Dr. Metablog

The Colorado Rockies and the Christianists

From 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the barrier, until 1957, when Walter O’Malley hijacked the franchise to Los Angeles and cut the heart out of Brooklyn, the Dodgers represented the best of America. While the United States remained legally segregated by race and fractured by religion and ethnicity, it was the Brooklyn Dodgers who offered the nation a vision that was more inclusive and more just.  One year before Harry Truman issued an executive order banning segregation in the armed forces, eight years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, eighteen years before the enactment of federal statutes protecting the right to vote, the Brooklyn Dodgers hired Jack Roosevelt Robinson to play first base. And on an unforgettable day in April in Cincinnati, when racist fans hurled taunts at Robinson, Pee Wee strolled over and put his arm on Jackie’s shoulder.  It was an iconic moment and one that transformed not just baseball, and sports, but the world.

 

 The boys of summer made us proud to be democratic, proud to be Americans. All good men were Brooklynites, at least some of the time. Moreover, the Dodgers were talented: they won five pennants during those years, and, in 1955, they won the world championship. Half a century later the Dodgers are still the most loved, most chronicled, most mythologized team in history.

 

What will be written about the Colorado Rockies fifty years from now?  The Rockies’ watchword is not inclusion but exclusivity. They are a team not of destiny, but of narrow sectarianism. They search for and hire players of “character”-- which means players of their particular "Christian" denomination. Their general manager, Dan O’Dowd, is thoroughly delusional. "You look at some of the moves we made and didn't make. You look at some of the games we're winning. Those aren't just a coincidence. God has definitely had a hand in this." A hand in what?  In a history of failure?  In a losing record?  Last place in their division once again?  God takes sides in baseball games? Either God is bush league with bat and glove or O’Dowd is a one helluva sloppy theologian.

 

O’Dowd, along with club president Keli McGregor and manager Clint Hurdle, join together for telephone prayer sessions. Is it possible that they hold on to their jobs not because they are capable of assembling a winning team, but because they subscribe to the same beliefs as owner Charlie Monfort (“I believe God sends signs, and we're seeing those")?

 

Baseball is not about religion. It’s about 95-mile-an-hour fastballs, about hard sliders, about come-from-behind ninth-inning victories.  Colorado taxpayers didn’t fund three-quarters of the cost of Coors-–Coors!!! -- Field so that evangelical ballplayers could testify to their faith.

 

And what a curious faith! The Rockies depart from established Christian thinking and veer toward the banal new cult of “prosperity gospel.” Reformation Calvinism had asserted that an omnipotent deity elects some for salvation and consigns many more to damnation. Believers sometimes understood material success to be a sign (but never, ever a reward) of salvation. The Rockies’ unChristian theology turns Calvinism upside-down and defies common sense when it proclaims that faith leads directly to base hits. (As a matter of fact, “prosperity gospel” seems to work better for the capitalist owners than for the players. The team loses, but the franchise increases in value).

 

There's no hint of supernatural intervention in the Rockies unremarkable record. If the Rockies were to run away from the opposition, it would indeed constitute a "miracle" -- but a miracle only in the common secular sense of the word. It would be a miracle indeed if an incompetent skinflint ownership could somehow stumble into success. 

 

Are the Colorado Rockies the most foolish, fatuous, and vain organization in the mountain west?  Not in the least. There's a church in Broomfield that has a website where “you can send your prayers and encouragement for the Rockies by clicking here.” Click for Christ. Good Lord!

 

I wonder if the Rockies ever knew, or if they would like to learn, who it was who said “do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him." If they could answer this question,they'd be in a position to recognize that there's less real religion in the entire history of the Colorado Rockies than in five seconds of Reese and Robinson.

 

October 19, 2007.  More on the Rockies and religion? Click here. 

How to Deal With Enormous, Man-Eating Pythons

A few weeks ago, I noted that in The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin made the case that early humans were prey more than they were predators. Now I've read a new book on the subject: Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman, Man the Hunted (Westview, 2005).

