Baseball is over

I’ve never enjoyed football, and I long ago abandoned hockey and basketball. Baseball was the first of the major team sports that I embraced, and it’s the last I let go of.

I tried to give it one last shot. I tuned in the other day to the “first wild card game in baseball history,” as the announcer intoned on the TBS broadcast. This is a new format this year, where two potential “wild card” teams have to play each other in a one-game “play-in,” with the winner seizing the wild card spot for their league’s playoffs. The ardent sports fan in me thinks this is actually a promising innovation, because it gives two more teams a shot at the playoffs, and it increases tension as the pennant races wind down, while giving more weight to actually winning a pennant, since having the fourth best record in your league doesn’t automatically guarantee you a wild-card spot.

Or at least, the ardent sports fan in me would think this, if he hadn’t died some time ago.

I think he died a few months ago when I saw a headline in Yahoo or MSN saying that some team, maybe the Oakland A’s, went from hopelessness to being the hottest team in the game. At that moment, I realized that I couldn’t name a single player on that team, nor did I care to find out. Oh, and I hadn’t watched a single baseball game all season. Nor did it electrify me that there were seven no-hitters (including three perfect games) this year.

So when I was flipping through channels and happened upon this one last game, St. Louis Cardinals vs. Atlanta Braves, I was surprised to find some lurid fascination in it. I tuned in with the Braves leading 2-0, and I thought a Braves win would be nice, because I at least knew that their star third baseman, Chipper Jones, would be retiring at the end of the season, and a long playoff run would be a respectable way to go out. Jones is a universally respected player, and one of the few active players who was around when I was a kid who still got excited about baseball cards.

Naturally, Jones soon made a throwing error that led to three runs for the opposing team, putting them up 3-2. Then it was 4-2 after a Cardinals home run. Then 6-3, Cardinals, thanks to two more Braves throwing errors. In the bottom of the 7^th, Jones came to bat with two outs, two men on base, and a chance to pull his team even. He grounded out swinging on the first pitch.

Somebody stop the bleeding! And yet the worst was yet to come. In an act of unspeakable masochism, the Braves insisted on keeping hope alive by again bringing the tying run to the plate in the 8^th inning. With runners on first and second, some player I’ve never heard of hit a long pop into left field. A miscommunication between two fielders allowed the ball the drop untouched. Maybe a hit? Likely an error. Either way, the bases would be loaded with only one out, and the Braves would have their biggest chance of the day, aided by a heap of what is called “momentum.”

But no! The umpire invoked the infield fly rule, the details of which are so arcane that I won’t go into them here, but the result was that the batter was ruled out, and the runners advanced to second and third. Scoring position, but two outs, not to mention a burning raft of controversy surrounding a call that could not have been considered reasonable by anyone other than the employees of Major League Baseball whose sole job is to toe the company line.

Oh, the game was played in Atlanta, and what happened next was what Gorilla Monsoon might have called “pandemonium.” The fans immediately hurled drink cups, food wrappers, and assorted trash and debris onto the field, accompanied by a lusty cascade of boos and hisses. The TV announcers shook their heads and deplored this “very disappointing” and “absolutely embarrassing” behavior on the part of Braves fans. (Yes, an uncharacteristically boorish response by fans who for the last several decades have cheered their team with a “tomahawk chop” and faux-Indian chanting.) Whatever “momentum” existed was extinguished in the 20-minute delay that was required for the grounds crew to pick up the garbage.

Presumably, the Braves players were too ashamed to score after this disgraceful display. But Chipper Jones would have one last chance in the bottom of the 9^th, two outs, no one on base. He hit an infield squib that he barely beat out when the first baseman was pulled off the bag. It was ruled a hit instead of an error by the official scorer. Many commentators considered this a gift. I guess you know it’s time to retire when the scorer is giving you a hit that you probably didn’t deserve. Two batters later, the game was over and the Braves were finished, as was Jones’s career.

*          *          *

At one point in the game, during an unconventional putout (the pitcher threw the ball to first and it bounced off the runner’s back), an announcer said, “In case you’re keeping score, that play was 1-3. Does anyone keep score anymore? I hope so.”

Why do you hope so? What pleasure do you get from seeing solitary old women sitting in the stands and marking down a bunch of numbers to record the mundane details of where the fielders throw the ball?

