After This Fall

A few years ago, Sports Illustrated imagined New England after a World Series victory by the Boston Red Sox. Months after the celebrations ended, an inexplicable malaise would creep through the fans. Without defeat, they would lose direction; the Boston Red Sox, World Champions, would lose the haunting “almost” that made them distinctive.

But when the Red Sox finally won a World Series this year, the story of their victory was more amazing than anything fans could imagine – and yet the story we most hoped for. After lying prostrate before the New York Yankees, these “happy idiots” produced one of the greatest comebacks in sports history. How beautiful that a team driven by impossible standards should meet defeat at the hands of a team driven by sheer joy; how poignant that New York’s impossible perfectionism should fall to Boston’s practical idealism.

Can Red Sox Nation survive now that “long-suffering” must be stricken from the word “Red Sox fan”? Those who think it can’t don’t understand. Our passion was never about our pain; it was always about hope. The Red Sox finished second to the Yankees seven years in a row. For a Yankees fan, that level of defeat would be intolerable. For a Red Sox fan, this was a fountain of hope. It hurt – it definitely hurt. But I could always count on the Red Sox to make things interesting. Like many other fans, I never loved the Red Sox because they lost. I loved – and love – the team because every game was a thing of beauty. That’s what loving the Red Sox, for me, has always been about: blind, passionate, unfathomable but unquenchable hope – and a beautiful story to make the game worth watching.

Some have said that the Red Sox, those “lovable losers,” will by winning lose their lovability. But no Red Sox fan loves losing. What we love – and what defines that land without borders, Red Sox Nation – is possibility itself. Possibility is what makes every game new, every season “next” season, and every struggle an epic. I can’t thank these Red Sox enough for telling a story, time and again, that kept me coming back for more. If you think this year’s story was amazing … just wait ‘till next year.

Dreams of the Body Politic

Once again, the speculation runs rampant over reasons why one presidential candidate or the other has slipped or advanced in the polls. I could accept this most easily during the debates, since these imaginary facts serve nicely to add dramatic tension and narrative depth to the story news agencies wish to sell the public; shifts in polling numbers help “raise the stakes” of the debates by amplifying any perceivable effects on the public. What none of these news agencies bother to say is that most of the time, the margin between Kerry and Bush in any particular voter poll tends to fall within the polling agency’s margin of error. Journalists – with pressing deadlines and corporate managers who value profit more than accuracy – apparently feel compelled to make somethings out of nothing. It would seem that ambiguity and uncertainty don’t really sell.

With each passing day, it feels as if the body politic is asleep, and the news media have taken over its dreams. I’ve always felt that performative arts – particularly mass media – constitute an imagination for our collective identity (our body politic, if you will). But the stream-of-consciousness associations that drive the day-to-day speculations about causes (before effects have been clarified or verified) and consequences (for events or choices that have been, at best, imagined by reporters and pundits) now appear so distant from verifiable experience that I’m left feeling as though the voice of the press is content to wander freely … through possibility … without sensing any need to wake up, and look at what we actually know.