| | The opening of baseball season found me with a cynical, rolling eye, a spirit jaded and depressed from one season too many of the mismanaged, morale-flattening Mariners. As an antidote I turned to the lyrical Giamatti.
Although I did not quite regain the sempiternal optimism that is supposed to be the hallmark of the true baseball fan (I do not cry, "wait till next year!", but rather mutter, "ye gods, with what stultifying stupendities shall we be embarrassed this time?"), I got interested in some things Giammati said in Baseball and the American Character about...you might find this surprising...baseball and the American character.
Apparently a large reason for baseball's sudden popularity after the War Between the States was nostalgia. An' I started thinkin', nostalgia explains a whole lot about the American character, from "throwback uniform" nights in baseball to reenacting and living history exhibits, from "organic" and "local" foods to wilderness reserves, from classic car replicas and model trains to, uh, Graceland. America, it seems, is awash in nostalgia, and like Freudian psychologists we can trace most of her present neuroses to her traumatic adolescence.
One cannot underestimate the power, whether derived from biblical images or classical, of the image of the enclosed green space...on the American mind. Such imagery may be one reason why not almost forty-five million people a summer flow to baseball parks in the midst of urban wildernesses, flow in big cities to a place where perfection does not exist but which recalls in some distant way the place that promised perfection....paradise.
* * *
For those native to American, particularly in cities, the game, whether watched or played, recalled the earlier, rural America, a more youthful, less bitterly knowing country....
Giamatti, I think, hit the nail on the head when it comes to the American story. The millennial hopes with which she was first settled did not wane with the religion that birthed it; from the Puritans to the western settlers everybody thought that, with proper encouragement, America could be the promised land. And, like everybody in the grip of an absolutised ideal, they became quite fanatical about it--only a zealot could be serenely convinced that total warfare against fellow citizens was the appropriate tool to preserve the Union. And once the South, the only part of the country that did not share (as fully) in the millennial dream, was out of the way, everybody thought that the last enemy had been defeated, that now nothing could stand in the way of the shining march of progress. Thus triumphant, America was translated in the twinkling of an eye--in a few brief decades--from a traditional to a modern society; that this happened not without violence only hastened its course, and, much like a child forced to grow up far too quickly, she has ever since been sorrowing for the youthful past that she barely knew.
Because we are all Americans, we all have in us this painful nostalgia for green fields, red barns, and mama's home cooking. I can feel myself getting sentimental right now. Yikes.
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| | Posted 4/17/2009 10:30 PM - 8 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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