Dying of Thirst at the Ol’ Ball Game
When the days get long and the weather balmy, I like to have the baseball game playing in the background while I make dinner. It reminds me of my childhood days, when I would sit on the back porch and listen to a crackly AM radio, watching thunderstorms roll in over the tree line.
The other day, I was monitoring a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and Arizona Diamondbacks while I peeled some carrots. The broadcast had just returned from a commercial break and the camera [displayed] a montage of fans munching snacks, chatting, waving handmade signs and generally enjoying a leisurely afternoon. It was a pleasant scene. The broadcaster gave a breezy recap of the situation the new pitcher faced and went through a few data points on his last outing, which was a rough one.
Without fanfare, a graphic for an Arizona water charity appeared on the screen and the broadcaster said, without any change in tone: “Folks, for our friends without homes, Arizona’s scorching summer days can be fatal. Please consider a donation to XYZ water charity today to help make drinking water available to the homeless.” He then continued, once again without breaking stride, “…and Paul Goldschmidt steps in to face his former team. He’s one for two this afternoon with a bases clearing double in the second…” I looked up from my cutting board in a state of mild shock. Had he really just casually informed the viewers that people who, already grappling with the indignities of street life, regularly perished from heatstroke? And this somehow came up between breezy descriptions of a ball game, displayed over placid shots of kids scarfing down cotton candy and people waving foam fingers. Then, just like that, it was over and everything kept moving forward, like nothing of any more significance than the pitcher’s inflated ERA had come up.
I grappled for a way to describe what had just occurred, and settled on the term “absurd proximity”. The TV had flashed words and images into my consciousness, but the conjunction made no sense. The broadcaster’s tone had not altered in the slightest from that taken while relaying the pleasant trivialities of the game and the grim reality of death in the streets. Just as the temperature of an object eventually slips into equilibrium with its environment, so did the proximity of the frivolous and the sobering have the effect of robbing any significance from the fact that homeless people routinely succumbed to thirst during the Arizona summer. All the information became equally lukewarm. If I had not been listening closely, I might have missed it altogether.
As the game continued, I recalled a disturbing image from a family road trip from St. Louis to California. After a grueling first day of driving, we had decided to spend the second night in Las Vegas in order to have a short and leisurely final stretch. We rolled into Sin City in the late afternoon of a sweltering August day. I noticed the temperature displayed on a passing billboard: 113 degrees. I had always considered midwestern heat a harsher animal than that of the west due to the suffocating humidity that characterized summer in the heartland. Stepping out of our car onto the nearly-pulsating asphalt of the hotel parking lot, I reminded myself that, as god awful as humidity was, an oven was dry heat.
The parking lot was bordered by a cinder block retaining wall, beyond which lay a desiccated creek bed, dotted with the skeletal desert foliage. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed two people heave themselves over the wall and into the parking lot. It was a man and a woman, severely bedraggled and with a manic look in their eye, carrying a large, empty bottle of the type often seen atop an office water cooler. The scurried across the lot to the side of the building and hastily began unscrewing the garden hose from its faucet. Each took a few gulps directly from the faucet before inserting their bottle under the stream. They were clearly high or just beginning a comedown. They constantly twitched and fidgeted and the woman occasionally leapt to her feet to take a few steps in a circle before returning to the task at hand, as if she was walking something off. The fact that this scene was unfolding against the backdrop of a well-manicured hotel garden and below billboards advertising loose slots, loose women and divorce attorneys had the same disorienting effect as the baseball game. Once their receptacle was reasonably full, they darted back to the wall, dragged themselves over and vanished into the creek bed.
It occurred to me what a different experience it was to actually stand in the presence of a couple of our “friends without homes” who could have easily expired that afternoon. I didn’t shake the unsettling scene for quite a while. But, according to the baseball broadcast, it should be no trouble to simply move on to the next diversion. At least, that’s what the broadcaster’s delivery and the accompanying images taught me.
This wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. I remembered thinking, as a ten year old, that it was a bit odd to watch the news shift from horrifying images of the twin towers’ collapse to a sunny lunchtime scene which reminded me how superior Kraft Mac N’ Cheese was to all other brands. On a separate occasion, I read a breaking news story that the Russian ambassador to Turkey had been gunned down in a museum by an off-duty Turkish policeman. The ambassador had been giving a televised speech and there were several cameras present, so the entire sequence was filmed in HD. Later that day, scrolling through Facebook, I was shocked to see that a number of accounts had, within a couple hours of the murder, generated memes of the perpetrator brandishing his weapon over the dying diplomat. I don’t recall the slogans accompanying the pictures, but I remember feeling confident that they were not worthy of the image. One more flick of my thumb and I was presented with some smiling friends at a coffee shop. One more and a “Which City Should You Live in Based on Your Personality Type?” quiz greeted me.
Such absurd proximity is, I think, a symptom of our rejection of the sacred. Intent on democratizing every facet of life, we are loathe to declare any one aspect to be more serious, more important or above vulgar manipulation. In many ways, this was an advance. Silly or nonsensical beliefs and undeserved authority should not be sheltered by an impenetrable and unquestionable shield. But, by trashing the entire concept, for fear that we might inadvertently imply that some form of hierarchy exists, we lose our ability to discern what is important and what is trivial. Our minds distinguish the import of information by the manner in which it is presented and the context in which it appears. To bookend life and death affairs with trifling matters is to cause the whole row to equalize into vapidity, convincing us that what we are seeing or hearing is not real, that it is along the lines of a dream from which we may awaken whenever we wish. As I mentioned previously, we can simply turn the TV off. When we flip a switch, we feel instantly satisfied that the troubling images are no more. We can certainly turn away from an unpleasant scene in person, but, even with your eyes closed, you still know that it is out there in a way you do not in the case of television. As a consequence, we are unable to care because we do not know what to care about. It’s all elective entertainment.
Media theorist Neil Postman once remarked that “…we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.” He was criticizing television’s pretensions to be a vehicle of crucial cultural dialogue. I wonder how we might measure a culture that, instead, claims nothing as significant.
