The Weekly Screed (#881)

We’re all Yankees now

by David Benjamin

“Sympathy is something that shouldn't be bestowed upon the Yankees. Apparently it angers them.”

                                                                — Bob Feller

MADISON, Wis. — With the insinuation of Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court alongside three women too old for him to molest, the Trumpniks have scored another victory — and they’re really, really pissed off. 

Win or lose, they’re always pissed off.

What’s going on here?

I sincerely think the answer can be found at Yankee Stadium, where Trump’s favorite team plays ball. I’ve been there. I’ve tried talking to Yankee fans. It’s not easy. Win or lose, they’re always pissed off. Of course, usually, the Yankees win. The Yankees have won 27 World Series. Nobody else is close.

But think about it. In 94 World Series since 1923, Yankee fans have had to watch some other team win 67 times. This really, really pisses them off. 

For a while, I thought Yankees fans were so inexplicably angry simply because other teams kept showing up, and daring to oppose them. Talk about disrespect! Lately, though, I’m re-thinking my analysis. It seems to me that Yankee fans are angry for the same reason that Trump fans — whose winning streak is starting to look like the ’27 Bronx Bombers — are angry.

For instance, I’ve never seen anyone on the Senate Judiciary Committee more furious than Trump lackey Lindsay Graham as he was excoriating his Democratic colleagues for opposing Kavanaugh. He called their defiance “the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics.”

Really? He’s never met Newt Gingrich?

Bear in mind that this guy was winning. He actually could not lose. He was the damn Yankees. But Graham was pissed off apparently because the other team had not only showed up but — compounding their treachery — they played Yankee-style ball and almost tied the game in the ninth.

Democrats and their fans were angry, yes. But Kavanaugh was angrier and Graham was the angriest of all. And the closer the Republicans got to sauntering off the field with their 28th championship, they grew increasingly livid. Even days afterward, when the Boss stood up to present the pennant to Kavanaugh, his victory speech crackled with indignation and naked rage.

But he won! Even Yogi Berra would grin, say a win is a win, and move on.

What’s going on here?

  

My clues to solving this mystery of mass psychology are, well, first, the Yankees. When I went to the Stadium and asked fans about their unpent-up rage, they insisted that — like the scorpion straddling the frog — it’s their nature. This I doubted. There was something deeper here.

Second clue: The Trump voters I know, both friends and family, seem outraged at not being the beloved underdogs in this movie. They’re King Kong and they want to be Fay Wray. After every Trump victory — whether over common sense, human dignity, basic science, racial comity or rape victims — his believers roll out the barrel and celebrate riotously. Fine, they won. But why then do they turn and expect us, the losers, to drop our skirts and join the party?

For some deep-seated reason — I suspect guilt — they don’t simply want to beat us and rub our faces in the muck of defeat. After winning by any means necessary — even cheating, (cf., Merrick Garland) and lying (cf., Justice Kavanaugh) — they want us to turn around and like them. They want we should cross over, join the dark side and buy that stupid cap with the logo that we’ve hated ever since the first time we saw it.

And when we don’t convert and wear the hat and join the “Lock her up!” chorus, they get really, really pissed off.  It’s betrayal. It’s downright treason. Everybody’s supposed to love the Yankees.

When I was a kid, there was only one baseball game a week on TV. It was always the Yankees. They always won. Being force-fed Whitey Ford and Bill Skowron did not endear me, or the rest of the viewing audience, to the Yankees. It pissed us off.  Mike Royko once said, “Hating the Yankees is as American as pizza pie, unwed mothers, and cheating on your income tax.”

Although entrenched in Chicago, Royko probably watched a few White Sox games in Yankee Stadium, where I’m sure he felt what I felt. From the moment you enter, even if you’re a baseball neutralist, there is a physical sense of menace. All around you, large Yankee fans — who are not sober — spew profanity and seethe with a top-dog, middle-finger fury that seems constantly on the brink of mayhem.

When you watch one on Fox News, you get the same prison-yard vibe from a Trump rally. Now and then, their hero spots an enemy infiltrator amongst his faithful and grants them leave to “beat the hell out” of him. Or her. I picture a similar scene at Yankee Stadium. Brett (Gardner, not Kavanaugh) steps into the box and scans the crowd. Suddenly florid with rage, he points his bat at a Sox fan in the nearest grandstand. And he shouts, “Sic ‘im!”

The Yankee fans who pound the interloper to a pulp do so with the best of intentions. They’re teaching him, with every instructive insult and sympathetic kidney-punch, that if he just liked the Yankees, this wouldn’t be happening to him.

Congressman Eric Swalwell said on TV that the Kavanaugh vote in the Senate was a “gut-punch.” This is exactly the point. If he just liked Donald Trump — really, really liked him… if we all did, then nobody would have to keep slugging us.