April 2009 Archives

"Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle." -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

My step daughter asked once what stopped people from hurting other people. The law, the police, the easy responses spurt out, but one who doesn't know better can see the flaw in the answer. They only do something, anything, after the violence is done. They are hovering swords, not protecting walls. Morality? If someone wants to hurt you, he's already reconciled his violence with whatever morality he holds. So what keeps them from doing violence? Nothing. Nothing but the threat of violence.

It's a cold realization when it firsts comes to us. We get used to it over the years, get used to the terrible and constant vulnerability of life without parents. We get used to it because rough men stand in the night ready to do violence on our behalf.

That idea of violence is uncomfortable with our civilized sensibilities of the modern world. We reject violence as a tool of state or individuals, we reject it as a determinant of morality. Might does not make right. And yet our armies are scattered across the globe. But you see we need those soldiers, because although we are righteous, the others are not.

The great lie at the heart of all states is that other people are not the same as us. It is the excuse for violence, the rationalization that makes it possible to wield a weapon in the first place: it's okay to kill them, they would do the same to us, they're different than us. It's the foundation of every atrocity small or large throughout history. The lie that the others are different. And once that lie is used to justify violence, it can't be relinquished. The ends become the means, and violence must be called down not just for the reason of the lie, but in defense of the lie.

"Anyone who clings to the historically untrue -- and thoroughly immoral -- doctrine that 'violence never solves anything' I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms." -Robert Heinlein

Chimpanzees form hunting bands that patrol their territory, viciously bludgeon to death trespassing chimps from other tribes. Wolf packs seize and defend swathes of land from each other, territory waxing and waning with the fortune of the pack. But the fighting is never pitched, always a sure thing. The attackers strike with either overwhelming force or not at all. The defenders retreat quickly if outmatched. It's violence, but it's not war, not as we understand it.

Besides humans, only ants fight wars. A million drones ripping each other apart limb for limb for naught but a few square feet of territory. I saw this once, a dead stump in the backyard that had long housed legions of little black ants that I'd watch as a child for hours on end. One day, a swarm of red ants invaded, hordes more ants than I'd ever seen. Giant black soldiers came out to defend, hulking tanks amongst the normal drones in their thousands. Tides flowed back and forth in red and black, the detritus of heads and limbs torn asunder by the wake of the waves of attacking bodies. Why would they go through such hell? Why would they die for it, for a few square feet?

It is because they do not sacrifice anything. They are all genetic neuters. Nothing dies with them. By defending their queen, they defend their own genes. Their deaths mean as little to their legacy as our discarded nail clippings mean to ours.

Other animals do not fight to the death because they carry their own genetic legacy. They cannot die for anything but their own children. Mating behavior is all ritual so that the ability to fight can be demonstrated without risk. When a scratch can kill from infection, unnecessary violence must be ritualized. Nature is full of infinite displays of faux violence, always stopping short of true harm.

But humans are unique. We fight wars, dying like ants by the millions, our genetic legacy withering in the pools of blood. By defending our nation, our religion, our way of life, we defend our ideologies, our memes. Our deaths mean little so long as our ideas live on. Memes make humanity ants instead of mammals, our individual attributes do not matter, we are irrelevant to the tribe.

So war is the human condition, the thing that separates us from animals. Violence, suffering, agony inflicted en masse. But it is also the antithesis of what we think civilization is founded on, it is the necessary evil that allows the greater good.

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." -Martin Luther King

Violence is always the worst that can be done. You can't do more, and in a way you can't do less. That is why war will never go away, because it is always the ultimate resort, the final line. There can't be another line, and you can't remove its capacity to be crossed except by changing fundamentally the way we think as human beings. The greatest capacity for human good, the willingness to die for a cause is the opposite side of the coin from the willingness to do violence. If people weren't willing to die for a cause, killing to prevent the cause would not be such a rational resort.

The horror of war cannot be contextualized. Violence doesn't become any less horrifying when it's done for a good cause. A knife slipped inch by agonizing inch into a man's heart is not less terrible to behold because it is for democracy on a battlefield instead of in the torture den of a serial killer. Horror knows no context.

