PERSONAL RESPONSE 3: LOSING
During the recent World Series why was I recently cheering for the Dodgers and wanted the Yankees to lose? I didn’t know the players on either team, in fact I hadn’t watched a baseball game all year. I only paid attention during the World Series. When the Yankees, way ahead in game five, collapsed and the Dodgers won I felt really good. I would have been all the way down if the Yankees had won. Why? I had just arbitrarily picked one tribe rather than the other through, an odd allegiance that I had developed somehow as a boy, hearing about the damn Yankees. I joined one tribe rather than the other but once in I was totally committed. After the game all of New York City was gloomy, all of Los Angeles ecstatic with a huge parade. The game was the thing, an arbitrary game with all kinds of rules about foul balls and fans touching the ball, the number of balls and strikes allowed, how quickly a pitcher pitched, as arbitrary as the electoral college or the rules about when ballots could be cast and by whom.
Every four years the United States plays this game with great excitement and anticipation and at enormous cost sensing unfairness on the other side. I realized after I got over losing that nothing was going to affect me very much. And nothing was going to affect my barber on the other side very much. His situation and the situation of the working class in the Swannanoa Valley would very likely not change at all. He had the great satisfaction of having won again and poking the other team in the eye. But no more jobs would come to the Swannanoa Valley because of this and Swannanoa, where Trump visited a couple of weeks ago, would remain a sad crumbling place, sadder now because of Helene’s fury.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 