Making Too Much Ado, About Very Little

THE LAST TIME I saw my MAGA friend was Labor Day, 2021. Trump was out of office, and my buddy, all six foot eight of him, was, as Davy Crockett might've said, "a mite wrathy". His face was twisted into a contorted grimace. I was the object of his anger,not entirely without justification. He immediately started in on me, talking politics, and I made excuses, and quickly left. Earlier that year he had precipitously wagered me a case of imported beer that before year's end, Trump would, by some stroke of magical Supreme Court fate, or perhaps violent insurrection, be back in office. I think he realized he would lose the bet, and he did, and I made him pay up. That made things even worse between us, as if by claiming my deserved prize I was somehow humiliating him, which I was. The seminal fact about my friend is that before the advent of the political candidate Trump, he had shown absolutely no interest in politics. I have known him for forty years. Trump politicized my friend, as I suspect he did to latent conservatives the nation over. Trump, the progenitor of a whole new legion of right wing fanatics, turning potential into actuality. Maybe that's his "greatest" legacy. I became a political animal on November 22, 1963, when I was eight and a half. Politics, and baseball. I still love both, but as I have matured, mellowed and evolved, I realize that its just another ball game. Baseball, and poltics, just another ball game. Don't sweat the small stuff, its all small stuff, as we like to say. I accepted a half ounce of skunk bud in place of the beer, and as my friend walked away, he got in one last shot, reminding me that since I own and live in a nice house, I am a capitalist. Maybe he thought he was both elucidtaing and insulting me. He was neither. I reminded him that he too is both capitalist and socialist, which most of us are, in widely, wildly varying proportions. Like most baseball fans, politcally charged folks take politics way on yonder much, much too seriously. Baseball, for obvious reasons. It is, after all, just a game, a passionate game, full of sound and fury, signifying...nothing. Only in recent years have I even begun to take Yankees losses with a grain of equannimity. Its taken more than sixty years, a long haul. I had another friend whom I enticed into becoming a baseball fan by taking him to see a major league game. He was hooked, immediately. Within a few days he had momorized the batting avarage of every player in the big leagues, and he never let up, praise be to Abner Doubleday. I believe it is a well known phenonanon that the more recent the convert, the later in life one finds the true fatih, i politics, religion, or baseball, the more fervantly devoted the fan or votary. This, I think, applies almost equally to baseball, religion, and politics. When we became hooked on something late in life, we becoem hooked hard, line and sinker. I'll go on being passionate about baseball, and politics, not so much about religion, which I disdain. My MAGA friend is most likely on top of the world long about now, and shall doubtless remain so for the next three and a half years, assuming Trump remains in office that long, which is always questionable. During that time it is not likely that I will see him. When Trump leaves the political stage, so will, I suspect, my friend. But I'll go right on rooting for the Yankees, because, the way it looks now, they've a far better chance of winning than any political candidate or party I have the misfortune to support.