As a matter of fact, I have started keeping score, and the score is: Sanity 1, Baseball 0

I loved baseball as a child because it was full of baseball cards that I could collect and statistics I could memorize. It’s the only sport where numbers themselves take on mythic status (61, 714, .400). It had old stadiums that people would wax poetic about, and those were just one small piece of the venerable history of a sport that seemed intertwined with the American spirit. Most of all, baseball had “hero moments.”

In the other team sports, there is always some kind of mob ready to spoil your moment – the double-team jumping in front of your last-second shot in basketball, the backfield crowding all available receivers in football, the ridiculous crush of bodies that makes even skating down the ice seem impossible in hockey, let alone shooting with any sort of freedom.

But in baseball, there is patience. The hitter stands in the box, the pitcher stands on the mound, with nothing between them, and they wait, each one knowing that the next pitch can be his “hero moment.”

My fandom had existed as a kind of hero worship, but we long ago entered an era where I no longer know who the players are, and when I can no longer conceive of hunting for heroes in pop culture, but am far more interested in becoming the hero of my own life. And so I find it remarkable that millions of men (and women) can be found who so gladly hitch their dream wagons to these sports teams and their fortunes.

Watching this Braves-Cards game, I saw that professional baseball, as reported and televised, has become a circus act. Once in a while, you get to see some bizarre or humiliating spectacle, and that can be amusing. But the days of baseball being something I identify with are over.

Hats off to Chipper for devoting two decades of his life to The Show. Time to call it a career, for you and me both.

Cue gnashing of teeth . . .

Nooooo! How can this be? This can't be happening!

WHY???????

But, it says they're "hoping to make this golden gem available again." I can give money!

No, it's gone. Hoping is gone. Loving is gone!!!

It's over. As the poet says, "Who wants to live forever?"

Aces

It is sad news to hear Andy Roddick announce that he will retire at the end of the current U.S. Open tournament, that is, at the end of his U.S. Open, which is not likely to last past the quarterfinals.

For someone who won only a single Grand Slam tournament, Andy Roddick has always seemed to command an unreasonably large slice of attention in the world of tennis. Certainly, part of that is because I live in his home country, an America starved for tennis success after being spoiled by decades of dominance. Consequently, the national fan base cleaves to its one star, grasping helplessly at the hem of his increasingly tattered garment.

I was never really a fan of Roddick’s cocky demeanor, over-reliance on his serve, and relative mediocrity in a time of titans. Playing in the shadow of the near-invincible Roger Federer, and then effectively replaced when the almost equally dominant Rafael Nadal emerged as Federer’s true rival, it’s reasonable to say that his impact on the sport of tennis was minimal.

But as I look back on his career, I find something genuinely reassuring and edifying. Though it was easy to make him the poster child of unprecedented American ineptitude, people somehow forgot that he was the one American of his generation who actually won something. Carrying the weight of a nation’s expectations, he persevered and never fell apart. He had a big decline in the middle part of his career, and the lack of self-confidence was visible at times, but you can’t really argue that he sabotaged himself somehow, like a Marat Safin, or that he didn’t want it badly enough. He simply played as well as he could, which unfortunately wasn’t good enough to win Slams in this era.

I find his efforts to be particularly ennobling in light of the insatiable American appetite for winning that has led to the lionizing of athletes like Michael “Bong Hit” Phelps and Lance “Dickweak,” athletes defined by inordinate success based largely on innate gifts that overcame questionable work ethic, in the case of Phelps, and a poisonous “win at all costs” attitude, in the case of Armstrong. If not for the narcissism in our culture born of sitting on the shoulders of the rest of the world, there would be fewer news articles asking why Roddick had “underachieved,” and more articles celebrating how good he actually was.

Maybe Roddick himself got too caught up in the failures and disappointment to realize how proud he should have been of himself that he got as far as he did.

The saving grace was perhaps his outsize personality (at least relatively speaking in the bland world of pro tennis). He was a favorite subject at press conferences, and seemed to delight in comparing the intellect of a referee or a chair umpire to that of an 8-year-old. Most enjoyable for me was his career as a funny and occasionally hapless pitchman for American Express. Remember Roddick vs. Pong, Roddick buying a towel, and Roddick forced to buy a second seat on the plane because massive trophies kept falling from the overhead cabin and onto his gourd? Even better was the spin-off commercial (and I can’t find it online) where the second seat is empty because he ended up losing at the tournament. I respected the good humor it took to make a commercial where he’s on the receiving end of a joke about losing.