The book's title is a bit misleading because it concentrates on primates other than modern man. Nevertheless, it was good to be reminded of the circumstances under which our hominid ancestors lived. Seven million years ago and until recently, our diminutive forbears were forest dwellers who were pursued by huge crocodilians, outsized eagles, packs of hunting dogs, a variety of giant cats, and hyenas the size of modern lions who had jaws strong enough to crunch human skulls in a single bite.

And also man-eating snakes. In the course of their discussion of snakes, the authors of Man the Hunted report on the instructions provided to early missionaries to Africa on the proper response to pythons. (A 25-foot-long reticulated python can weigh up to 300 pounds.)

Remember not to run away; the python can run faster. The thing to do is to lie flat on the ground on your back with your feet together, arms to the sides and head well down. The python will then try to push its head under you, experimenting at every possible point. Keep calm, one wiggle and he will get under you, wrap his coils round you and crush you to death. After a time the python will get tired of this and will probably decide to swallow you without the usual preliminaries. He will very likely begin with one of your feet. Keep calm. You must let him swallow your foot. It is quite painless and will take a long time. If you lose your head and struggle he will quickly whip his coils around you. If you keep calm, he will go on swallowing. Wait patiently until he has swallowed about up to your knee. Then carefully take out your knife and insert it into the distended side of his mouth and with a quick rip slit him up.

Well-meant advice, I'm sure, but perhaps difficult to follow. Suppose you're just not in the mood to allow the python such liberties with your person. Suppose you've forgotten to bring your knife; suppose the python decides to start with your head rather than a foot. Suppose you involuntarily wiggle just a teensy bit. Suppose you just don't feel that it's a good day to be engulfed.

I think that, on the whole, running away and screaming at the top of your lungs is a more sensible reaction. But then again, I never signed up to be a missionary.

Everything is Crepuscular

When I encountered an excerpt from wunderkind J. S. Foer's Everything is Illuminated in the New Yorker, I was dazzled. The writing was witty, focused, intelligent, and emotionally rich.

Now I've read the whole book, and I'm deeply divided about this Jekyll-Hydish performance. The good parts are still excellent. Jonfen's Ukrainian adventures in search of Augustine are beautifully managed  -- although I must say that the joke about Alex's English, so wonderful in the excerpt, quickly grew wearisome. But the interspersed history of the shtetl of Trachimbrod is just plain bad. It's boring, embarrassing, and imitative, consisting not only of helpings of I. B. Singer and of the least attractive aspects of Marquez and his numerous unmagical epigonoi, but also of an unhealthy dollop of supermarket-checkout prose. Can Foer discipline his talent, find his own voice, and move into the big leagues?  It would be tragic if he continues to indulge his genius for imitation. Or perhaps he'll be both good and bad, like Larry McMurtry, who's written world-class novels (Leaving Cheyenne,  Lonesome Dove) but has also squandered his talent on pounds and pounds of glossy trash. Time will tell.

Life with Gilbert and Sullivan

When I was no more than a hemidemisemiquaver, I would listen attentively as my mother sat at her old Hardman piano and sang ditties by Gilbert and Sullivan. I believe that the first song I ever learned “by heart” was “I’m called Little Buttercup” with its still mysterious “pretty polonies.” In 1947, when the D’Oyly Carte company made its first post-war American tour, I was taken to see a performance of H. M. S. Pinafore. I was utterly transported. No subsequent theatrical experience has worked equivalent magic. I still think that it’s a little miracle that I saw with my own rapt eyes such legendary Savoyard stalwarts as Ella Halman, Darrell Fancourt, and Martyn Green.

Pinafore was the only stage play that I saw until I was past adolescence and out of the house. What could have prompted such uncharacteristic extravagance on my parents' part? Whatever the cause, the result was that my infatuation with Gilbert and Sullivan's operas was early established. The attachment was difficult to sustain because there was no family phonograph; moreover, those thick, heavy albums of 78s would have broken the budget. I was fortunate to possess a tattered old anthology of G  & S songs from which I would pick out tunes as best I could.

