(03-13-2021, 07:44 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(03-13-2021, 01:42 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Bumper stickers? Somehow I prefer "New York Yankees", "Disneyland", "Wall Drug" or "Meramec Caverns" to "Second-Amendment Solutions". It is far healthier that politics be lesser obsessions in mass consciousness than "My trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park". It is better that we have our focuses on sports rivalries between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals than between people who believe that liberals are no different from Commies and conservatism is a thin cover for fascism. Music? What does a Beethoven string quartet written two hundred years ago have to say about contemporary politics?
New York Yankees? What a horrible bumper sticker!
I am not and have never been a Yankees fan. The only time in which I cheered the New York Yankees was in the 2001 World Series... well that was on behalf of New York residents who had just experienced the obscene. I think we remember. Otherwise (I live in Michigan, and "my" Detroit Tigers seem to alternate between the cusp of greatness and the horrifically awful. They may be headed to a 90-loss season, which is a huge improvement over what they have been over the last fifteen years (or so it seems for many reasons -- it is five years in a time that for me has been mostly grim, dreary, and joyless). In recent years the Detroit Cocker Spaniels have been basically a Double-A team playing in the majors... something like the Washington Generals basketball team that is the foil team for the Harlem Globetrotters, except that it has no humorous elements. With the Detroit baseball team, any great season is a lifelong memory.
I can understand people in New York State, northern New Jersey, and western New England cheering them on... but in a place like Michigan, cheering the Yankees is like watching some Texas oilman winning at poker with a buy-the-pot strategy and delighting in that oilman's win.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.