Federer called Roddick“a great man.” I'm inclined to think that he gave the sport everything he had, and the sport is in his debt. Though the 2008 Wimbledon final between Nadal and Federer is a universally admired match, my favorite Slam final will always be the Roddick-Federer five-setter at Wimbledon 2009. I said it before (on a comment on my brother’s blog post): "I would love to see a Federer-Roddick final with Roddick bringing his best game ever to bear. Granted, he would still lose, but I'd like to see him press Roger to the limit just once in his life." And that’s exactly what I got.

You could say that Federer was already in decline by this time, or that this was Roddick’s last gasp of greatness, and that this somehow diminishes the meaning or quality of this match. But in the end, the tournament has to be played every year, and a player can only beat the guys who show up. Roddick showed up, and he forced Federer to show what a great player he really was.

It took a truly gutsy effort by Federer to win. As for Roddick, everything that was good about his game was on display, and mistakes were minimal. It was the greatest match I’ve ever seen him play, and I think that to perform at one’s very best level is a worthy goal in itself. Roddick’s landmark achievement is his U.S. Open championship in 2003, but I’ll always remember him for this match.

This was as close as Roddick would ever come to winning another Slam or beating his nemesis when it counted, and most viewers would agree that it could have gone Roddick’s way. Afterward, you could kind of see it in Roddick’s eyes – he knew that it was over, that he would never get this chance again. But in my mind, he solidified his signature role in the tennis world – he stood for persistence and resilience in the face of certain defeat. Americans need to be reminded of this virtue from childhood. It’s certainly more important than the Pledge of Allegiance, and will serve you better throughout your life.

So a great player retires without achieving all he hoped for, but let’s not get misty-eyed. At the end of the day, Roddick still goes home to millions of dollars, a beautiful wife, and the knowledge that at least for a few weeks, he was the world’s best player. But if you must make idols of the millionaires you see on TV, at least pick the Roddicks of the world, people who have visibly agonized over the weight of their fame and the sting of falling short of not just their own expectations but ours as well.

So how long will this dead man keep walking at Flushing Meadows? Since his next match is against someone named Fabio Fognini (and since he’s already up two sets as of this writing), I’m going to say that Roddick will prevail and reach the fourth round, and I’ll even give him the victory in a possible meeting with Juan Martin del Potro, setting up a likely (and by that, I mean, of course, “unlikely”) quarterfinals encounter with Novak Djokovic, who would surely be the end of the line for Andy Roddick, falling against the guy who once jeered him in front of his home crowd after beating him at this very tournament.

But you would request a dream scenario, wouldn’t you? Let’s say Djokovic keeps guessing wrong on Roddick’s serve, or maybe he comes down with a case of bird flu, SARS, or even anthrax. That and a few lucky breaks and favorable calls, and who knows, maybe Roddick pulls out the win and avenges the 2008 U.S. Open loss, the recent London Olympics loss, et al. Once in the semis, I think Roddick could very well handle a David Ferrer or a John Isner (and now we reach deep into the well of fantasy to consider Isner advancing to a semifinal), setting up the most worthy exit Roddick could have from the game, an impossible final “final” against Roger Federer, his true contemporary, and seemingly the only person to consistently go out of his way to label Roddick a real rival, even as Roddick himself denied the validity of such a lofty status.

One last chance to throw everything onto the court.

And who wins? Well, if Roddick is ultimately to have any kind of legacy, it won’t be about winning or losing, will it? 

I’ll have what he’s having, and make mine a double

So I was at McDonald’s the other day, and I notice sitting to my right is some old geezer eating a McDonald’s ice cream cone.

Good day to be an old guy, I thought.

Then, I notice that there is a second ice cream cone resting on his tray.

So I says to myself, does he have a grandkid scampering around here somewhere?

Old guy walks outside to get some sunshine, leaving the uneaten second cone. While he’s out there, I see that next to his tray is a 32 oz. Big Gulp from 7-Eleven, already drained, presumably down his gullet. While I’m considering the Big Gulp and noticing the distinct lack of children nearby, the elder statesman comes back inside, picks up the remaining ice cream cone, and starts to eat that too!

At this point, I’m wondering, have I entered the Twilight Zone? Who made him lord of the universe, that he gets to eat two ice cream cones in one sitting? After already downing a Big Gulp!

