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Column
October magic mirrors but doesn’t reflect October
madness
By KRIS BERGGREN
This fall, it was a great pleasure
to be a Minnesota Twins fan. My husband, kids and I succumbed mindlessly and
happily to the allure of our team’s presence in the American League
Championship playoffs. We carried on with our normal lives, but it was only a
façade -- homework, piano, dance class, our torn up bathroom awaiting
walls, floor tile, and new fixtures all took the back seat to each at-bat and
every nuanced pitch. We screamed ourselves hoarse, waved our “homer
hankies” from nosebleed seats at our incomparable Metrodome, paid too much
for “Dome Dogs” and Cokes, and felt butterflies in our stomachs
during a few ninth-inning nail biters.
Baseball is a beautiful game, made sweeter by the fact that the
playoff teams were by and large Davids to the Goliath of corporate professional
baseball. In fact, the Twins are the fourth-lowest-paid roster in the league,
even slated for “contraction,” a fancy word for elimination, just
before the season started. Instead, our team advanced to the Central Division
playoff series against Oakland: winning three of five gut-wrenching games
allowed us to advance to the American League Championship Series against the
Anaheim Angels and the hope -- now crushed -- of playing in the World Series.
The Angels, owned by the Disney Company, had previously knocked off the mighty
New York Yankees. It’s classic Americana indeed, and it’s so much fun
to spend these golden days of fall basking in the best of our can-do culture
and our love affair with the gutsy underdog. October magic, the media dubs
it.
Baseball news was also, for us, a welcome respite from the uglier
game going on in Washington. The high drama and never-ending surprise of
October baseball were oddly mirrored by the predictable dramatics of the
Congressional debate on whether to grant President Bush carte blanche to invade
Iraq. Only it’s a fun house mirror that distorts the simple battle in the
infield to a prospective bloodbath in a battlefield on the other side of the
world. Hey, no Bronx Bombers this year! -- only bombers.
As told to me by an eighth-grader: Say, have you heard the one
about Rumsfeld and Cheney at the bar? Seems the two of them were overheard
chatting about an invasion that would kill a million Iraqis and one blonde. The
guy sitting next to them asks, “Why one blonde?” and Cheney turns to
Rumsfeld and says, “See, I told you nobody would ask about a million
Iraqis.”
America’s pastime may also be a sublimation of all that
swirls around us. We crave the heightened emotions, the posturing, the clamor
for a win, the certainty of rules. But in baseball, everyone knows it’s
just a game after all. At the White House and in the halls of Congress,
they’re playing for much higher stakes -- life or death for Iraqi men,
women and children and for our own soldiers, not to mention international peace
and humanitarian concerns. October madness, I’m calling it.
Bush seems to think that warmongering is as American as rooting
for the home team. But America’s no underdog; we’re the Yankees of
the world stage. We’ve got the deepest pockets, and, some would say, the
most arrogance around; and now, thanks to the approval of an election-minded
Congress, instead of counting strikeouts Bush can now count on launching a
first strike against Iraq, no umpire needed. So, instead of watching groups of
young men play a game with a ball, we may soon be watching young men and women
at war with an opponent that our president seems to think of in the same facile
terms a Twins fan regards Adam Kennedy, Francisco Rodriguez or Troy Percival,
an adversary to be outsmarted and overpowered.
Is Saddam a bad guy? Yeah, he pretty much stinks up the place. But
I’ve been listening to conversations and radio programs and reading the
papers, and it seems to me that few ordinary citizens or even elected
representatives are convinced of the credibility of Bush’s position that
the United States is in imminent danger from a terrorist attack initiated by
Saddam. Heck, for what it’s worth, even the CIA downplays the likelihood
that Saddam, unprovoked, would order the use of weapons of mass destruction
against us. Nor does the average American seem to buy the idea of putting
Saddam Hussein in for Osama bin Laden as if a southpaw reliever were coming to
the mound and you needed a left-handed batter.
In October baseball, you want to take some risks: You may need to
steal a base in an early inning, or fake a bunt to draw the infield in a bit,
wave the runner home in a close game rather than stop him safe at third. In
October madness or any other kind of war, your risks have moral consequences,
not just business outcomes or dejected fans. Under the circumstances, launching
military operations against Iraq is like taking the field in a pro game without
a scouting report on the other team: ultimately, a losing proposition.
Kris Berggren writes from Minneapolis. She can be reached by
e-mail at krisberggren@msn.com
National Catholic Reporter, October 25,
2002
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