The great crime of violence is not what it does to the victim though, it is what it does to the killer. A child soldier is forced into combat, loaded up with guns, drugs and alcohol, in more danger from his own side than from the nominal enemy. At what point is he culpable? When he burns, rapes and opens throats with a smile and a joke, is he guilty when he is eight? Twelve? Sixteen? Eighteen? We can't draw such an arbitrary line, because guilt cannot be contextualized either. He is both an innocent and a murderer. He doesn't cross from one to another at some point. All murderers are also innocents and all innocents are also murderers. We contain within us the seeds for both ultimate evil and ultimate good, but exist as both at the same time. We are evil and unredeemable even as we are good and innocent. It's the duality of man: love and hate, heroes and monsters, good and evil.

Morality isn't a scale, our goods don't balance our evils and produce some net of our quality of being. We are simultaneously everything evil and everything good that we have ever done. And here is the real rub: the same is true even if we were forced, even if we were compelled to either good or evil against our will. Our actions are who we are. A man who slits another man's throat is a killer whether he did so gleefully or with a gun to his head. This is not judgmental, an attempt to equate the moral culpability of the two, to establish stark black and white morality. Rather, this is an attempt to understand that rationality and morality must be considered separately for either to be understood. Murder committed under duress may be the only rational choice, but that does not make it the only moral choice.

Following orders has been rejected as a defense for atrocity. We declare that the soldiers should have refused their orders, even if it meant their own lives. We insist that individuals have responsibility to a higher law than their own survival. Morality divorced from immediate rationality. That's the teaching of every religion since Christ, and the first thing rationalized away by human institutions. The godhead tells us not to kill, and our leaders, secular or not, add the endless litany of exceptions that all derive from that fundamental lie that others are different.

History has a very dark sense of humor. Gandhi preached nonviolence while the panzers swept Europe clean and the ashes of the Jews floated into the clouds. He said that the Jews should have offered themselves willingly. That they should have bared their own throats. That the horror would have caused the Germans to revolt, would have ended the war. He was an optimist. He believed that however evil the world, men within it could be redeemed. Gandhi's philosophy only works if men are fundamentally good. If they are fundamentally corruptible though, it leads to the destruction of everything we have built. He failed to see that the Jews by and large did not resist, lambs to the slaughter, and yet the ovens still burned. The Germans did not revolt, did not refuse the orders. Only Allied guns by the millions stopped the horror. Rejecting the lie of the other is a suicide pact unless the other side can be convinced as well.

So are we helpless then, doomed to either endless violence or bowing to evil?

We don't behave like mammals, we behave like ants. It's the dark side of sentience. Our species replaced the preeminence of genes with the ascendancy of memes and exploded out of the savannah like a virus. A billion years of evolution surpassed by ten thousand years of sentience, our towers and art and beauty charged by the same force that arrays us by the millions to savage our brothers. The very thing that makes us great is the thing that makes us horrible. Life does not exist without violence, sentience does not exist without war.

That damnation is also what gives us hope, because we've made a jump before, we've changed everything that made us what we were, became something more, something both better and worse.

"At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church -- none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. ... War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses -- but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction -- and that is war." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It was a time of peace, it was a time of war. Everyone wanted heaven but dealt in hell's prizes. Soldiers fought in the deserts, civilians fought in the streets. The politicians bickered on television, the reporters begged for exclusives. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. In short, it was no different than any other stretch of time on this pallid people infested globe.

The recently departed American president could not complete a sentence, nor claim victory in the popular vote. The challengers sat in million dollar mansions and pondered stock prices more than party principles. In tenements and ranch houses, the masses flocked to one side or the other, based more on calculated moral stances than issues or even their own pocketbooks. Promised tax cuts mattered little next to the platform's position on unborn children. The intellectuals surrendured twenty years prior and formulated wordy theories explaining their opinions and the faults of their opposites. Fighter planes screeched over oil-rich provinces independent in name only, the national guard holding cities they could not pronounce for ideals they invented for their leaders.