I am aghast. I don’t mean to judge, and I must admit that when I compare his plate to mine, he was traveling light:

My plate

McDouble – 390 calories

6 Chicken McNuggets – 280 calories

Honey Mustard Sauce – 60 calories

32 oz. Coca-Cola – 310 calories

Total = 1,040 calories (and it didn’t even seem like that much food!)

The Geezer Special

Ice Cream Cone – 170 calories

Ice Cream Cone – 170 calories

32 oz. Big Gulp – 310 calories (assuming Coke or Coke-like soda)

Total = 650 calories

He had some other edible item on his plate, but I don’t remember what, lost as I was in the haze of ice dreams. And that, much more so than caloric intake, is the point of this story.

I think I was just jealous that he had the stones to buy two ice creams, and here I was eating fast food and rationalizing it by choosing moderately priced and reasonably skinny protein-rich items. As far as the Coke, hey, it was a broiling hot day.

Maybe when I’m 95 years old, I thought, I can be like this old-timer. No. Three ice creams!

THE MORAL: It would have been leaner to have ordered two ice cream cones instead of a McDouble, and I could have congratulated myself on going veggie. 

The Greatest Play I’ve Ever Seen

Three and a half years ago, I started writing a blog post about the greatest play I had ever seen. But I kept putting the draft aside because I couldn’t figure out how to explain what made it special. I hadn’t yet “gone over the mountain,” as Thoreau would say. I’m still not sure I’ve gone over the mountain, but I’ll consider this a continued ascent as I shine my little lamp on a corner of the arts that has gotten scant attention on this blog: the theater.

It’s actually the silver screen that brings my attention back to plays today. As I flipped through articles about Tony Scott’s apparent suicide a few days ago, I came across other, lesser Hollywood news about Gary Ross, director of the sublime Pleasantville, now perhaps better known for directing the Katniss movie. It was announced that instead of helming the next Hunger Games movie, Ross’s next film project will be Disney’s Peter and the Starcatchers, based on the series of tween novels that were previously adapted into, yes, the greatest play I’ve ever seen.

*          *          *

A little background . . .

In my youth, I fancied myself clever for quipping that plays had been superseded by movies. My Shakespeare ardor morphed into a kind of revisionist fantasy as I pontificated to my fellow groundlings, “If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be making movies, not plays.” I had seen engrossing, artful film adaptations of Shakespeare (Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, Branagh’s Othello, the Ethan Hawke Hamlet made some joy out of a play I never cottoned to), and if they were already pretty good, imagine what the Bard himself could have done.

                                                                                                            

It’s not that I don’t like plays. I can’t remember ever coming out of a play or a musical thinking ill of the experience. But I have many reasons for thinking that the movie is the superior form of thespian entertainment.

First of all, movies can do so much more than plays can. The combination of computer technology and a nearly unlimited range of physical spaces for shooting seems to shame the relatively limited stage into submission.

Beyond this, when you examine those shows that have both stage and screen versions, I’ve never known the screen version to suffer in comparison. Watching the stage adaptation of The Lion King, I was mildly amused at the mechanical masks that the principal actors wore, as well as the novel way that, say, a giraffe neck was integrated into a human actor’s costume. These are technical achievements to be sure, but there was nothing in the stage show that suggested that it had accomplished something the movie could not have, aside from a few gimmicks, like “animals” roaming down the audience aisles (and perhaps The Lion King 3D rerelease successfully challenges this advantage). The difference was costuming versus animation; otherwise, the show played out just like the movie, and ended up feeling unnecessary.

To go the other direction, when The Phantom of the Opera was adapted into a film in 2004, under the guidance and production of Andrew Lloyd Webber himself, the look was beautiful and the music just as thrilling, but if anything, you could say that the filmmakers didn’t do as much with the technology as they could have. As with The Lion King, the two versions just looked a little different, but it’s the movie versions that would seem to have more potential. The Lion King on stage looked like a static version of the film. Phantom, having originated in a more static medium, felt a bit uncomfortable on the screen, if only because we are accustomed to seeing constant, sweeping movement on a movie screen.

I’ve already mentioned Shakespeare, but even looking at the plays in themselves, I have rarely felt that the staging and performance were necessary. I’m sure I’m not the only person who gets more out of reading the plays than seeing them live. The most necessary Shakespeare production I’ve seen was Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and that’s because it was set in the 1920s and had an original ragtime piano score and songs. It seemed to make more out of the source material, and thus made it worth putting down the book and buying a ticket.

