On a Serious Note:

I am putting this response to my Red Sox rant up here, perhaps against its author's wishes, because it's that fucking good. Rarely does a man of the people humble we Powers-That-Be at the Enfranchised. To do so is to earn an Imperial reprieve at the Colosseum of Your-Ass.

"Just read your post, and I wanted to send this via email instead of via comment (or via pseudonym). Obviously you've heard about how youths everywhere have revealed themselves to be members of the Red Sox Nation over the last two weeks. But you shouldn't be so pessimistic about this. Last year during the ALCS, I can remember only one kid here getting visibly upset as Aaron Fucking Boone homered off Wakefield, and he's a football player whose background is working-class Bostonian. Even during the series, most people were indifferent. But for some reason, be it narrative or hype, this year's Yanks-Sox series stoked passions in even non-baseball fans like my Chilean bio major roommate, who a month ago thought the infield fly rule was a scientific theory. Obviously the comeback made people instinctively identify with the Sox: hell, it follows the plot of every sports movie ever made. The most bizarre thing of all is how people's interest in the series went beyond mere spectatorship. They actually became Red Sox fans, acting as if they had been there as Bucky Dent hit his homer or Buckner let Mookie's grounder roll through their legs; they actually absorbed the consciousness of an 85 year old retired cop from South Boston.

Maybe it's that people want to feel like they're part of a winning team? Maybe it has to do with malaise over the state of our country? Here, we're supposed to be the world's great superpower, beacon of hope and freedom, but mired down in an unacknowledged guerilla war in a country that two years ago posed no threat to us. Our once mighty army is being handcuffed by Pentagon ideologues who launched the most misguided war in three decades, if not in American history. America isn't supposed to be like this. We're optimistic, not pessimistic. Our history is of perpetual motion and progress, guided by a sense of mission and providence, and rarely have there been times when people question our national myths and mythmakers. Today is like 1980: our military power has been humbled, energy prices are skyrocketing, the economy is teetering, geopolitics are in flux, the incumbent president is a spectacular failure who's fiddling as the Mid East burns. Enter the Red Sox - the Miracle on Turf. They're ordinary men, underdogs, who against all odds defeated the great and arrogant power. They're Boston patriots, they're our rebels, our founders. They fit into our national founding myths. They give us a reason to believe in ourselves again.

That and people are insecure douchebags. Lemmings, all of them. I want to take a bat around campus and physically assault every third person I see. It was Schaedenfraude that brought me to the Sox, but after seeing all these NYC private school ass clowns dressing up as Sox fans, I want to emigrate to someplace where they don't give a shit about baseball. Montreal looks promising.

PS. I just realized the plague that will be Buddy Christ/Johnny Damon Halloween costumes. If you don't mind, I'm going to go set myself on fire."

Mr. Campion, wherever you are, I think you just earned yourself a Kerry vote.

-Fosterius