Tag Archives: i may be ugly and hate filled but..what was that third thing you said?

Baseball, Parental Guidance

Teaching Tolerance for Those You Hate

On the way to school this morning, The Baby and I had a conversation about fandom, prompted by absolutely nothing she or I had said up to that point. She has been talking about baseball a lot lately, for some reason. I may have mentioned that the season was starting soon, and so she’s been asking me often exactly when it will begin. When I say “Next Friday,” she’ll let out an anguished groan, because any length of time longer than a minute is an eternity to a little kid. She also thinks, because I told her I write about the Mets, that I’m a “baseball recorder”.

So we’re walking to school. I believe the last thing I said was something along the lines of, “Ooh, look at that squirrel up on that telephone wire.” Then, this:

BABY: Do you like the Mets?

ME: Yes, I do.

BABY: Do you like the ‘Ankees?

I paused here for a while, wondering how to respond. Do I say something stupid and hateful? Or do I try to keep as much positivity in our shared lives for as long as I can? I opt for the latter.

ME: I like the Mets better. They’re my favorite team.

THE BABY: I don’t like the ‘Ankees.

I am genuinely perplexed, because honestly, I don’t think I’ve said one word about the Yankees in front of her–good, bad, or indifferent–her entire life. Her only interaction with That Team, as far as I know, has been driving past the stadium on our way upstate. I have not tried in any way to transfer any of my animus on to her. I have to assume this is a product of school. *shakes fist*

ME: Why don’t you like the Yankees?

THE BABY: They smell! They smell like ‘Ankee shirts!

At this point, I have to fight every impulse in my body to laugh. Because as much as I might say I “hate,” the Yankees, I really don’t. For one thing, I know too many Yankee fans who aren’t dicks to wish them too much ill. There’s really no one currently on the team who even bugs me–no, not even Jeter. There’s just a certain kind of Yankee fan who drives me nuts. And let’s be honest: there are douchebags a’plenty in every fanbase. If the Mets had the run of success that the Yankees have had in the last 15 years, they’d attract the same terrible types the Yankees do now, people who want to bask in reflected glory and are not fans of baseball or even sports, only winning.

More importantly, I don’t want to be one of those dads who creates a Hate Clone in his own twisted image to hurl tiny epithets at the object of his scorn. That’s even worse than trying to push kids into a sport or to skip grades, because at least a kid can gain something from those endeavors. But using your child as a vessel for all your hates and fears, that’s just monstrous. I’ve seen kids like these at stadiums, dressed head to toe in team gear, yelling horrible things they couldn’t possibly understand, like Children of the Damned in Zubaz.

If I encouraged this kind of thinking, I feared her growing up to make her own version of Buffalo ’66. Or even worse, becoming a version of one of those mutants from Filip Bondy’s Bleacher Creature columns in the Daily News of yore. I had to read tons of that column when researching my recaps of the 2000 season, and it dented my soul. The kind of hate that came out of these people’s mouths toward Mets fans was at thermonuclear, Alabama 1963 levels.

I did not want my daughter to grow up to be such a person. Sports should inspire love, not hate. So, I took the high road.

ME: That’s not nice. The Yankees don’t smell. Different people like different things. Some people like the Yankees, some people like the Mets. Some people don’t like baseball at all.

THE BABY: [with a resigned sigh] Yeah, I guess so.

And we walked on to school. I felt good for following the better angels of my nature, and I thought of the lyrics of one of my dad’s favorite parodic songs, Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week”: Step up and shake the hand / Of someone you can’t stand / You can tolerate them if you try…

Life In These United States, Literary Endeavors

You Hate Me! You Really Hate Me!

I got a fresh piece of hate mail yesterday, something I haven’t received in quite a while. When you write for the web as much as I do, it’s like yelling in a vaccuum. It’s hard to gauge if your words have any impact at all. So it’s nice to know that someone read your work and was touched by it, even if the work touched them in such a way that they want you dead. 

The hate mail had nothing to do with Scratchbomb, but a piece I wrote at the now sadly defunct Freezerbox.com, a site I contributed to for several years. The emailer didn’t specify the source of his/her ire, but they were very clear about what they wanted me to do myself, or have done to me.

I’m not going to reproduce the hate mail here–not because it’s filthy, but because I’d rather not give the writer’s words any more fame than they deserve. The gist of the message was:

1) I am on drugs because I disagree with this person politically, and also because, unlike them, I peppered my work with proper spelling and fancy punctuation.
2) They hope America gets taken over by Muslim terorrists so I’ll get what I deserve. It’s funny–I never hear liberal commie types like myself wish that the US would succumb to foreign aggressors, but AMERICA: FUCK YEAH! types say this all the time. That would totally be worth it–the beacon of Western democracy should fall to teach me a valuable lesson.
3) I should go back where I came from. I don’t know where they thought I came from; Jihadist Russian Homo-ville, I guess.

I was mildly upset at first. I thought, Wait, I’m such a wonderful person! Who could possibly hate me? But hey, I’m not exactly innocent when it comes to writing really angry stuff online. Plus, in thinking these things, I’ve put more thought into the hate mail than the sender had.

In the old days, if you decided you hated someone, you’d have to type or write a letter, go down the post office, and spend money on a stamp before you could possibly express that hatred to them. Most people didn’t bother, because they knew some secretary would read this letter and throw it out. And because taking all this time out of their busy day interfered with their elaborate masturbation rituals.

So in volume, I’m sure there was far, far less hate mail in those days than there are angry emails/comments today. But the instataneous nature of the Intertubes is a good thing on this front. Because if someone reads a post that pisses them off, they can fire off a snotty email or comment, and that’s pretty much the end of it.

Read the comment sections of any site–political or not–and you will see some of the angriest, hate filled language ever written this side of the Aryan Nation. And yet, as far as I know, no blogger has ever been murdered a la Eric Bogosian in Talk Radio. 

Way back when, people were less inclined to publicly declare their hatred. But then all that animus built up over time until they started picking off people from clock towers. So I like to think of the Internet as a safety valve for the Crazy Steam that builds up in some people’s brains. They let it off, and then they’re close to normal for another few days.

Hey, I’ve been there. I know that if I don’t post here often enough, I start getting pains in my head! But then I vent my frustrations and the neighbor’s dog stops talking to me for a while!