And that brings me to another crucial reason for preferring the cinema. Given the bourgeois nature of the stage versus the more democratic playing field of a movie theater, it’s hard to sympathize with what the dramatists are peddling. I just paid $20 to see The Dark Knight Rises on the IMAX, and I considered this a gross extravagance. Until I reminded myself that $20 would not have gotten me a seat of any kind at most of the playhouses in town. And no, most theaters don’t actually welcome groundlings.

At the Las Vegas production of Phantom at The Venetian, the overture is accompanied by a fine special effect that you couldn’t experience in any movie – the epic vision of a gargantuan chandelier above the audience, breaking apart and swaying with spectral malice above our heads. Neat trick, I thought. But then when I considered that I had paid $85 to watch a giant chandelier sway about, I didn’t think it was so neat anymore.

One of my local multiplexes is at a shopping mall next to Ruby’s Diner, which is a mid-range hamburger chain that offers movie ticket discounts if you show your dinner receipt at the theater. Now, I never heard of anyone offering discounted tickets to see Desire Under the Elms with the purchase of a hamburger. And for that matter, isn’t it strange that it’s virtually mandatory to treat your date to some kind of swanky Waldorf salad and duck confit bistro for dinner before heading to a performance of Hedda Gabbler, even though all you can afford after buying the tickets is McDonald’s?

The difference between plays and movies is the difference between theaters that are named after some hoity-toity personality (Goodman, Ethel Barrymore, Brooks Atkinson), and theaters that are named after the number (and sometimes size) of their screens (AMC 20, Edwards 18 IMAX).

It’s the difference between “theatre” and “theater.” 

*          *          *

So much for plays, then. After all, what could possibly redeem this bastion of privilege and obsolescence?

In February 2009, the La Jolla Playhouse premiered Peter and the Starcatchers, a play written by Rick Elice, and directed by Alex Timbers and Roger Rees (yes, that British guy with the recurring role on Cheers, and a small role in The Prestige). It was adapted from the series of novels written by Dave Barry, the humorist, and Ridley Pearson, and published by a Disney subsidiary firm. The story is billed as a prequel to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which was originally a play before Barrie himself turned it into a novel called Peter and Wendy, and before Disney rendered it as its fourteenth “animated classic” in 1953.

Three years later, I don’t remember many of the details or plot points (another black mark against plays – where’s the commemorative DVD?), but I do recall being impressed at how Peter and the Starcatchers succeeds as creation myth behind the already well-known Peter Pan myth. We learn how Captain Hook (or the Black Stache, as he is known) lost his hand. We watch as Tinker Bell comes into being. We see Peter earn his “Pan,” and are treated to one interpretation of the name.

But what I remember most was what took the play beyond the boundaries of any movie – the conceit of having the actors play not just characters, but also props and sound effects. The most memorable special effect was the simplest and most frequent – the actors would transition seamlessly from playing orphan boys and pirates to playing doors. One actor would literally swing another actor open as though he were a door.

This and other flourishes, such as having actors play parts of a ship, or becoming a chorus of dripping water sounds, relied on the sharpest acting, and the cast was more than capable. The effect was somehow elegant and rustic at the same time, like the rude mechanicals from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or perhaps something like Cirque du Soleil as performed by Monty Python.

This effect, actors playing props, is not unprecedented, but the execution was so smooth and realistic that it erased the barriers between actors and objects. It also created an exciting fluidity and enforced the expectation that anything could happen, any actor could potentially be anything on stage at any time, so there was no waiting for the lights to go down so that black-shirted stagehands could rush in and whisk away a table and bring in a park bench or something.

The play successfully erases the barrier that I’ve always felt existed between the stage and the audience, so that nothing compromises the illusion of being in Peter’s world.

*          *          *

Writing about the play now feels like being in that scene in The Prestige, when Hugh Jackman watches Christian Bale perform The Transported Man for the first time. The magic trick isn’t even shown on screen, but you see Jackman’s reaction and the life-long obsession it engenders in him – “the greatest magic trick I’ve ever seen.” Likewise, you may feel like my story is missing something, namely – the trick. Can no-tech effects and virtuosic acting really explain what happened on that stage that enraptured me and separated it from other plays? Wasn’t it just more expensive gimmickry?

