I don’t know if a lot of people watch baseball anymore, but they should. Not because I love baseball, but because I think it’s part of cultural literacy. If you were to talk to my Dad at a dinner party, he would engage you in polite conversation, but you would only get the fire in his eyes that I know so well if you were to accidentally stumble upon the ‘86 New York Mets as a conversation topic. Do you know where you were when the ball went through Buckner’s legs to save the Mets from elimination in the run-up to the World Series? Well, my Dad does, and he wants to tell you about it.
Ken Jennings — you should know who that is, but if you don’t, that’s the whole point of this article — maintains a list of over 4,000 movies that he has seen and recommends. This is possibly excessive, but as the longest running jeopardy winner, he’s the one with a multimillion-dollar reward for being way better than you at Mellow Trivia. I should be able to randomly scream at a stranger carrying a box down Rugby, “WHAT’S IN THE BOX?” and no one should think I’m insane, because catch up on your David Fincher filmography, dammit.
Esoteric references aside, there’s a point here. For all its flaws, commercial culture is one of the last things holding us together. America isn’t and shouldn’t be homogenous, but a national cultural identity is important for civil society. I’m not going to go full nostalgic and say we need to go back to Lucy and the Cleaver family, but there should be some baseline of commonality so we can all say, “Hey, did you see the game last night?” instead of sitting at our respective, cliquey lunch tables and never speaking to each other. (For the record, I’m equally open to “Hey, did you read issue 37 of the new Spiderman?” I just happen to have less expertise in that area, and Batman’s way cooler anyways. Nerds.)
This is all part of a much larger conversation going on in this country involving politics, religion, political correctness and identity. Wesley Morris, who is a personal favorite of mine, recently wrote an article in the New York Times accusing us of collective navel gazing. The discussions that dominate the more socially-conscious comment sections on the internet have taken this question of what it means to exist in our young and intrepid society and twisted it into something else, something exclusionary .
I was recently at a panel where social activists — who have legitimate grievances — completely lost credibility because they accused a leading, academic voice on inequality of being unqualified to speak about the black middle class because he is white. The question of who can speak or write about what is going on in our world will create animosity on all sides, regardless of belief. A little civility would go a long way. Or, we could just make Calvin and Hobbes required reading in third grade, like I’ve been saying for years.
It would be ridiculous to claim that a greater emphasis on shared culture can bridge racial and social divides, but I do think it would go a long ways towards making these conversations we’re having about identity in America more cordial for all involved. It would create at least a whiff of shared understanding where more and more there is less and less. It’s a lot harder to think that the person on the other side of the aisle is a monster when you’re both rooting for the Mets to beat the Cubs and make it to the series.
Well, at least the Cardinals didn’t make it again; that’s something we can all be grateful for.
Drew’s column runs biweekly Wednesday. He can be reached at d.ricciardone@cavalierdaily.com.
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