Belligerence makes the world go ‘round.
New York Yankees fans and Boston Red Sox fans are militant competitors. They’re also mutual complements. When the Yanks and Sox square off at Fenway Park this weekend, soldiers on both sides of the front will fire the latest shots in a long-standing conflict—which would be more distressing news if long-standing conflict weren’t such an important part of human identity.
Harmony means getting along with your peer group.
Hostility, on the other hand, means getting in touch with your personhood.
I’m not suggesting that the New York-Boston story isn’t oversold by the media. There’s a fine line between authentic theater and artificial theatrics, and most Yankees-Red Sox showdowns have a made-for-TV feel to them. But made-for-TV drama is better than no drama at all. In a game where you can’t root for the home team without booing the visitors, the most compelling narratives are those which give every character a reason to hate his foil.
White is because of gray.
We are because of They.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from the Yankees-Red Sox schism, it’s simply that no self can survive in the absence of an other.
Baseball rivalries get bitter with age. The Yankees and the Red Sox, the Giants and the Dodgers, the Cardinals and the Cubs—they’re progressively poisonous feuds, disputes deepened by decades of discord. The reason, of course, is that bad blood builds upon itself. Optimistic aphorists will argue that time heals all wounds. I’d counter that every healed wound is a festering sore waiting to happen.
It’s sweet to forgive and forget.
It’s sweeter to retaliate and remember.
A typical Yankees-Red Sox series may not be especially conducive to peace on earth, but at least it isn’t dulled by an excess of goodwill towards men.
Essence emerges from opposition. What you are depends on what you’re for; what you’re for is defined by what you’re against. The difference between New York Yankees fans and Boston Red Sox fans is at once arbitrary and fundamental, as the difference between all existential enemies is at once arbitrary and fundamental. Every child is born with an inclination to extend his hand as an act of camaraderie. The one who spends enough time in the shadow of the Green Monster may yet learn to offer his finger as an assertion of contrast.
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Robert Frost never owned an “A-Rod Sucks” t-shirt, but he did know a thing or two about pathological antagonism:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Which is a fitting prologue to Friday’s first pitch.
Because a biting wind buffets Boston when the Bombers come to town, and any fair-weather soul who laments the coldness of fan’s inhumanity to fan is either dreaming of spring training or only jut saying, is all…
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