Monday,
November 12, 2001
This Week's Column:
The
More They Stay The Same
A trip to the ballpark strikes a strikingly familiar chord.
It's an experience that comes back again and again. And again. And again.
And again. And...
The baseball season has at last come to its end. It reached a satisfactory finish; though I wish the local nine had gone a little further in the playoffs, I will take the defeat of the New York Yankees as adequate compensation.
Normally, once the season is gone, a fan like myself is left with little more than memories of exciting games and an ephemeral taste of nachos. But this year, along with the memory of days and nights of pleasure, I will take from the baseball season a kernel of insight, a lesson that was learned one afternoon at the ballpark.
It's an old saying in baseball, that every time you go to the ballpark you will see something you've never seen before. That may be true, but there is another side to that coin. These days, if you are a regular visitor to the ballpark, you will certainly see and hear tons of stuff that you have seen before: the same songs played over the sound system (blared out at hideously loud levels, I might add); the same announcements brayed at the crowd; the same promotions and sales pitches dangled before the fans' eyes; the same video hoohah shown on the giant television screens. Even during the game you are subjected to a relentless drumbeat of sameness. Each player for the home team will take his at bat accompanied by his own personal "theme music," snippets of songs that get played literally hundreds of times over the course of the season.
It's a curious phenomenon, this rote standardization of life at the stadium. While you can argue that everything about the ballpark experience is new to those who are attending for the first time, that doesn't make much sense for baseball teams from a business standpoint. As anyone with a lick of sense knows, the best and most lucrative customers are repeat customers. This holds especially true for baseball teams; the strength of a team's attendance figures have traditionally relied upon bringing people out to the park again and again. Presumably, the last thing a team should want to do is bore the pants off their patrons. Ticket buyers who wind up saying, "This is all just the same shit we saw the last time we were here," will not be inclined to come back for more.
The "broken record" syndrome looks even weirder with regards to the "theme music" angle. Every time one of those players strides to home plate, he hears exactly the same noise. Think about it: wouldn't you find it a little tedious if, during the course of your workday at the office, someone played the same snippet of music every time you used the copy machine? It would wear on your mind a bit, around the fortieth or fiftieth time it happened, wouldn't it? The baseball season is six months long, and it is known to be a notorious grind. Teams aren't exactly doing their players a favor by making it any more tedious. Plus, baseball players are notoriously superstitious. A guy walking to the plate while in the throes of a deep slump isn't likely to want to hear the same song he heard last time up, when he grounded into a double play. You have to wonder why they put up with it.
Indeed, you have to wonder why anyone puts up with it--players, fans, concession workers, everyone. Maybe that's simply what we have come to expect from the ballpark. Maybe folks never even consider the matter. Or maybe there is a broader significance to the sameness. Perhaps this is a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon.
Let's face it: for most people in our society, especially those living a "nine-to-five" life, one day pretty much blends into another. Monotony is no stranger to the modern world. The daily routine rules all, whether we like it or not.
And even beyond the timesheet world of the office, uniformity rules our lives. Almost everyone shops in the same stores, in relentlessly nondescript malls; even the names of the malls sound the same. (There must be at least twenty-five "Gateway" Squares or Plazas in the Bay Area alone.) Chain restaurants serve the same meals with the same flavors (or lack thereof) to millions. You have to go far beyond the suburban googolplex to find anything beyond the same five movies; "art house" fare need not apply. All across this land and beyond, a culture of monotony dominates the scene.
All of this may not be entirely bad. Certainly, there is comfort in the familiar. The success of those businesses which can repeatedly give the consumer a consistent product speaks volumes about the common desire for the comfortably well-known commodity. It is tough to fault those who wish to take the safe and accustomed road.
But my mind is drawn back to that afternoon at the ballpark. And not just the ballpark as I knew it this past season; no, I remember how it used to be, the experience of going to the game back in younger days. I have been going to baseball games on a regular basis for over twenty years now, and I can see how much the experience has changed over the past two decades. And I know that the difference is even greater between today's day at the ballpark and that of thirty years ago, or forty years ago, or sixty years ago. The experience of attending a baseball game has changed. In some ways, it has dramatically changed.
And therein lies the critical question: is this pervasive culture of monotony substantially different from the previous experience of human life? Is our "assembly line" life something new, or is monotony itself simply more of the same thing?
Certainly, the pace of life has changed from previous eras of human history. But surely life held little day in, day out variety for many who lived in previous generations. From ancient times to the cusp of the modern world, the majority of people lived the agricultural life, and life as a farmhand held little variation in the daily routine: morning chores, afternoon chores, evening chores, then go to bed and do it all over again the next day. For many, the change in the seasons and the occasional holiday must have served as the only noticeable signs that the days were passing at all. Was such an existence substantially different from the five day work week (apart from the advent of the weekend off) that so many of know so well?
It is an important question. One of the most potent charges leveled against the modern world holds that it tends toward dehumanization and deindividualization. Do those problems go hand in hand with the triumph of standardization and sameness? Is there a form of degeneration inherent in the culture of monotony? Or are our lives fundamentally the same as they have ever been: just as monotonous, just as standardized, with only superficial differences obscuring the unbroken threads?
We need to be able to answer these questions. That is the reason why we must study history--especially history that is less concerned with dates and battles and more concerned with the lives of those who lived in the past--as well as the literature of the past. We need to be able to compare the present with the past, to see if we are making progress, standing still, or falling into a deeper well.
Upon such knowledge may the future of humanity depend. The philosopher Santayana left us with one famous, frequently cited statement: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." But if this is so, there may be a corollary, one that bodes ill for a society sunk deeply into its own repetitive loops: those who perpetually repeat the present can not have a future.