In college I had a roommate who was a genuine savoyardophile and who arrived with a "hi-fi" and an extensive collection of ‘long playing’ records. I took advantage of his resources and his knowledge. During the fifties and sixties I attended performances of the full G & S repertory in various amateur and semi-pro productions-–even a rare Utopia Ltd. at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge. I also acquired a treasured collection of D’Oyly Carte and Glyndebourne performances on vinyl. During the seventies and eighties, I couldn’t clean the house or cook a meal without the assistance of Sir Arthur. But turntables and 33s went the way of 78s, and then the vinyl itself came to be sequestered in plastic tubs in the basement.

I was G & S-less for a decade or so, but Topsy-Turvy (1999), the great Mike Leigh film, rekindled an unfaded love. Now, sixty years after my first Pinafore, I’m compiling a new collection of recordings (everything’s out there on CD if you’re patient). I now own reissues of classic D’Oyly Carte recordings and also of a sparkling Mikado by the Welsh National Opera. In the fall, the entire collection will be transferred to the iPod. Who would have guessed that I'd have gone through four or five new technologies in my lifetime? And yet the song remains the same.

What is the attraction? Gilbert and Sullivan, I think, gave me early authorization to be silly. The operas licensed criticism of oppressive or irrational social norms. Everything was fair game. Inasmuch as I was raised in a rigidly conformist society, the G & S precedent was a great liberation. I’m absolutely convinced that a great big hunk of my sense of humor was formed around a Gilbertian core.

When I was a boy, it was the clever patter songs that most struck me. They’re still good, and some are brilliant. Bunthorne’s soliloquy in Patience, in which he confesses that “he’s not fond of uttering platitudes/ In stained glass attitudes” is as fully on target now as it was in 1881. Simply substitute tired modish Derridadaism for the "high aesthetic line," and “the meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind” jumps right out at you.

But nowadays, it’s not Gilbert's free-standing wit but Sullivan's glorious ensembles that cause the shiver of delight. Instances: Iolanthe's “Oh, many a man in friendship’s name”; Ko-ko, Pooh-Bah, and Pish-Tush singing “To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock”; in Ruddigore, the trio “In sailing o’er life’s ocean wide,/ No doubt your heart should be your guide/ But it is awkward when you find/ A heart that does not know its mind.” And many others, including, certainly, the quartet from Yeoman of the Guard: “Strange adventure, maiden wedded/ To a groom she’s never seen.” Still another transcendent moment: the high silliness in Pirates, when the assembled choruses kneel to sing the resplendent, ridiculous: "Hail poetry, thou heaven-born maid…  All hail, divine emollient." I think that the touchstone of all touchstones is a truly wondrous brief duet in Iolanthe, when the lovesick Lords Tolloler and Mountararat, tenor and baritone, rejected by Phyllis, who chooses a simple shepherd over their dignities, leave the stage singing "Neath this blow/ Worse than stab of dagger/ Though we mo-/ Mentarily stagger,/ In each heart,/ Proud are we innately,/ Let’s depart, dignified and stately.”

In addition to the satire, and the splendid music, G &S also supplies great big helpings of joy. G & S manage to persuade me, at least for the duration of the play, to give credence to “rapture, rapture,” and that “pleasures come in endless series,” and “joy unbounded,” and “laughing song and merry dance,” and “happier than any/ A pound to a penny,/ A lover is when he/ Embraces his bride."

There’s much to deplore in Gilbert’s creations: nasty racism, an insufferable obsession with class (embraced even as it appears to be refuted), jingoism, which is sometimes satirized but often (as in the faux-japonisme of The Mikado) unconsciously accepted, as well as the constant distasteful bludgeoning of middle-age women. But just as we forgive Shylock in order to embrace King Lear, so we must suspend our moral indignation to revel in the best of Gilbert.

Last week, two of the grandchildren visited for a few days. We rented the DVD of the Central Park Kevin Kline-Linda Ronstadt Pirates. The kids were attentive, engaged. Next time they visit: more Gilbert and Sullivan. Perhaps we can plant a savoyardian seed.