Prisons overflowed with felons who bought a joint, while rapists walked free. In California, every news room and available camera focused on a yuppie who killed his wife, while a thousand computers stole an election without a peep. From sea to shining sea, billion dollar record companies sued nine year olds for downloading three minute songs they heard on the radio. Life savings disappeared into the coffers to fund the ad campaign for the next Britney Spears, except this time, it would be twins! The best-selling books were filed under self-help or were elaborate conspiracy theories wedged into current events. Class rooms in Kansas taught that the lord created the world in 7 days, even while the Hubble space telescope glimpsed the fourteen-billion year old remnants of the Big Bang.

Reporters caught up with Loretta Biggs outside her Topeka church and asked her how she explained the fossil record if the world was indeed created on October 23, 4004 BC. "Well, young man. Of course God buried all those bones to confuse you high-falutin, too-smart scientistologists. Halleleujah and Amen." They cut her rendition of the Lord's Prayer to launch into a toothpaste commercial. Dentiment. Great-tasting and plaque-killing.

Russia, the declared loser of the Cold War, hurried to tiptoe as close to utter collapse as was possible without actually holding a civil war. They spent a decade bombing a breakaway province or two and battering their own army's morale into dissolution. The apparatus of Soviet government continued on with a different head, for a time a new born democrat and then his throwback prodigy who disliked democracy enough to keep the regime from imploding another few years. Nuclear reactors popped like blown fuses, but mountains of soil and dollars - not rubles, no one would take them anymore - kept the lid on the mushroom clouds. The Russian mafia sold their most beautiful daughters to American internet users who could not get dates on their own, but did not know how to order call girls within their hemisphere. A thousand nuclear weapons probably got lost, though no one could recall since no one paid guards to keep track of them for the better part of a decade. Rollicking elections fostered a sense of democracy, even while a prophylactic factory tried to pay its workers in condoms when it ran out of money. The same workers rioted when a vodka tax raised the price by thirty cents per liter. Life expectancy among men dropped two decades in a little over five years once the less fair sex of Russians realized that their particular democracy made them neither richer or freer, nor did it make their wives Swedish or their country more than a third-world superpower has been. The Germans slaughtered the Jews and even they got the Marshall Plan.

America thought the better of itself since it still could afford to invade the occasional country or two, even if it did have a tragic cost in hundred-story office buildings. A million jobs telecommuted to India and the skilled middle class became mop-jockeys and drive-through monkeys. Too close-to-call elections led to the replacement of paper ballots with untracable electronic ones. Immense multi-nationals reported false profits for years upon years, lied to their stockholders and jumped ship right before the iceberg with golden parachutes. Kenneth Lay did not serve a day and kept his mansion in Boca Raton. Jimmy, the stoner down the hall with all the tatoos got three-to-five upstate for owning a bong. They euthanized his two dogs since he had no family to take them. Martha Stewart did three months hard time, although the commentators could never agree on whether it was funnier or sadder. Late night talk shows got the most mileage out of every event, almost as if their script writers had a hand in the events of the day. A fake news show on Comedy Central won Emmys for journalism. Telling the truth was a laugh and passing on the lies was a fact.

All these things passed as the twenty-first century began. All around this dance of events, the workers trudged to dieing factories and employees lined up at punchclocks for their menial work as janitors, sales associates, customer managers, and administrative assistants. The bureaucrats lilted easily on their thrones of senate seats and corporate board rooms. A wind lifted in the backcounty, whirling dusty through the ditches and small towns, twisting through back alleys and high rises, ever rising into the coming whirlwind.

The damned Yankees took everything I ever had in my life. My family, my friends... they were all killed in the war of Northern Aggression, slaughtered in the battles, torched by Sherman when he burned Atlanta and Georgia, or starved by the hard times during the occupation. I was a messenger for the Confederates, back in sixty-three when we were still fighting hard and invading the oppressor north. Trouble is, I wasn't even knocked out of the war by one of those Yankee bastards. I got shot in the leg by a Confederate turncoat the day before Gettysburg.

It was a bloody ugly shot, breaking bones and everything else that got in front of that goddamned traitor's bullet. I passed out in that mud, falling off my horse and breaking the leg even worse. My eyesight is terrible, so the only thing I really saw was that traitor's Confederate gray coat, and his dirty black hair flying in the wind, without the cap that most of us rebels wore. I wish that I'd had spectacles so I could have seen his face and loathed it for the rest of my life. Getting captured wasn't what really made me furious though.

