Soberly considered, the New York Yankees
and their fans present a moral dilemma. Our consciences, naturally
abhorring everything abominable, tell us that such things simply ought
not exist. And yet we also know that the evil they represent is one we
would not really want eradicated. Somehow we depend on it, not because
it appeals to some morbid subliminal fascination with the horrific in
us, and not even because it teaches us about the world’s deep Darwinian
laws, but because it answers to a psychological need.
By
exciting in the rest of us that sweet cold loathing that only they
induce — that strangely tender malice, at once so delicious and yet so
purifying — the Yankees and their followers provide an emotional
cleansing. They give us occasion for the discharge of a dark, dangerous
passion, but one unburdened by guilt. The detestation that any rational
soul spontaneously feels for the Yankees is so innocent, so
uncontaminated by spite — just instinctive revulsion before something
obscene, like the goat-headed god of the diabolists. And there are few
luxuries more gorgeously nourishing than the license to hate with an
unclouded conscience.
Yankees fans,
of course, never having drunk from those healing springs, typically
mistake this hatred for envy, and so for an inverted admiration. But
nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, those of us whose teams
hail from smaller markets sometimes fall prey to a slightly
petulant, even bilious resentment of all that boughten glory — the
exorbitant free-agent contracts, the legions of scouts, the colossal
television revenues — but who can blame us? And how could we fail to be
vexed by the fawning servility of a national media incapable of telling
the beautiful from the meretricious?...
Read the rest here.
For a moment there, I thought he was going on about the Democratic Party. "And how could we fail to be vexed by the fawning servility of a national media incapable of telling ..."
ReplyDeleteAll kidding aside, I find these kinds of emotions between opposing camps all over the Internet.