Every year, I tell myself that this year will be different, and I will actually follow baseball closely through its long, meandering season, and that I will watch at least 10 regular-season games, tuning in during the summer before the playoffs begin. If I am really dedicated, I tell myself, I will go to a ballpark to catch a game in person more than once. Every year, though, I fail. Year after year. This has been a pattern for the past five.
Perhaps I am trying to convince myself to love something I cannot truly love. You might call me un-American, dear reader (or even slightly g*y), but the only sport I love and follow to a fault is European soccer. Particularly, English soccer. I also love watching golf, but only during the majors, like the U.S. Open or the Masters. However, I do love how baseball is so deeply woven into our country’s history, how it’s our pastime. Every time I have been to a game in the past couple of years, and I am three beers deep, sitting among the peons in the outfield bleachers, I am almost moved to tears by the beauty of it all. It’s so romantic. It’s so damn American. The game. The fans. The families. The crack of a bat. The seventh-inning stretch. The hot dog vendors who trudge up and down the stairs.
As I have gotten older, I have discovered that my love of America really stems from the particular, from very specific things, like baseball’s unique and cherished place in our collective consciousness. The different regions and landscapes, the cities, and the national parks. I love New York City, the painters living in rent-controlled Greenwich Village apartments, the Orthodox Jews running around the Diamond District with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists, the bodega cashiers who call you “boss” when you order a chicken parm. I love how megachurches in Texas put on rock concerts for Christmas. I love southern drawls and southern hospitality. I love how there are still people in Long Beach, California, who look and dress like members of “Sublime.” I love how native Vermonters tap maple trees for syrup. I love the American Particular, the eccentricities of the people I meet, from the weirdos to the suburban normies and everyone in between.
Since the war’s outbreak, I have seen many a black-and-white, grainy, declassified video of the U.S. military raining hell down on Iranian targets. When I watch these videos, quite frankly, I do not feel patriotic. Rather, I feel an odd, almost dystopian detachment from my country. I feel unmoved. Maybe I shouldn’t, because this is a war. This is a deadly serious business for the country. Maybe it’s just the times we live in, the world we live in, where so much of life is lived through screens. Maybe our political leaders, who increasingly treat warfare as if it were a video game, are to blame. And I have been told by these same leaders, as well as various government officials and the legions of clownish TV pundits and grifters on X, that, if I do not feel wholly titillated by big booms and fireballs, and if I oppose this war, I am somehow un-American and unpatriotic. Poppycock!
The greatness of America lies not in the fact that we can bomb the sh*t out of mullahs halfway across the globe. It’s not that we have more sophisticated and expensive weapons and aircraft carriers than a regional Middle Eastern power. No, it’s that we can all gather inside a ballpark, and – even if you support this war wholeheartedly or you believe that it is the ultimate betrayal of our Founding Fathers and their vision for the nation’s future, even if you vehemently disagree with the fan sitting next to you on every political issue under the sun – still enjoy the game, a few small beers, and a hot dog. That, right there, captures the greatness of America. Peace, prosperity, tolerance, and baseball.
The cretins in Washington will try to divide us. They will try to bully us over the war, one way or the other. They will try to convince us that they know what they’re doing and that they’re doing it all out of a love of country and duty to the Constitution. Who are they kidding?
In the end, they may try to take it all away – our history, our freedoms. But they will never take away our love for America and her beautiful particularities. They can never take away our baseball.
Like what you’re reading? If so, please consider subscribing to State of the Day or sharing this with a friend. You’d be supporting this newsletter and helping keep independent journalism alive.
If you are already a paid subscriber, make sure to join the conversation in our subscribers-only chat below.
How did you feel during 47 years of state sponsored terrorism?
I was deployed to Iraq for a year and witnessed Iraqis (mostly civilians) and Americans being slaughtered by Iranian IED's. I know how I felt.
How did you on Oct 7, when thousands were murdered, tortured and taken hostage, when children were killed in their homes?
How do you feel about such a treacherous regime having nuclear weapons and the ability to make good on their goals of Death to Israel and Death to America.
The United States is preventing that, making the world a safer place. I am very proud of that.