I hadn't ever told anyone else in the world, because of the shame of it, but I had been carrying the plans that good General Lee had drawn up for the battle the next day. That traitor hadn't just damned me to a charity hospital in Pennsylvania, but had lost the war for ol' Dixie, cause next thing that happened, a Union patrol found me and gave the battle plans to General Meade. Lee got crushed because of that, even though he never said anything about it. Sir Robert E. was not one to shuffle blame to others.

The war just finished a couple days ago, but I'd known it was just a matter of time ever since our boys fled south and Sherman went through my beloved Atlanta. There just wasn't the same life to Dixie after that defeat and that idiot speech of Lincoln's. Lincoln's another bastard this world could do without.

So now I'm still laying in this charity hospital, next to some crazy old coot with bandages all over his face and eyes, and his arm wrapped up for good measure. The bloody Yanks found him next to me in the mud that day. He says he was shot down defending Dixie, but me and Doc Davy think he was just drunk and managed to shoot himself twice somehow. The old guy asks me constantly if I had heard of the condition of the soldier who had been carrying Lee's battle plans, but I just said no, because I didn't want to admit it had been me to him anymore than I wanted to tell anyone else. After two years learning how much I hated the north, Doc Davy (who had confided in me that he shared my sentiments about Lincoln and all the rest of the northern aggressors, being a good Virginian himself), said that I could leave in just a couple days because my leg was almost healed up for good, even though I would always have a limp.

It was funny, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I'd been in the army since I was fifteen, and before that I just did what my Pa told me for the most part, doing odds and ends around the town to pick up a few dollars. All I knew was that Doc Davy and I would be getting together to discuss a little revival of the spirit of Dixie. So I left the hospital after two years wearing the same old tattered uniform I'd been wearing when I was shot, minus the hat which had been lost somewhere along the way in the hospital.

Crazy as it sounds, it was the old guy in the bed next to me that gave me a clue what to do. Having been impressed by my stories about the army, he pressed a small hunk of metal with glowing lights into my hand. He said that if I just whispered to it, it would take me to any place or time. Then he told me that he hadn't been able to save Dixie with it, but maybe I still could. You must think I'm insane, but once I got outside the hospital I figured that I didn't have anything to lose, and told that piece of metal where I wanted to go. There was only one place in all of history I would want to be, and that was at Gettysburg again so I could shoot that son of a bitch who betrayed the south, shot me and lost the war for the Confederacy. God bless Dixie, but it worked just like that daffy old fool said! In a blink, after I said where I wanted to be, I was there without a sound or any kind of warning. I closed my eyes outside that hospital and opened them at Gettysburg. The scattered crack of rifles, the harsh smell of powder, the thunder of cannon! By God, I was back at the day before Gettysburg, before I was shot and Dixie fell!

I knew exactly where I was, about a half mile from where that traitor had shot me down. It was a bit hazy because I'd lost some of the memory of it from my injuries and the passage of time, but I could remember enough to make a difference. Picking up a rifle from the nearest dead man, I ran as fast as my limp would allow me.

Cresting a hill, I stood above a muddy little vale where the bastard had ambushed me. I saw a gray-uniformed soldier kneeling beside one of a few bodies sprawled in the mud. He picked up a hat and pulled it onto his head and then slung a pack over his shoulders before moving to a nearby horse. Rage pounded in my ears when I realized that this must be the traitor who had shot me, flowing black hair covered by a hat, leaving my body in the mud to steal my horse, my hat, and the plans that would win or lose the war for Dixie.

Without hesitation, I kneeled and shot at the traitor. I missed him though, because my eyes were so weak that they blurred when I tried to aim. My second shot struck him in the leg though, fittingly enough the same one he had shot me in. The worthless bastard crumpled to the ground with a scream. I limped down the hill to him, intending to take my pack back and deliver it to General Lee's cavalry commander, but a shot rang out behind me from where I had just fired at the traitor. As I had no time to lose, I grabbed as many papers as I could from the pack and dove into the bushes just as I heard another shot and felt horrible fire burst through my left arm. I knelt there, too tortured with pain to move and barely able to contain the howl building up inside of me.

