Insidious Lassitude

I watched a game of baseball for the first time the other week. I’d spent the night being ill and was unable to sleep or do anything except stare at the idiot box. At four in the morning, when you’re entwining every limb around your stomach to keep it from flinging around like a Waltzer, Baseball, it turns out, is significantly less depressing than pre-housing-market-capitulation Location, Location, Location repeats. Kirstie and Phil’s directive that it’s ok to own as many country houses as you can afford, and bully to the environment, the local colour and the rural-displaced, doesn’t need an actual stomach bug to make one nauseated. Watching Channel Five’s coverage of the US-exclusive ‘World Series’ was, perhaps for the first time in my life, the best way to spend the night. The tumult in my gut and the mental turmoil of discovering myself a Channel Five viewer may’ve, I suppose, coloured my perception of the game. But, well, what a terrible game it is. No wonder America is in such a state. If I were to continue this idea, I might, sweeepingly and ungenerously, suggest that ‘The ballgame’, as I believe the definitvely typically incluisive colloquialism is, has a kind of dialectical relationship to the citizens: they’re so stupided that they invent a stupid game; and, they watch a stupid game and they’re stupided by it. Cripes.

But no, my perception was probably tyrannised by my illness; it’d probably still just be my stomach that was moved if Channel Five had been showing, I don’t know, some polar bear cubs stranded on a melting ice block in the middle of the Bering Sea mewling as they’re harpooned by some of George Bush’s rapacious oil-suckling goons. Stupid cubs. But, it was mostly that the Americans seemed so incapable of hitting the ball. A man would throw it; a man would swing and miss it; a man behind him would catch it; all three of the men would spit and scratch their crotches (not each others, this America, for God’s sake). And so it would go until - at an unspecfic, and seemlingly random time - the batter wandered back into a caged pit and another man came out to miss the ball. I watched for a couple of hours and if my hands hadn’t already been occupied balling up my intestines then I’d've been able to count on one of them the times the ball was hit. Meanwhile the crowd gobbled up with impunity the kind of snacks that, if there was any justice in America/the world, would surely tyrannise their guts for days to come.

All of this could be further worked into a memorable metaphor for American society, its relationship to the world, and sundry other specific things like the country’s governmental foreign policy directives. But I want to get on with the business in hand. As Rolling Stone notes: Vegetarian Eddie Vedder pens affectionate ode to Cubs. I’m paraphrasing the Stone, for I can’t remember the headline they used, but that one sounds about right. By ‘the Cubs’ the Stone (or my interpolation of the Stone) doesn’t mean polar bear cubs, but refers to the moniker of Chicago’s priniciple baseball team, the Chicago Cubs. Vedder has long been a fan of the Cubs, and as inexplicable as the game is to me, his support further underlines the significance baseball has to even unstupided Americans. Before I saw a game, I liked to imagine baseball as being a bit like cricket in the way that it’s mythologised and the cultural importance of it as a respository of national values and such like. I liked to think of it as virtuous and righteous and inclusive; that whatever problems American society has, the game provides a constant - a vestige of the way things used to be, a narrative to guide the people, the pitch and the ground a place where the threatened and in some cases lost, sense of communal identity, is reinstated and redeemed; a geographical place where people can gather and forge themselves as a collective, without the imputation of a government agenda which doesn’t represent them, where they are equally free from the despotic arms of capitalism and big business (ok, I knew that bit wasn’t true), the baseball ground a kind of pychogeographical leyline. That sort of stuff. 

I have a fondness for cricket because it still maintains the pretence that it’s a game steeped in tradition and values; that the rules and etiquette still have a role to play in understanding how society works and we can be valuable within it. I also like it because many of these traditions are curiously English and slightly eccentric, somehow there are strands of local - or national - colour that are yet to be torn up or tied to globalisation. Maybe football - I mean ’soccer’, American readers - would be more analgous to the cultural significance of baseball, because cricket has slightly elitist and class-specific undercurrents. Football is ‘the national game’ of England in the same way that the ballgame is the national game of The America World. But the point is, I’d like to think that baseball has a role as a keeper of the national identity; a salve for the downtrodden and homogenised; a preserve for national identity threatened as it’s twisted like an intestine around the needs of big business and their governments. That sort of stuff.

I find it particularly pleasing that someone as troubled by globalisation, right-wing fuckwittery and the encroachment of capitalism on human values as Vedder is, can still be provided with a hopeful, unsullied narrative by a game. In the song he conflates the unity and optimism of a team’s supporters with a kind of good citizenship and a hopefulness, despite all, for his country and the world. What makes it particularly affecting is the way that he draws on the traditions and we’re-in-this-together edict of team games, to fashion what is really a protest song wrapped in an utterly disarming metaphor. But when he sings ’someday we’ll go all the way’ it’s almost as a call to revolution. He tosses in a bit of nostalgia for the pre-9/11, pre-capitalism-gone-mad, time of greater certainty, and evokes the keening-with-possibility of childhood, contrasting it with the unsaid of today. He posits the scoreboard as a source of wonder and home to the magical potentiality and transformative powers that are the gift of youth. It is times that are analgous with these that the globalised society has lost; magic has been replaced by calculating, keeping score is now the kind of malevolent term that Bush might use in his ’smoke them out dead or alive’ rhetoric. It is a song which uses traditional themes, values and narratives to throw into relief their systematic erosion. Like a mirror: Collectively what have we lost, what are we losing, what will things be like for our kids?

In this case baseball really is a bit like polar bear cubs.

Eddie Vedder - Someday We’ll Go All the Way (Live, Chicago)

MP3 via Fuel for Friends.

UPDATE: I notice that Heather at Fuel Friends has taken down the MP3 file, presumably because the track has now gone on sale. I’m going to crane my neck out an infitessimal fraction of a fraction and guess that Eddie Vedder wouldn’t mind me having his song here. But perhaps the harpooning goons at the record company might see me as a threat to the way they govern his work. So I’m siding with Ed on this, and I’ll wait until the scorekeepers smoke me out and spear my values and dreams with the long-arm of their law before I remove it. I’d wap out some baseball term or other that’d wittily close up all the strands of this snark, but I’m not familiar enough with the game. So, go figure, as Bush would doubtless say.