Losing It

You hate so much it gives your life purpose. It gives you a mission. It makes you a more effective human being. Food tastes better, the air is sweeter. And somehow it liberates you from the pain that has been delivered unto you. Orwell knew. A feature of his fictional Oceana of the far-off year of "1984" was the daily "Two-Minute Hate," where the hopeless slave minions of the future-that-never-came got their juices going by chanting choral imprecations at the enemies of the state, including the monster Goldstein.

And we knew about that in Chicago, a city not unacquainted with hate. In the bleak days I evoked: We hated Philip K. Wrigley. He sat up there in his white chewing gum tower on Michigan Avenue, right across from the Tribune, he sat smug and cheap and silent and unmoved. He was like the Judge in "The Natural." God, we hated that guy. He would not light Wrigley, because it cost too much, and in not lighting it, he sentenced the team to an eternity in the second division. Why, you just have to look at all the World Series they've won since the team was finally sold (to the guys across the street, as it turned out; they could have negotiated over tin cans and strings stretched across Michigan!) and the new owners finally went to night ball . . . oh, well, never mind.

And in Baltimore! It started when Edward Bennett Williams, a cursed outsider from the degenerate Babylon 37 miles down the Parkway, bought the team. It was clear he regarded Baltimore as some kind of mucus infection on his shoe, and his diffidence, his arrogance, his ignorance, his condescension started the hatred toward ownership. Then there was some New York industrialist. He, too, saw Baltimore as a collection of odiferous mold spores and stayed away. He was hated for parsimony, greed and a capitalist's cold, rational heart. And then came the days of -- you know. Vain, powerful, infantile, a punisher, he spent millions to buy the city's love and got its collective hatred instead, certainly the worst bargain any man has ever made. Tiny but thick, mean but rude, unfunny but cruel. Man, that was good hating! That was the filet mignon of hating; looked good, tasted good and you went home with the smell of blood in your nostrils. What more could a fella want?

Alas, he seems to have finally relented this year, and it shows on the field, where a more-or-less free-to-operate general manager has at last put together an interesting and almost competitive team of kids and sensibly priced veterans, and what's his name (I think I could remember it if the fear of a lawsuit didn't keep freezing up my memory) seems to have gone into a benign mood. As a consequence, the team is occasionally winning, occasionally hitting, occasionally coming from behind. It's fun again. I might even go one of these days, but probably not, as old hates die hard.

So what can you in Washington hate? I hesitate to name an owner or a manager or a general manager. After all, these are authentic human beings who try hard within their financial stipulations. They are not cruel, bitter, jealous, infantile, monstrous. Just guys.

So who or what? The dogs? They're okay; the koshers are the best. The beer, which demands a new mortgage or denies a child a year of college? But that's true at all parks. The house. Come on: It's better than that thing called FedEx, so you can't really do a number on it. FedEx looks like it was designed by the guy who did Mr. Cooke's toenails. It's what you call back-of-the-envelope architecture -- well, it's not architecture at all, it's engineering of the "it probably won't fall down" school.

But back to baseball: I suppose you could gin up some anger at the swells from K Street in the costly seats, working the phones and keeping their white collars (on blue or striped shirting) up, their manicures shining in the sun, their faces ruddy from too much sailing. In Baltimore, we really hated those guys in their suspenders, sipping Chablis and eating brie off an English water cracker with a pinkie crooked next to their cool blond wives who looked half-equine (but in a good way), and nobody talked about the truly embarrassing fact that by coming up the 37 miles to see the Birds, they probably saved the Birds for Baltimore. Maybe that's why we hate them so much: because we owe them so much. They were so decent and such faithful citizens and good customers, so the principle of the guilty punishing the good with hatred must be invoked. They're probably doing the same for the Nats, so maybe it's not such a good idea to get in the habit.

The parking, the peanuts (awful), the ball girls, the insignia grown into the grass, the cross-hatching by the mowers, the soundman, the people who shoot T-shirts into the crowd, the organist? All substandard, but . . . hate?

No, you need grand passion, simmering hostility, spleen, dilated nostrils, spluttering, dangerous blood pressure. Really, there can be but one thing.

The presidents' race. You know, those four big-headed dweebs in their 1892 vaudeville shtick of faww-down-go-boom before every game! They stumble in from the outfield and stagger to a clearly scripted finish near the Nats dugout. It's always the same, it's never funny, it's weirdly dismissive. I mean, if the city is known for anything, it's known for the seriousness with which the game of politics is played. It's a hard-knock, prisoners-will-be-shot milieu, so why is it dissed and turned into stooge's comedy? The race is just as certainly disrespectful to those great men, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, who gave and fought and risked. Now they're represented as spindly bodies without knee-joints sustaining gigantic alien heads that seem drawn not from history but from Japanese anime.

They are the worst attributes of modern marketing: cute, harmless, without mythology or morphology, charmless, awkward, silly, sexless and pointless. They belong on lunchboxes, and connect not with the grand parade of tragedy and triumph that is both America and baseball but with things like Alvin and the Chipmunks, bad CGI movies, gnomes and Beanie Babies. Cute is scarier than death. Watching them makes my teeth hurt, my head ache.

However, I do not advocate a coup. The tree of liberty need not be watered by the blood of giant, stupid muppets. Also, the four phys-ed majors, from whatever local educational entity, encased in those gigantic, absurd heads need not give up what will doubtless be the best jobs of their lives. Rather, hatred of the four big presidential icons is best to be nurtured. It is a garnish, not an entree. It gives piquancy and relish to what has become an otherwise rather dreary ballpark ritual of anticipating uninteresting ways to lose. They are useful; they give you a free-of-charge two-minute hate at each attendance and it clears the pipes, calms the bile, settles the choler of the day, purges the system. It's sort of like a good bleeding at the hands of a medieval barber. You just feel refreshed, and when the thunder-thumbed, balsa-batted heroes of the Nats lose yet again, you're all spent. You don't have to go home muttering and tied in knots and tense. It's okay.

Go, Nats.

(FYI, I did look it up: Underrated Lee Walls played 10 years and finished with a lifetime batting average of .262. In 1958, for the Cubs, he hit 24 home runs, batted .304 and made the All-Star team. Also: I never read "War and Peace," still don't type well and have not written five short stories.)