No more shots rang out, but I figured whatever Yankee bastard had shot at me must have just run out of bullets and was watching if I would poke my head out. Checking the chamber of the repeater rifle, I realized that I only had three shots left, and I would have to make them count. My patience was rewarded when soon I saw between the branches of the bush that a figure was making his way into the vale towards me, holding his arm in obvious pain. I was gonna give him a little more of that when I got the chance.

He searched through the pile of papers within the pack for several minutes before I worked up the will to move my ravaged arm enough to get a clear shot. As he stood and picked up my pack that still lay in the mud, I shot him, although he was mostly obscured by the shadows of the trees around us. His head snapped back with a grotesque scream and I saw that he too was clothed in a faded Confederate uniform. The wound was horrible, and it seemed as if my shot had grazed off most of his face, and yet he lived somehow.

I shook my head in bewilderment at how many traitors were running around unbeknownst to anyone. As I stood to leave the bushes and retrieve my pack, I noticed that I was being enclosed by a half circle of Union troops throughout the vale. They hadn't yet seen me but were already in the clearing where the pack was sitting next to the two traitors. A few minutes earlier and I would have been safe, but now I was in grave danger, any movement would be fatal as the screen of troops moved closer. Without any other option I told the chunk of metal I wanted back to 1865, outside the charity hospital I had just left. At least now I could save part of the plans I had just grabbed from the Union.

Back at the hospital now, I rushed inside to talk to Doc Davy who was surprised to see me, especially with a bullet hole in my arm and a rifle in hand. I was eager to see if the Confederacy had been saved, but Doc Davy just looked at me as if I was crazy and asked if I had shot myself with the rifle I had inexplicably acquired in the last three minutes.

It took several minutes of arguing with Doc Davy before it dawned on me that the plans I had taken must not have been enough to avert the Union victory. The hatred was flowing through me again as I thought of the other traitor in Confederate uniform who had kept me from stealing back the rest of the papers and saving Dixie. If I could get back a few minutes earlier, I would be able to stop the other traitor as well and take the pack to Lee's cavalry commander.

Saying nothing else to Doc Davy, I marched outside and told the old man's piece of metal to take me back again to Gettysburg just before I had been shot in the arm by the other traitor. Once again I was standing upon the crest of the hill above the fatal vale, and below I saw the second traitor searching through my pack, which the first traitor had dropped. There had to have been some mistake, I expected for him to be right in front of me here on the crest, but the hunk of metal wasn't too smart I guess. Otherwise it would have brought me back right as the bastard was about to shoot me from here.

Without time to think, I shrugged aside the metal's foolishness and fired, hoping I might still have time to grab the rest of the plans from my pack. There were only two bullets left in my rifle and so I aimed as precisely as I could with my blurry vision and pulled the trigger. The shot flew wide and the second traitor leapt up, grabbing some papers from the pack as my second bullet struck him in the arm. Before I could rush down to tackle him, the bastard jumped into the bushes.

I contemplated my situation. My left arm was crippled and I was out of bullets. But I knew from the previous visit that a Yankee patrol was only minutes away. I waited warily for what seemed like a lifetime, waiting for the bastard to show himself in those bushes, but there was no sign of the cretin. I climbed down to my pack to gather the plans for delivery to the cavalry commander. Just as I stood up with Dixie's salvation in my hands, an incredible hammer slammed into my skull. Crying with a shriek of a mind overwhelmed, I realized I had been shot in the face and fell to the mud writhing in pain. There was movement from the bushes from which the shot came but that vanished as the sound of a closing Yankee patrol moved in. Darkness enveloped me and I faded away into the misery and nightmares, knowing that the Yanks were going to get the plans after all.

I woke a few days later in a Yankee charity hospital next to some soldier that had been found near me on the battle field. My face was bandaged over completely, but Doc Davy here, (of course he doesn't know that he knows me yet), says that in a year or two he'll take off the bandages to find out if I can still see. My arm still aches in a wickedly painful sling Doc Davy rigged up for it. The soldier next to me had something wrong with his leg that he never wanted to talk about and would always get defensive when I asked him if he had heard about the soldier caught by the Yanks with Lee's plans. Can't blame a man for wanting to know if he's alive.

