Peripatetic

I’ve been struggling with the issue of tolerance lately. Tolerance is an absolutely essential part of my personal moral code; I was raised to be tolerant and to value tolerance, and I consider it a necessary part of being a decent human being. But I have to admit that I am not very tolerant of…well, you know. The extreme right wing, the fundies, the wingnuts. (Let’s just refer to them as “those people,” to turn one of their nasty little code-word phrases back on them.) It’s a passive sort of intolerance, which is the only kind I’m capable of, really: I’m just not interested in a two-sided conversation with them, I don’t want to hear their opinions, and I wish they would all just go away and take a few US states with them.

Oh, on a one-on-one level, I’m as tolerant as I have to be, of course; with my fundie co-workers at my last job, for example, I just avoided all topics that might cause controversy, and as a result, we all got along fine and I knew them to be essentially decent people, just horribly misguided in some of their beliefs. But on a broader scale, I am not tolerant of those people, and I don’t feel as bad about it as I maybe should. After all, if tolerance is so important to me, shouldn’t I take a live-and-let-live attitude toward them instead of wanting to put them all on a boat that sails around the world for all eternity? And if I don’t take that attitude, then aren’t I guilty of the same sort of intolerance as they are, just with a smaller target zone?

Yet I can’t seem to make myself feel any more tolerant of them than I already don’t (to use one of my husband’s cleverly twisted locutions). So when I read this in Salon this morning, I felt both better and worse about the subject: better, because it’s hard to feel terribly guilty about loathing someone who can publicly express such an abhorrent sentiment, and worse, because the quote makes me feel even more intolerant (though I can honestly say that I stop short of being able to apply that same abhorrent sentiment to, y’know, those people).

I moved to Minnesota in October 1986, when the Twins had just ended a season full of promise. I was aware of this even though I hadn’t been a baseball fan for years, because I had just started watching the game again while I was still living in Austin; one of my roommates (on whom I had a sort-of crush, and on whom my cat Tim had a major crush) would watch Rangers games on nights when he was home, and Tim would follow him into the bedroom where the TV was, and I would eventually follow Tim and get drawn into the game as well as the company. It was a good time to move to Mpls. as a reborn baseball fan: the following year, the Twins overcame their mediocre road record to clinch the division, and then the pennant (in an exciting series with the tough-as-nails old guys from Detroit that we interrupted work to watch), and finally the World Series. I was a Twins fan, and a Minnesotan, for both of the team’s Series victories, and the 1991 Series was an amazing one from a baseball perspective…but from a great-story perspective, the ‘87 Series was even better. And though Kirby wasn’t my favorite Twin (that would be Kent Hrbek, who always took the game just seriously enough, never too seriously, and played with the same sense of joy that a little kid does), he was clearly the hero nonetheless, and the most reliable player on the team for years, and I loved him just like everyone else in Minnesota did. It’s hard to describe how wonderful it was to experience that ‘87 Series as a fan, and Kirby was the symbol of everything that was great about it. Even people who had never paid attention to sports before got caught up in it.

I loved his public persona, too. For a year or so, I did a radio show on the cable radio station (remember cable radio? No? That’s okay, neither does anyone else) in Mpls.’s Warehouse District with one of my co-workers, and we used to have lunch afterwards at the Loon Cafe, a favorite hangout of Kirby’s. We’d see him there more often than not, and though I never had the nerve (or the desire, really; I’m big on leaving celebrities alone) to approach him, lots of others did, and he was always gracious and accommodating and easygoing. The staff loved him too. He still lived in the city at that point (though not for long; he moved to the ‘burbs shortly thereafter), and there was even talk of him running for mayor, though nothing ever came of it and who knows if it was ever even a real possibility. But just the idea of it fit in with Kirby’s overall image: he was salt of the earth, a true class act. It was impossible not to love him. It still is, really.

All of which, of course, made it harder to accept the awful stories that came out after he was forced to stop playing baseball. Not just the sexual assault charges, of which he was acquitted, but the horrifying, and apparently accurate, accounts published in Sports Illustrated of his physical and sexual violence and abusiveness. For the longest time, I just refused to accept those stories, and when it finally became impossible to ignore them, I simply stopped thinking about the subject at all; my mind would sort of close up when Kirby’s name was mentioned. We don’t get to have many heroes in sports anymore, and seeing one who had so thoroughly seemed to be the genuine article was crushing.

