Post-modernism has a tool called deconstructionism. Ironically, it is what attracted me to return and explore my Judaism. In Hebrew there are two terms that fit in this tradition; leefroke and lifarek, to unpack and to take apart (deconstruct). The basic idea is that a meaning has been constructed and we need to take it apart, to unpack the layers within the text to understand it. This is what I am struggling with after the Cubs disastrous collapse at the hands of the Los Angeles Dodgers over the last week. How can I derive meaning from this tragedy?
The text of the Cubs collapse is written by many hands and has a lot to be picked apart. Michel Foucault speaks about the oeuvre of an artist or author, and asks some pointed questions about the relationship between the artist and the work. In this Foucaultian reality, what are the Cubs. Who is the author of the text that had me fighting my tear ducts last night and confronting nightmares about the demise of my team.
I define “text” very broadly. The Cubs loss of the National League Division Series is a text. When I explain my understanding of text in an academic lecture, I bring a slide of Rene Magritte's painting, The Human Condition. In this painting, the literal presentation is a wall with a window in the center which is open. When we look out the window, we see a landscape, but when we look more closely, we see an easel in front of the window and the painting it supports is the landscape in front of us, which we see almost seamlessly except for the edge of the canvass.
The way I understand this painting is that there is reality out there, and then there is the reality that we see. Within the reality we see, metaphorically, there is a window and there is a landscape. And then there is the reality framed for us on the canvasses or in the words of others. This reality is the text. It was created and framed for us by human hands and minds, and it closely blends into the way we see the “real world,” if there even is a difference between the two.
So what is the text of the Chicago Cubs defeat yesterday? Let's start unpacking.
The Cubs are a baseball team. Their home is Wrigley Field, an old baseball stadium in the North Side of Chicago. I refer to this stadium as my second temple after the one I pray in and before the one where I work. When I was in Israel and heard a public comparison between the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem and the destruction of Ussishkin Stadium, where one of Tel-Aviv's two basketball teams played, I understood the comparison completely. I understood it even more as I watched the Yankees play their final game at “the house that Ruth built,” which is the term of endearment for their stadium which recently shut its doors.
Because baseball teams have homes, I can relate to them as a human being who greatly values the house I live in which is a home by virtue of the experiences my family has in it. Home is where the heart is, and a big piece of my heart resides at the corner of Clark and Addison.
Baseball teams are also collectives. There is a roster of twenty five men (I won't go into a feminist dialog here, even though one is begging to be had.) There is a patriarch; the manager, and a bunch of uncles, the various coaches who help with batting, pitching and running the bases. There are the family's doctors who make house calls out to the field when someone is hurt, and there are the fans. In Chicago, there are die hard fans. Rarely when I pray in synagogue am I moved as much as I am when I sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame with forty thousand of my fellow Cub fans from the seats at Wrigley.
Take Me Out to the Ballgame is one of many baseball rituals. Before a game, instead of a tallit, I put on one of my various Cubs shirts or hats. I come to the field with peanuts (no Crackerjacks) and bottled water. I try to come early, when I go with my kids, to catch batting practice. And all fans stand during the singing of the national anthem, and many take off their hats. The list of rituals could go on for pages.
Foucault's questions about the oeuvre include questions about who is the author. I understand him to be asking, “Is the young Hemingway the same person as the veteran writer of his later works?” One could ask, “Is the team that has played at Wrigley the same team that played there in 1945, the last time the Cubs made it to the World Series? Is it the same team as the one who won the Series in 1908. There is little tangibly the same about the 1908 Cubs and the 2008 Cubs, outside of the name, Those Cubs didn't play in Wrigley. The owners are not the same. The fans are not still living. Those Cubs had slightly different uniforms. I can't remember the names of those Cubs. I remember the names of so many Cubs since my first major year as a fan, 1969 (I was four at the time).
Foucault's question about the author is an important one. Am I the same fan I was when I was four? I remember watching the Cubs collapse in 2003 and thinking to myself how this was a good thing because my 3 year old son, at the time, would not benefit from the lessons of perseverance that I did if he gets a World Series victory before he reaches double digits. Now at forty three, I have learned perseverance. I am a different fan than I was at 4. I want my World Series! (Silent whine held inside.)
The whole idea of feeling the terrible pain I feel about the Cubs loss is really absurd and illustrates one of the major complexities about human life. Why do I feel connected to the Cubs? When they lost to the Dodgers, the only reflection on me, who I truly am, is in the value I invested in this team. The fact that they chokes does not indicate that I will choke under pressure. The fact that they have been swept in their last two post-season series has no reflection on me, yet I feel miserable.
In my lifetime, I have dedicated huge amounts of resources to baseball. I read a new baseball book every March. My last was excellent; The Physics of Baseball. I buy baseball cards for my son. I take my three kids on baseball trips all over the country including Miami, Atlanta, Washington, New York, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and more. Without a second thought, I can watch a baseball game for three hours and not feel the time pass. When I take my kids to the park, I feel like I am investing in their character.
But it's really all absurd. I am investing resources and emotions in something that doesn't reciprocate, except in the joy I get from watching. It does not care about me. It goes to profit big corporations. In this case, Sam Zell and the Tribune Corporation. And it is more about commercialism and capitalism than anything else. They use my love for the Cubs to their own gain. They sell me clothes and books and tickets and food. And they charge as much as I am willing to pay, if not more because there are thousands more like me, and they don't think about the private Jewish school payments I have to make or the synagogue fees or the rabbinic school tuition. It really is absurd.
And the real irony is that I will continue to read about baseball and travel to spring training and freeze on opening day and nothing will change. And I will continue to hold a bunch of stupid superstitions about why we lost and what I could have done to make them win.
I have an interesting story about this. I was once walking on the beach in Tel-Aviv on election day in 1996, during a contest between Bibi Netanyahu and Shimon Peres, when I saw a man being dragged from the water. As I got closer, I saw that the people attending to him did not know what to do. I had my daughter on my back and my wife at my side and decided to attend to my civic duty. I took the Gerry Carry off and handed it to my wife and then ran over to the victim who was now blue in the face. As a former life guard, I knew exactly what to do. I bent down and started to resuscitate the man. I blew the breathe of life into his whiskery, blue mouth and saved him.
Later that day, I thought to myself, “I did my part. Now God, do something for me. I want a Peres victory.” It was a crazy thought and I don't want to believe that there was any real faith behind it. But it fits in with the Butterfly in South America flapping it's wings (chaos) theory. Everything is interrelated and I wanted my actions to be causal, which I'm sure they were for the victim's family, but I wanted a Peres victory, which I didn't get, and yesterday I wanted a Cubs victory, which I may never get.
And now I must face my fears and climb into bed even though I'm afraid I will be on the same plane I dreamt about last night, with Billy Williams and Ernie Banks and Fergie Jenkens and other Cub legends, and we will fly over Shea Stadium and they will reveal their plan to take revenge on the Mets and I will argue uselessly against them just before Ron Santo comes into the cockpit and tells me that its alright, there's always baseball heaven and we can root from there, and so on, and so forth, into our second century of loserdom.
A lot of good deconstructing this loss has done me. Good night!
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