“What’s going on here?”
Instapundit re-posted this, and for the life of me, I don’t know what the hell the conservative critic is alleging. I’ve watched or attended almost every Fenway Park opener in the last 40 years. Some things change, but not the crowd’s spirit or the nostalgia of being in a ballpark where so little has changed since 1912, when it had its first opening day (and The Titanic sank).
Yeah, I miss Curt Gowdy (that’s him narrating in the video), but the Red Sox have been blessed with terrific play-by-plat announcers over the years. The Green Monster hasn’t changed much: it still has the hand operated scoreboard. The team wore its classic gleaming white home uniforms as they always do on Opening Day.
What’s “radicalizing”? There are no blacks in the crowd or on the field, because it was 1950, the Red Sox were the last team to break the color line, and Boston was then and is still a largely segregated city. I saw the Red Sox opening game yesterday on TV: there still aren’t many black spectators. A black Broadway performer, born in the area, performed the National Anthem (and sang off-key): So what?
Is the “radicalizing” feature the fact that nobody wears suits and dresses to baseball games anymore? Seriously? Sure, the fashions at the 1950 game seem quaint, but “radicalizing?” I like to be comfortable at baseball games.
The only hint of politics at yesterday’s game came when Boston’s woke mayor Woo and the Bay State’s Governor, Maura Healey were booed by much of the crowd. (Good!).
What am I missing here? What was so upsetting about the brief clip of the Boston baseball opener 76 years ago?
Ethics Alarms 
What am I missing here? What was so upsetting about the brief clip of the Boston baseball opener 76 years ago?
Who knows what “Instapundit” meant (the name is vaguely familiar) but 1) America was then in the glorious days of tremendous, unprecedented success and prosperity after winning the WWll. Enthusiastic, etnically and culturally homogenous, proud, largely unified. They believed in their country and felt connected to it, their neighbors, their churches (mostly everyone had an affiliation). And the trusted the ruling class.
Advance through the decades up to today: a broken down nation, disunited, unable to think and reason, dominated by intense propaganda and infiltrated by intelligence operatives who guide and influence social programming. The children of the nation perverted, having no belief in higher metaphysical agency, psychologically unwell, dangerously ignorant, unaware of their traditions, separated from positive identity, indeed their country overrun by other, less related cultural groups, and everyone seething in just under the surface anger and intense personal frustration …
Porn addiction, incapacity to form RELATIONSHIPS, no longer a culture of families and happy, healthy children … and a dying, disunited future and one without much prosperity …
… buffoon government, a derelict narcissist president with a Julius Cesar complex, empowering imbeciles, and further selling out the nation as had been the trend for decades.
The nation teetering in bankruptcy yet going another insane round of ultra-expensive war-making in thrall to overtly psycho Radical Zionist Israelis …
Yippie! Let’s celebrate and go to the ball game!
None of which is evident from the 1950 clip, or the corresponding event yesterday. (Instapundit is an iconic sonersvative political blog from the Golden Age of blogging.
What are your thoughts on the content of what I am trying to communicate about “where things are now” and “how in the heck has all this cone about”?
It is really strange for me: I am compelled, impelled, to state what is obvious but that “no-one” wants to face!
It is all evident in that clip, but these messages are “signals” that have to read. I admit there is an interpretive, subjective side, but these messages mood among a widening class of Americans is all about asking the questions: What happened? How did this come about? Who did this? And very importantly: What, it exists, is the somution?
FYI this is rather much how I see myself, or in any case the shtick I have constructed:
Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein provided an interpretation of Cassandra as representing the human moral conscience whose main task is to issue warnings. Cassandra as moral conscience, “predicts ill to come and warns that punishment will follow and grief arise.” Cassandra’s need to point out moral infringements and subsequent social consequences is driven by what Klein calls “the destructive influences of the cruel super-ego,” which is represented in the Greek myth by the god Apollo, Cassandra’s overlord and persecutor. Klein’s use of the metaphor centers on the moral nature of certain predictions, which tends to evoke in others “a refusal to believe what at the same time they know to be true, and expresses the universal tendency toward denial, [with] denial being a potent defence against persecutory anxiety and guilt.”
It has positive and negative aspects! 🤩
Jack,
I think they mean radicalizing in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, indicating that a conservative watching the clip would feel right at home, while a liberal would be outraged at all the lack of DEI, and so on. So it is radicalizing from the liberal viewpoint, that believes any position right of Marx is radical.
I think this is in line with some of the memes like the one that says: “What radicalized you?” “I watched Die Hard and saw the gas prices in 1988…”
Outraged that the 1950s were the 1950s? Who gets outraged at 70-year-old clips? And conservatives long for no blacks at baseball games and spectators wearing ties rather than baseball caps, when the conservative President wears baseball caps constantly? I still don’t get it.
…a conservative watching the clip would feel right at home, while a liberal would be outraged at all the lack of DEI, and so on.
A few comments. The terms Conservative and Liberal are not explanatory enough anymore. I will try to explain.
When you say “liberal” you are really referring to something, a political, social, and ideological manifestation hard to classify. Because we do not know well enough what they are and what it is. They are definitely radical however.
The conservative you refer to is really a Liberal! in the true sense of the term. He snd she is willing to live in and abide by the rules of political and social pluralism. I.e. a Liberal!
What is developing is radical conservatism with teeth, with claimed power, or reclaimed power, and something more ideologically militant. It is no longer Liberalism as formerly defined, yet it struggles to have the resolution to handle weapons (I do not mean physical weapons).
So to refer to “Conservatives who are really Liberals whose conservatism amounts to “driving at the speed limit” has a certain punch to it.
It is toothless and powerless in the present dispensation. Really.
The thing I saw was a sports team standing with respect to the national anthem. I don’t know that this is an indictment of the Red Sox, as it is of sports in general.
While I often enjoy the compilation of articles in Instapundit, I find that sometimes their tagging is not very easy to follow and I get different impressions of the articles than they probably want. I much prefer the way you do things. You may declare Res Ipsa Loquitor, but you still devote some time to describing exactly what you would like us to focus on rather than letting us come to a variety of possibly erroneous conclusions with a vague tag.
The team still stands in respect for the National Anthem. So do all the fans. That’s the most unchanging aspect of the ceremony.
I have a list of things that makes baseball far better than basketball
*I hate the word re-definition that progressives like to use. They are uncomfortable about using racial terms, so they’ll use the word “Diverse” as a stand in for majority minority. I remember when an education administrator was reporting on her visit to a reservation school system. She kept talking about “how diverse” the school was. So I checked, around 300 students and one white kid, a teachers kid. Every other kid in the school was Native American. By definition, it was the least diverse school in the state.
Not outraged at the 1940s, but outraged at displaying the 1950s – even advocating for the 1950s.
Merely displaying the 1950s, without the necessary shibboleth condemnation either implies to them advocacy with which they farm their offense or threatens the value structure of those who take offense as a defensive mechanism to protect themselves from their own fears.