It may seem counterintuitive, but for me, movies have a monopoly on verisimilitude. Immersion is more natural at the movies; I feel like the movie is really happening in the moment, whereas plays seem, frankly, as staged as the moon landing.

Peter and the Starcatchers was the first time I ever went to a play and forgot for a moment that it was a stage. It’s as if they invited me in, told me that the story was to be a simple one that I had heard before, told me the stage was just wood and steel, and yet when they started performing, they still somehow got me to believe in it. Transforming the inherent fakeness of the stage into something real is the magic – the kind that every play aspires to conjure, but which I had heretofore found almost exclusively in the movies.

Indeed, the play has much of the vaunted Disney magic that seems increasingly rare in Disney’s animated pictures these days. (And please don’t bring up Pixar. Their movies are enjoyable, but Pixar specializes in high craftsmanship and cleverness, not magic – floating house notwithstanding.)

Though I’ve experienced more capacity for transport in the movies than in plays, it doesn’t mean that it happens often. But high-concept magic guided the modernized morality of Gary Ross’s Pleasantville, and Ross also wrote the screenplay for Big, the seminal magic movie for boys growing up in the 1980s, so perhaps he and his team can summon some of that classic magic for Peter and the Starcatchers as well.

*          *          *

My experience with Peter and the Starcatchers doesn’t change my belief that movies can do so many things that the stage just can’t. But at the same time, the stage is capable of things that movies wouldn’t dare to attempt.

But having said that, there is one final damning trait exhibited by even the finest play; in fact, it is especially the finest plays that are most beleaguered by this trait.

The greatest play I’ve ever seen is one that you will never see, unless you and I attended the same show.  I’m being a bit dramatic, for even if we attended different performances, you probably saw more or less what I saw. But as the production moves from place to place, as the cast gets jiggered, and the staging is updated, and sets reconstructed, and lines rewritten, and concepts reconceived, and even the title tweaked (by the time it hit Broadway and started winning Tony Awards, it was called Peter and the Starcatcher), eventually, though you may see the play, it will be a different experience. 

And I think it’s this unbearably ephemeral nature of a great play that tears me up inside and makes me want to do away with the theater entirely.

I am reminded of these lines in Carl Sandburg’s poem, “Languages”:

Sing – and singing – remember
Your song dies and changes
And is not here to-morrow
Any more than the wind
Blowing ten thousand years ago.

*          *          *

So I ask myself that question now: what would Shakespeare do today, plays or movies? I’m not sure. Maybe a little of each. But surely, what with juggling both stage and screen, he wouldn’t bother writing sonnets. Right? 

A Game of Chicken

You have surely heard that the Chick-fil-A chain of chicken sandwich restaurants has been taking a beating lately in the liberal media for the proudly unambiguous anti-gay statements made by its president, Dan Cathy, which he has backed up with significant financial contributions to gay-unfriendly organizations. Considering that he runs an empire founded on poultry, perhaps one is not surprised at his willingness to ruffle some feathers.

Just before the flap began, I happened to go to a Chick-fil-A for one of their breaded chicken sandwiches. I first tried their food a few years ago, and thought they offered a flavorful sandwich at a reasonable price, and most notably, in a very clean and friendly environment. I was, however, taken aback by an odd marketing and signage campaign featuring cows foisting deliberately misspelled slogans in a particularly heinous font. Imperatives such as “Eat mor chikin” and a special promotion, “Dress like me, git free chikin,” acquired a decidedly ominous, even fascistic glower, which didn’t seem in keeping with the chain’s otherwise homey aesthetic. Upon further thought, this perhaps is meant to evoke the quaint rusticity of the chain’s Southern roots, or else leaves open some speculation about fundamentalist Christianity’s anti-intellectual tendencies.

The sun's rays are oddly reminiscent of iconography from WWII-era Imperialist Japan.

At my latest visit, the service was once again pointedly friendly. The teenaged girl who took my order flashed a brilliant smile full of braces, certainly more welcoming than the usual McDonald’s employee, who tends to have the disgruntled visage of one of Bane’s henchmen in The Dark Knight Rises. A woman who appeared to be the store manager walked out from behind the counter to bring me my takeout order, and asked if I wanted their “special Chick-fil-A sauce” with it. 