So maybe now I should feel worse than I do about allowing myself to have rose-colored memories of Kirby. But he’s gone, and it feels like a little bit of my own history is gone with him, and I will mourn him in spite of everything. It’s not quite the same as “trust the art, not the artist,” because whereas it’s possible to divorce an artist’s abhorrent personal traits from the work they produced, with Kirby, part of what made him a great baseball player was the stuff beyond the stats: the enthusiasm that he brought to every game, his graciousness off the field (with fans and other players, at least), the way he mentored younger players, his fidelity to the Twins when he could have commanded more money elsewhere, the way he served as a spokesman and a role model for so long. All of those things gave extra impact to his brilliance at the plate and in the field. (There was no sight on earth quite like seeing that short-legged, pot-bellied little guy leap halfway to the sky to make a catch at the centerfield wall.) And if beneath all of that was a man of much poorer character, then the public character becomes tainted, inevitably. But then again, I didn’t experience Kirby the person; like thousands and thousands of other Minnesota fans, I experienced Kirby the Hall of Fame-bound baseball player. And that’s who I’m mourning tonight, with all my heart. So rest in peace, Kirby, and thanks.

Yeah, I know, maybe not ever. But this was a rare year in which I actually saw more than one of the movies nominated for Best Picture; I saw two, one excellent (”Good Night, and Good Luck”) and one abysmal (”Crash”). So of course, the abysmal one wins…and the really good one gets completely shut out of the awards. And Jon Stewart, though he started strong, wasn’t nearly as funny as he should have been. At least the Supporting Actor and Actress award winners were worthy; I didn’t see “Syriana,” though I will eventually, but George Clooney is always great in whatever he does, and Rachel Weisz was superb in the slight but effective “Constant Gardener.” (Ralph Fiennes was typically excellent also, though I guess it was too minor a movie for him to merit a Best Actor nomination.)

I don’t usually care much about award shows, though I almost always watch the major movie and TV and country music ones (I haven’t watched the Grammys in more than 25 years, and I find it surprising when people with similar musical tastes do watch them, because they have so little to do with most of what we listen to). As I said, it’s a rare year in which I’ve seen even one of the nominated films, because over the years I’ve become less and less of a moviegoer (or even DVD-watcher); somewhere along the line, I stopped being all that much of a movie fan. Besides, there’s usually other stuff on TV on Sunday nights, so that I miss most of the Oscar show. But this year I watched the whole thing, and I didn’t for one second believe that “Crash”—seriously one of the worst major motion pictures that I’ve ever seen—would win. I was sure it would be “Brokeback Mountain,” which cornered a majority of the other non-acting awards. I haven’t seen “Brokeback” and don’t have much desire to (mainly because it’s based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx, whom I consider a truly dreadful writer, the worst sort of earnest middlebrow shlock with literary pretentions), but I’d have been much happier if it had won rather than “Crash.”

What’s so awful about “Crash”? Oh, I dunno. Is it the hamfistedness of its “message”? Is it the ugliness of every single one of the characters? Is it the way that it purports to make us confront our fears and prejudices while actually sort of glorifying them? Um, yeah. That and a whole bunch more. (And I like Paul Haggis, who created one of my favorite TV shows ever, “E-Z Streets”…though in retrospect, that show was pretty heavy-handed too. But it had a sense of dark humor, something that is completely lacking from “Crash”).

It’s hard for me to describe how much I hated “Crash,” from the very first scene on, and why, so I’ll let Andrew O’Hehir do it for me. From Salon:

Look, it’s not like “Crash” is a war crime or something. A lot of the acting is quite good, and the honorable intentions of this achingly earnest sermon (”Racial Pain: Los Angeles, America, the World?”) are obvious. But it’s exactly the kind of portentous, piss-elegant middlebrow trash that many critics (and, unhappily, many viewers) see as Important Cinema. The only difficult part about identifying the preaching and speech-making in “Crash” is finding the places when it stops. No one in this movie ever talks like an identifiable human being, starting with the notorious early scene where two young African-American men who are about to carjack the L.A. district attorney get into a philosophical argument about the prevalence of white racism. (I had high hopes for that scene when it appeared they might have to shoot Sandra Bullock’s eterna-whiny rich-bitch character. After that, it was all downhill.)

I should have just skipped the Oscars and watched “The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (which I have out from Netflix at the moment) instead.