The Arbiters

Seems like a slow day in the arbiterrordome, so I thought I would post some local news, after I went and got me some lunch. But nothing in the paper left at the counter. At all. So, I could post some other local news: In NYC, home to at least one of our correspondants, a crane-thing (more of a cherry picker, I guess, but now New Yorkers have a statistically irrational fear of cranes to rival their similar fear of terrorism, so crane it is) keeled over, killing two window washers. Good local bus-plunge action for the NYT.

What I like is this: the initial story line called the death-dealing vehicle (it’s got wheels… upended in dramatic photo) a “contraption.” Then they amended it, captioning a front-page photo on the web, to the more dignified “machine.” Now it’s a contraption again, and back to the middle of the paper/site.

A) I would have liked to be in on the jargon-laced, coffee-fueled newsroom argument about those changes (I imagine much the same snappy dialogue, crusty craftsmanship, and princely idealism as in the goofy newsroom scenes in the Wire, season five).

B) Kudos to the MSM. (See, Ev, your foul habit of using au courant abbreviations has caught on with me. I’ve been… wait, we need to coin a word for “being reduced to a banal, derivative commentator on short-attention-span internet “events” and having one’s intellect slowly abraded by the belt-sander of the blogosphere… something with “blog” in it… it’s probably been done… a circumstance that should set the Professor spinning… maybe we could call our blog a “blough” ["ough" of course the most ambiguous English letter-clump, pronunciation-wise] and this would be “visiting the blough of despond.” The reference? Professor? Fatman?)  But anyway, Kudos: you don’t read enough about “contraptions” these days. I say we start a list of them.

But anyway anyway, let’s call the dead window washers “in local news #1.” Last week or so, I went to the coffee shop and, waitin’ on my sandwich, read this (in local news #0), from the Akron Beacon:

Quintessential journeyman Paul Byrd insists that the Indians’ bullpen catcher was recently the “player of the game” because, while playing his usual role as

…wait for it…

the-guy-who-stands-in-the-batters-box-lefthanded-but-batless-while-Byrd-warms-up

he insisted on staying in there even though Byrd plunked him multiple times.  In warmups.  Because it was that important that Byrd pitch inside to lefties. Guy whose job is to be plunked, standing batless (and, one presumes, wearing athletic shorts with broken elastic and an Indians road jersey bearing tobacco, blood, and ketchup stains), all for the fine-tuning of Paul Byrd.  Player of the game!  Is it merely that Paul Byrd, the Akron Beacon, you all, and I are idiots?  Or have we come a bridge and a half too far in our lionizing of untalented assistants?  Let’s pause for a minute (and throw half this stupid blough-so-far out the window) and pretend that good baseball players are worthy of praise, for their skill, their vaguely “heroic” sporting achievements, bla bla bla.  Even Paul Byrd, who must be one of the 300 or so best pitchers in the world, bla bla.  Let’s also concede that one should be nice to everyone, even–perhaps especially–to the underpaid, unremarkable busy-workers lurking the aisles and hallways of your local place-of-business.  Can’t we chuck just a little bit of the silly faux democratic cant and admit that, in a country of extreme wealth and nae much of a real middle class, it’s kind of insulting to praise the losers.  Fuck that; they’re not losers, and who cares if it’s insulting–it’s just plain stupid (by which I mean intellectually dishonest) to give lots of credit to people for doing easy things.  Nobody would want to talk about–even blough about–such garden variety egotist ponces like Arod (we will not even speak of square-headed, Texas-style solipsist sociopaths like Clemens) if they weren’t good at something hard.  So, fuck the bullpen catcher.  It’s cute that he has a job, and there’s a nice Monty Python vibe to the story.  But I’ve gone off track: my point is this–not that Byrd is an idiot, but that we’re too far gone if in baseball–BASEBALL, the last one-stop shop for the mythic, the archetypical, the pastoral, and (most of all) the romantic metaphor–we can’t distinguish the “heroes” from the peons.  Servants are people too.  And valuable in their own way, hence their jobs–but not members of the team.  Byrd, god help them, is on the team; not the bullpen catcher.  People.  But, also, servants.

Grumble