I gave up after a while because I'm pretty sure that he thought me a little crazy. In my pocket I still kept the piece of metal with lights on it that the crazy fellow gave me. There wasn't much point in using it when I couldn't see anyway.

Two years have rolled by now and I just gave the piece of metal to the young guy in the bed next to me since he's leaving the ward now and seems awfully loyal to Dixie. I said what it could do for him, and told him to go help old Dixie with it since I hadn't been able to. Doc told me that no sooner had the young guy left then he walked back in with an arm ripped up from a bullet. We had a good laugh at that, but I really hope he was able to help Dixie anyway.

A couple days after the young guy left, Doc Davy cut off the bandages and let me leave. Since then me and him got together a couple of times and came up with a few ideas of how to bring back old Dixie again. Tomorrow night, I'm going to the theater to see the President.

I was raised an Oakland A's fan. I watched the Bash Brothers knock elbows, leaned forward every time Rickey walked, knowing he'd steal second on the first pitch and third on the second. The steel plates under the first base seats would thrum underfoot like bass out of a broken speaker when Eckersley strode in to close out the game, all mustache, mullet and fist pumping. I can still name the starting lineup and pitching staff twenty years later and once on a Colorado mountaintop I listened to the Minnesota broadcast of A's at Twins on AM radio crackling in and out somehow from a thousand miles across the Great Plains. I died a little at Gibson's walkoff, erupted at the sweep of the Giants, died again when the Reds swept us.

I still have a McGwire foul ball sitting upstairs, a blueish smudge where the bat hit. It's a funny thing, no one else could say why that ball is any different than a thousand others bought at a sporting goods store. But I know. That's what faith is.

In 1997 McGwire leaves and breaks the home run record in a Cardinals uniform the next season. Giambi left after 2001. Tejada after 2003. The Big Three gets broken up after 2004. MVPs, Cy Young contenders, fevered fan favorites. Oakland doesn't even make offers to most of them. They can't afford it, so they don't insult them with a low bid. Classy. Frustrating and futile, but classy. This isn't mismanagement. This isn't making a bad baseball decision. These decisions are being made strictly financially. And none of this would really be a problem if not for the simple fact that not everyone plays by these rules. In 2008, the Yankees topped out the league with a payroll of $209 million. The Marlins bottomed out the league at $22 million.

$209 million. $22 million.

Yeah, yeah. The Yankees didn't win the World Series that year. The Phillies won it all with half the salary of the Yankees. Smart small market teams still manage to be competitive. The Yankees have higher revenues, of course they should be able to spend more money. I won't say these arguments don't have some merit, but none of them can refute the simple premise of equal opportunity being the foundation of sport.

The A's were competitive for years when on paper they had no right to be. Billy Beane and moneyball kept them going to the playoffs year after year, even when their best players left in free agency every winter to go play for five times the best the A's could offer. I know life isn't fair, but sports are supposed to be. They're supposed to be decided by who outthinks, outplays, outhits, just sheer out-desires the other side. Once you accept money as a major component of the equation, you might as well just be watching the stock market and rooting for the company with deeper pockets, because that's what sports becomes once you let the profit motive become part of the game itself. Sports franchises are companies. If their profit margin affects what happens on the field, all you are doing is rooting for one company over another, not one team over another. It might be splitting hairs, it might just be a tantrum over the purity of the game, but I don't think so. I think that purity does matter.

Sports matter because they don't matter.

We pour all of our passion into these games, fork over cash into billion dollar machines just to wear our colors, schedule our lives around the first pitch, kickoff, tip off. We live and die by our team's record. We don't have to do any of this. Absolutely nothing in our lives of substance changes on the outcome of the game. That fact alone is what makes sports matter, because it makes our devotion unconditional. If the game mattered tangibly to us, our love for the game would not be pure any longer. This isn't just intellectual masturbation, it's the basis for every religion from earliest times: sacrifice. It's not sacrifice, it's not worship, if you have a share in the outcome. If the game is already half decided by accountants three months before the season starts, the sanctity is broken. It's the ethical equivalent of buying salvation instead of earning it.

