We are agents of synthesis. Cross-pollinators in the butterfly forest. But when we become detached, when we sneer at the world we scavenge from, forget the land and people that made us, as I have sometimes forgotten Rhode Island, and many times quickly said no when asked if I would settle back there, when we treat culture like a Chinese buffet, blissfully sampling the goods that have been harvested and marinated and maintained by someone else, before moving on... is resentment all that surprising? (On a side note from my safari among the cosmopolitan class: we feel little obligation to anyone but ourselves and our fulfillment and replace that lack by committing to some vague, post-modern politics, inherently flawed in its approach that all life can be reduced to power dynamics and in the process excusing ourselves from tending to anything of value because, oh, well, the system…). We reject the grand narratives as archaic. What is our sense of inheritance or obligation? We live among militant atheists whose highest good is a sort of tolerance that comes not from understanding, but from believing in no thing strongly enough to defend it, and whose highest desire is an affirmation of their own goodness. 

 

But it is also because of the great beauty local life brings to me (and I'm sure I'm not alone in this experience) that I know things must be kept, and kept well. Places must be handled with care, with reverence to the fragility of good things, and with respect to the continuity of time as both a civilizational necessity, and a personal one. The rootless intellectuals, the cultivated traveler, the class privy to escapism, they forget. They imagine their frictionless utopias, they curate its aesthetics, hand selecting, splitting the give-take, then projecting their abstracted morals on a provincial order they condemn, and yet rely on. (On another aside, the people who are never shutting the hell up about cultural appropriation are the most unmoored, least connected to any specific culture, and for that reason think the pinnacle of culture is some piece of clothing, dupatta or churidar, maybe because that's all they've ever experienced it as. They think culture lives at the museum. They no longer experience culture as a daily ritual of belonging.)

 

Anyway, that is how I ended up a Mets fan just the other year. I gave the Yankees a chance too, but so many of their fans seemed similarly global citizens, influencers, transplants. Anyway, you can buy a Yankees hat at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. It may come as a toy to your Happy Meal in any city in the world. But you can't get the Mets anywhere else the way you get them there. That stadium had families raised on the drugs of hope and battle. Men handing out high fives. Mothers cursing out the opposing players. The kinds of girls that get in bar fights. Real depth and loyalty and a sense of identity that is, however lowbrow to the critics at the New Yorker, however “bread and circuses” to the neomarxists, more representative of ritual and myth and continuity, and really, more dignified than the sort of cultural wasteland the rest try to build themselves from.