After the bad press began, I wondered, would the service have been any worse had I ordered my sandwich while sporting a rainbow flag t-shirt, or if I had tried to regale the staff with tales of my ribald shenanigans at the local Pride Parade (which happened to take place just as this henhouse kerfuffle began). On the flip side, how should I go about treating them, now that their company-sanctioned bigotry has become newsworthy?

Boycotting Chick-fil-A, that is, making a stand with your wallet, is undoubtedly good for your conscience, your finances, and your waistline – a win-win-win situation. But I wonder if it’s any kind of solution at all, in light of all the other institutions and corporations that so deftly dodge the rather narrow purview of our consciences.

                                                                                                            

Civil rights offenses are a favorite whipping boy of the media, and furthermore, they seem to penetrate down to the sensitive emotional core of the populace, laying waste to more family dinners and love affairs than comparatively benign topics such as abuses of human rights (Chinese workers slaving away to make Apple products) or the ravages of economic inequality and immobility (working for minimum wage at McDonald’s/Target/Wal-Mart/etc.). Beyond mere rights and privileges, I’m sure there are a whole host of other evils associated with just these few companies I’ve mentioned, ranging from environmental to political and so forth. But not a lot of people (gays included) get indignant enough to throw away their iPhones or stop shopping at Target (itself a company with a history of both angering the LGBT community and seemingly pandering to its purchasing power).

No person can stand up for every good cause, nor should he be expected to. But every “Chick-fil-A moment” seems to me a signal, a cock crow (if you’ll indulge the pun), to align one’s life along the trajectory of justice.

                                   

I am reminded of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote:

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders.
- Resistance to Civil Government, aka Civil Disobedience

There is a game of chicken afoot, but it’s not a game played against a corporation or a bigot or even a socioeconomic paradigm that fosters such strife and selfishness; rather, it’s a game you play with yourself. You test yourself against your willingness to engage in activity that is unworthy of you. Let us see which is the stronger. 

Will the real @czardoz please stand up?

Let’s say that among my esteemed readership is a person named Bill Jones. Mr. Bill probably has one or more email addresses, but with a name as common as his, I highly doubt he managed to snag billjones@gmail.com. He probably didn’t even get billjones@hotmail.com or billjones@yahoo.com. If he were a real tech-savvy old-timer, perhaps he secured billjones@aol.com, I don’t know.

Like Bill, you are probably in the same boat. Unless you have a highly unusual name, nickname, or favorite moniker (or you’re content with using the email address provided by your regional ISP, like Cox, where the naming land grab is much less competitive), your email is probably a messy compromise bespattered with hyphens, periods, underscores, middle initials, the numeral 0 in place of the letter O (sigh), and a birth date or lucky number tacked onto the end.

Perhaps you’ve wondered what these people were like, these usurpers of the name that was rightfully yours. Perhaps you’ve wondered how they were defiling the email address that should have belonged to you. Well, short of writing them and asking, you’ll probably never know the kinds of depraved activities that your name is embroiled in.

Now let’s look at a more contemporary scenario, since email, the original social app, is no longer very social compared to Facebook, Twitter, etc. For example, there can only be one @czardoz on Twitter, and thankfully, that’s me. So imagine my disappointment when I hopped onto the Instagram train and discovered that the name “czardoz” was taken.

Not really a big deal compared to, say, human trafficking, but did it bother me? Yeah, it did. Especially since I am an avid photographer and post on Instagram fairly often, whereas I posted once on Twitter and then promptly forgot about it when neither Milla Jovovich nor Britney Spears offered a response.

But unlike email, each Instagram account comes fully loaded with a public personality that can be stalked. And what I found on faux-czardoz’s Instagram feed . . . I didn’t like it. In fact, it was fairly reprehensible stuff. If you’re the squeamish type, don’t click on the following links:

1) a girl spilling her ample cleavage onto a pool table, graced with the words “Nice Rack”

2) a dog swaddled in a Confederate flag

3) butchered pig parts, including the head

4) some guy brandishing said head in front of his face, as if to announce “I am the pig man.”

I’m not going to delve into this person’s psyche, if only because he seems like the type of bloke who would hunt me with a shotgun as soon as spit on my boots. But to make a long and unfortunate story short, I’m going to plant a warning beacon here to tell everyone that I am not this czardoz. This is the real me:

Not the pig man. Never the pig man.