Opening Day

Opening Day

The Mariners beat the Rangers

5 to 2.

It snowed

and they had to put the roof on.

J. J. Putz got the save.

He fanned two and gave up one hit

in the 9th.

The pitch of the evening

was the split finger fastball

which came out of his fingers

full of Pratt and Whitney

but

died like a shot clay pigeon

over the plate.

Very nice.

Happy totals on the radio.

Yea baseball.

Here's something else.

From a book I re-read a couple of weeks ago...

"Know this: though civilization has upset the established order of Nature, it has nevertheless not deprived Nature of her rights. In the beginning, she created strong and weak, her intention being that the latter be eternally subordinate to the former as the lamb is to the lion or the insect to the elephant. The adroitness and wit of humankind determined the relative positions of individuals, for soon it was not physical strength that decided rank but the strength of a man acquired through wealth. The richest man was the strongest man, the poorest was the weakest. But in spite of this changes in the manner in which an individual came by his power, the superiority of the strong over the weak remained fundamental to the Laws of Nature, according to which it mattered not if the rope which secured the weak was held by a man who was rich or a man who was strong, or whether it's coils weighted heaviest on the weakest or the poorest."

That's from the Marquis De Sade in "The Misfortunes of Virtue." It's what the counterfeiter Dalville tells Sophie when he enslaves her. These parts where the evil characters wax philosophically are more interesting to me than all of the perversion and tolchocking that goes in this book. It's a rationality for continuing the status quo that never seems to get old. It's exaggerated here of course but it's basically the whole enlightenment values to the extreme, self actualization at all costs, social darwinism song and dance. Whenever anybody starts talking about the Laws of Nature and human society, it's bullshit time. You hear a lot of this these days from people who think it's nice to have more than their slice when there's hardly enough to get by. Good old republican (not the political party) virtues and the notion of the collective good seems to have gone out the window with these folks. In their view, anybody that doesn't want to sign up for this type of savage, anarchic individualism calling itself democracy is a bolshevik. Just like Livy said, this kind of shite is gonna eat us up because like it or not, under the masts of the ship of state, we are a collective and none of these folks is truly an island.

It's a discourse that's going on that unfortunately isn't going the way I'd hoped it would. We gotta get some thinkers in this game that can throw some heat, like J.J. did tonight in the 9th. Michael Walzer would be in my bullpen. His ideas concerning economic justice and political obligation are thought provoking and may strike out a few rhetoricians who use abstraction to scoobie everybody else into letting them act like King Kong-sized, insatiable two year olds. The game's not over and just like Mr. Sexsmith sings, there's still time.