And that's when I accepted that the system was broken and walked away.

Love the sinner, hate the sin. I still love baseball, I just despise the system. Every year in late march, two DVDs (the VHS versions long since worn out and replaced) get popped in for viewing: Field of Dreams and Major League. The smell of grass in spring still reminds me of dirt and cleats, taking grounders and flyballs in the endless afternoons of late childhood. I still pull out my old glove now and then, bury my face in the leather that holds the smell of a thousand catches.

It feels like being part of a lapsed sect of a dying religion, the faith still kept in secret ritual even as I renounce it in public. I haven't watched baseball in years, I refuse to even check the standings online, because knowing would mean caring, and caring would mean that the bastards who destroyed the game would win. If you're an alcoholic, you don't set foot in a bar, because you know that once you're in, there's no way that you won't order just one drink for old time's sake, and then another because what's one more? And then I'd be back where I started, watching the parade of players leaving for New York and Boston every winter.

If they fix it someday, I'll come back. I'll fiddle again with the AM radio, die a little at the losses, smile a little at the wins, bask in the bleachers in perfect afternoon sun. But until that day, I'll keep the faith in private, and remember the game as it once was, when I was young and it was pure.

Ah, April Fool's Day, the least understood of the major holidays. Commonly believed to have been invented by greeting card companies in the early twentieth century, the holiday actually dates back to prehistoric times. Ancient Mayan and Chaldean astronomers established incredibly precise calendars, including the solstices and equinoxes, but equally as important to their astronomic projections were the so-called temeredies. On these days, specifically April 1st and October 1st in our modern calendar, the ratio of daylight to darkness is completely random, varying wildly with no discernable pattern from year to year. During one memorable period at the height of the renaissance, the ratio was exactly 12 hours of darkness, 12 hours of daylight for sixteen consecutive years, but that anomaly never has been fully explained. The most extremely skewed ratio in recorded history occurred on April 1st, 1809, on which day there was an astonishing 37 hours of daylight and -13 hours of darkness.

The Fool's Guild, a secret society with roots in every major religion and culture since before the beginning of recorded history, adopted the two temeredies as its official days of remembrance in Atlantis approximately a century before the destruction of that island civilization. Ever since, the history of Fools has been intertwined with the histories of April 1st and October 1st.

What are Fools? They are insane, but joyously and purposely so. They are the most human of archetypes for they combine the rational with the irrational, and thus should not be confused with absurdists, idiots, or the religious. Fools chose the temeredies as their signature days, because they foresaw their role as agents of anarchy in societies sociopathically designed for structure.

Fools are one of the two main determinants of human civilization: ants are the only other animals to wage war, hyenas an entire species of Fools, but only human beings combine the two impulses. This leads on occasion to spectacular combinations of events such as La guerra del fútbol (The War of Soccer) in 1969. But it also led to the invention of American football, hockey, rugby, as well as all track and field events involving running around in a circle repeatedly. Baseball and cricket were not the responsibility of Fools, who while they may be insane are never boring. These two sports actually were invented by General Electric as an excuse for large installs of outdoor electric lights in the 1930s. References to baseball and cricket before the 1938 GE Sports Expo are frankly fictional and do not hold up to historical scrutiny. Babe Ruth is perhaps the most obvious hole in the artificial history of baseball, the persona named after a candy bar by drunk advertising interns, who were stunned to find that the joke had slipped by their bosses and into print within a few days.

Fools have been around longer than any other profession, but they do not technically count as the oldest profession because they were not paid until the invention of the other two. Only with the advent of politicans and prostitutes could Fools turn a profit and thus become an official profession. A common misconception is the assumption that artists must be one of the oldest professions, but since artists cannot profit without becoming prostitutes, art in and of itself cannot properly be described as a profession at all.

Curiously, very few Fools existed in the Americas prior to European colonization. Archaeological evidence suggests that most Fools in the native American population were massacred soon after the population migrated into modern North America over the Bering land bridge, which collapsed behind them. Surviving fragments of legends indicate that the entire migration had been based on a Fool's insistence that he knew a shortcut to the Indus. The etymology of the worst Aztec obscenities can be traced from the ancient phrase "dude, it's seriously just one more day away."

