I am twelve. I’m in a softball game at my summer camp. I’m playing outfield, because that’s where they put the weakest players, on the very sound premise that the opposing team will seldom hit the ball hard enough for it to get to the outfield where we crappy players can fumble it.
A batter on the opposing team hits the ball, the pitcher catches it off a bounce and throws it to the catcher – these guys are, after all, among the better players – and a kid on the opposing team, who was on third base, slides into home plate just as he is tagged by the catcher. The umpire, one of the teenage camp counsellors, calls it: “He’s out!” Immediately, every kid on the opposing team starts yelling, “He’s safe! He’s safe!” And an instant later, every kid on our team, except me, starts yelling, “He’s out! He’s out!”
It was a close call, and from my position I couldn’t see whether the runner hit the plate first or the catcher tagged him first. But my fellow outfielder, who couldn’t see it any more clearly than I, nevertheless joins loyally in the indignant chorus of “He’s out! He’s out!” He even throws a dirty look in my direction for not taking part as a team player should. But I’m too busy standing there open-mouthed at how blatant it is that nobody on either team gives a crap about what actually happened.
We kids look up to the counsellor who is umpiring, as a grownup. So I’m waiting for him to make a lesson out of this, by pointing out that none of us cares about the facts, and we’re all merely yelling as loudly as possible for our own teams.
But he doesn’t. To my further surprise, he seems to take it in stride that, with the possible exception of the runner, the catcher, and any other kids close enough to see the tag, we’re all just hollering. He seems not even to notice the weirdness of this. Why, he seems to think that this is how the world operates! Because all he says is, “He’s out! Batter up! Let’s go, guys!” And the game continues.
And the game continues. We see it with Poilievre and Trudeau. We see it with Trump and Biden. We see it with – okay, wait, I’m going to do some rewriting now. I started this blog before the outbreak of the Israel / Hamas war, and I don’t want to get into citing more specific wars, conflicts, and personal animosities among politicians, because, you know, where do you stop?
However, please notice that I do mention both sides. That’s because I don’t want to fall into that trap myself. I would really like to just blame the other guys, and write, “We see it with Poilievre, we see it with Trump – ” But that would be me hollering, “He’s out, he’s out!” So I’ll allow that even such fair dealers as Trudeau and Biden sometimes come down chauvinistically on their own sides, regardless of the facts.
You will agree, I hope, that Trump trumps them all. That’s what he has instead of a moral compass: whoever enriches or empowers him is one of the good guys, and whoever criticizes him or stands in his way is a bad guy. As we all know about him, facts do not matter a whit, and he’s too stupid to try to hide what he’s doing. So he does us the favour of showing us what this kind of self-interest looks like at its most naked.
But we all do it, to a greater or lesser degree. We’re a tribal species, and we root for our tribe. It’s one of the ways we learned to survive, prehistorically. I do it too. It bothers me to admit that Trudeau has been disappointing, or that Obama is at heart a capitalist, and more conservative than I would have liked.
It even irked me a little to learn that during his presidency, George W. Bush did at least one truly magnificent thing: he launched the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a governmental initiative to address the global epidemic, which, as of this year, has helped save over 25 million lives, mostly in Africa.
And how about you? Doesn’t it bug you a tiny bit that George W. Bush has helped save over 25 million lives? Wouldn’t you rather just keep shouting, “He’s out, he’s out”? I know I would.