Let's just play the game....

The Super Bowl is over, and pitchers and catchers report to spring training in less than two weeks. I just finished Roger Angell's book "Game Time", a collection of essays over the past two decades. Angell is the fiction editor of "The New Yorker" magazine, and has made his mark with insiteful and cogent essays on baseball since the early '60s. He loves the sport, but he also has much to say beyond just what happens within the white lines. This is from a 1992 column, in which he talks about his father:

[My father] had only limited financial success as a Wall Street lawyer, but that work allowed him to put in great amounts of time with the American Civil Liberties Union, which he served as a long-term chairman of its national board. Most of his life, I heard him talk about the latest issues or cases involving censorship, Jim Crow laws, voting rights, freedom of speech, racial and sexual discrimination, and threats to the Constitution; these struggles continue to this day, God knows, but the difference back then was that men and women like my father always sounded as if such battles would be won in the end. The news was always harsh, and fresh threats to freedom immediate, but every problem was capable of solution somewhere down the line. We don’t hold such ideas anymore – about our freedom or about anything else. My father looked on baseball the same way; he would never be a big-league player, or even a college player, but whenever he found a game he jumped at the chance to play and to win.
If this sounds like a romantic or foolish impulse to us today, it is because most of American life, including baseball, no longer feels feasible. We know everything about the game now, thanks to instant replay and computerized stats, and what we seem to have concluded is that almost none of us are good enough to play it. Thanks to television and sports journalism, we also know everything about the skills and financial worth and private lives of the enormous young men we have hired to play baseball for us, but we don’t seem to know how to keep their salaries or their personalities within human proportions. We don’t like them as much as we once did, and we don’t like ourselves as much, either. Baseball becomes feasible from time to time, not much more, and we fans must make prodigious efforts to rearrange our profoundly ironic contemporary psyches in order to allow its old pleasure to reach us. My father wasn’t naïve; he was lucky.

Are we actually hindered by too much knowledge sometimes? Do we become so overwhelmed by the cacaphony of voices, facts, opinions, and news that they become a hurdle to building our own paths? The incoming barrage becomes so daunting, that we no longer want to play?
Can't be.
We just want to play a game. The fact that others play it on a larger stage, and do it so much better than us, shouldn't keep us from having our own fun.

Locking up little old ladies

"Administration lawyers told her, in response to a hypothetical question, that they believed the president would even have the right to lock up "a little old lady from Switzerland" for the duration of the war on terror if she had written checks to a charity that she believed helped orphans, but that actually was a front for Al Qaeda. "

This, in federal court; the 'her' is the judge. Quoted from Bob Herbert's op-ed piece in the Times today.

Stay calm. We must remember that this is a democracy: we have elected over 400 people to those halls in Washington, and they can still outnumber that one person in the White House. Thankfully.

The Loneliness of SOV's

“…I thought the only lonely place was on the moon.”
Paul McCartney, “Jet”

Most of my daily commute covers 25 miles of the New York State Thruway. The traffic is heavy during both morning and evening commuting hours, particularly between Exits 25 and 23.

One thing is very striking about each vehicle: the driver is nearly always the only person in the car.

Thousands of single-occupancy-vehicles each day. A mass of steel and rubber jockeying for road room at 70 miles an hour, all with one individual over each set of four tires. How lonely can we seem? How lost in ourselves are each and every one?

Naturally, we are all pretty busy while we cruise toward our place of employ or schooling. We listen to our radios and CD players. Some people shout at other drivers or give them the digit of universal disdain. We drink our coffee, eat our breakfast, do our makeup. Some even read the paper.

Those who crave human conversation will take out their cell phones, and flaunt the law. The safer ones have a wire crossing their shoulder, with that little knob about a foot below the earlobe, looking for all the world like an on-off switch rather than a receiver.

But in the end, don’t we look like hundreds of very lonely people? We represent one of the ironies of the metropolis age: mankind is crowding together in larger and larger metro/suburban/exurban communities, with more and more people on less and less space -- but we isolate ourselves from our neighbors. Big lawns and fences separate our homes. We drive into our driveways, shut the garage door behind us, and never even see our neighbor, much less wave to her. We walk up the front steps of the city brownhouse, or apartment building, and unlock the front door – the one with the bars, multiple latches, and camera above the alcove.

Our electronics keep us focused elsewhere – not really inward, just somewhere else. Digital music players and radios that come with small earpieces, so we can shut out anything within one foot. Huge 50-inch televisions, where we bury ourselves in vivid pictures and sounds. Video games that lock the mind into never-ending vignettes and chapters, hooked together in a seamless story that takes hours and cannot be broken.

I can’t fully condemn us commuters. For many, this may be the only solo time they get. Generally, we probably could be riding with a neighbor, working around the logistical problems and timetables, having a little human conversation and contact.

Meanwhile, we travel in a pack of SOVs. Yup, that’s me in the salt-covered black Focus. Driving by myself. Probably listening to Yes. Ask me if I’m lonely…