After the fall of Atlantis, the core of Fool power shifted north to Greenland. Fools had insisted on the existence of seven continents since time immemorial. They of course did not agree that mountains represented continental barriers and so counted Europe and Asia as a single continent. The seventh continent by their count was Greenland, which any accurate map clearly depicts as the fourth largest landmass.

Ancient tradition holds that Fools are given complete freedom of speech. It is one of the five ancient traditions universally held in all cultures, although only two survive in the modern age: Fools can say whatever they want, don't have sex with your relatives, be hospitable to houseguests (they're probably gods in disguise), don't record anything you don't want your wife or mother to see, and don't mess around with Jim. The tradition of Fool freedom of speech was only broken on one occasion prior to the Fool Genocide of 1893, when Vlad the Impaler personally impaled Illych de Loone after the Fool pointed out that the impaling fetish might simply be an overdeveloped case of compensation. Illych's last words are reported to be "I've had bigger", although this may be apocryphal.

The middle ages were of course the height of Fool hegemony, with the explosion of the importance of jesters in medieval courts. The growing power of jesters though was a blade that cut both ways, and led to a schism in the Fool's Guild that would never be healed, and eventually led to the grand tragedy of the fifteenth century: the great Fool civil war. Known (depending on the Fool's allegiance) as either the War of Joker Aggression or the Jester Revolution, the war was fought on every continent, in every city. After 76 years of bloody (and often ironic) fighting, the Traditionalists managed to annihilate the jesters with a spectacular stroke of strategy. The Traditionalists declared that forevermore April 1st would be Fool's Remembrance Day, and so just to be difficult, the Jesters naturally declared October 1st to be Jester's Remembrance Day. The trap thus sprung, the Traditionalists simply eliminated October 1st from the calendar, and thus no one, not even the Jesters themselves, remembered the Jesters or their rebellion. To this day, October 1st does not exist, contrary to overwhelming popular sentiment.

The civil war weakened Fool influence for many centuries and led to the greatest tragedy of Fool history, the 1893 Fool Genocide in Florin. The King of Florin, descended from a pair of the only surviving jesters and hell-bent on revenge, commissioned the construction of a wormhole generator, drawing from both the secret notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and the prophecies of Nostradamus. The device pulled Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher back in time so that their art could be used as an elaborate mechanism to trap Fools in space and time. Very few Fools escaped the entrapment, and most of those who did fled to safety with the mole men whose realm can only be reached via an Icelandic volcano.

The utter humorlessness of most of the twentieth century, in particular communism, fascism, sitcoms and observational humor, has been definitively proven to be caused by the lack of quality Fools and excess of overly serious morons in positions of power both in the political and entertainment worlds.

The last two officially recognized Fools in existence (made immortal by a pair of clever bets with the Devil and God, respectively) are kept locked in a room by the secret world government of Illuminati and Forest Rangers.  Loki the Red and Loki the Blue continuously play a game of their own devising with ever evolving rules, involving a chess set, seventeen dice, the mummified remains of the last midget emperor of New Zealand, and a seventy-five thousand year old circuit board unearthed in Antarctica. The ebb and flow of their game is analyzed by economists and generals to determine policy. An unexpected coughing fit by Loki the Blue in 1937 resulted in the Second World War.

The 21st century has seen the resurgence of the Fool in popular culture, although his numbers are still too low to allow for natural breeding to take over. Luckily in 2003, a Fool militia group replaced large quantities of sperm bank stock with their own semen, which should lead to a widespread reintroduction of Fools into the areas that need them the most: upper class, conservative households. Contrary to conservative ideology, Fools do not burst out through the mother's chest cavity, although they have been known to slip out of the uterus while their mother is sleeping in order to sneak a quick smoke and gamble with the troll/elf hybrids that live inside the walls of most modern suburban households. This does not seem to cause any problems, save when the Fool fetus in question brings back a friend to the womb for a little action.

You can be assured that the contents of this brief synopsis are quite historically accurate, as the author has verified the events with the time machine he built in his garage out of a refrigerator box, a sharpie, three hundred paperclips, and the pelts of three zombified squirrels.