Bleachers in the Sky

I recently flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma and back, and with the connecting flights that made four plane rides overall. Air travel has not improved much since last year. I was able to actually reserve a seat instead of waiting by the gate for a last minute seat assignment, so that’s a small victory.

But the airline caste system is alive and well. The division between first class and coach class is made more glaring by the efforts the airlines have made to squeeze every penny out of beleaguered coach passengers ($25 to check one bag = outrageous).

First class passengers get their own flight attendant, who serves them drinks as they relax comfortably in large seats, watching the rest of us slobs file in. I hate them. I want to spit in their smug faces, piss in their complimentary drinks and strangle them with their own neck pillows. But we can’t do that in this day and age, especially with homeland security being what it is (I stood behind a crippled old woman in Tulsa who was made to go into a magnetometer and put her hands above her head— serves her right for packing a metal hip at the airport—so even when security is running smoothly, it is still completely retarded).

The most galling example of this was on a plane where the door was situated between first class and coach. After we landed, a flight attendant blocking the aisle with her body so that we scum of the coach class could not start to leave the plane until a sufficient number of first class passengers got off the plane.

So I think airline passengers should borrow from the bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium. A great tradition at Yankee Stadium, which I’m told has carried over to the New (not the real) Yankee Stadium, is this: at the start of every game, the rowdy “Bleacher Creatures” in the right field bleachers chant “Box seats suck! Box seats suck!” towards the privileged box seats close to home plate.

It’s a great tradition, as the people sitting in the box seats tend to be mindless beneficiaries of corporate largesse or disinterested scions of privilege with no passion for or knowledge of the game. The great baseball owner Bill Veeck observed, “The knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.” And that’s as true today as when he uttered it.

At a certain point before each flight, after everyone is seated but before the flight crew begin the safety information, coach class should begin a chant of “First class sucks! First class sucks!” This could be a great tradition. It would create a greater camaraderie among the masses in the steerage of coach class. It is protected speech beyond the authority of the government and in large enough scope the airlines could not stop it or sanction passengers who participated. And the snobs in first class would benefit from some humbling as well. So please join me in this, unless I get lucky and get upgraded to first class.

Yankee Losses

The New York Yankees lost two legendary fixtures within the last few days.

Bob Sheppard had been with the Yankees well before Steinbrenner bought the team in 1973. While he never amassed the wealth of George Steinbrenner, his life shows that he was a man with better perspective and an intact moral compass.

He was a teacher first and foremost, and took joy in helping people improve their speech and elocution. After he retired, Yankees—most notably Derek Jeter—continued to use a recording of him to be announced. I’m privileged to have attended games at the real Yankee Stadium and listened to Bob Sheppard announce games.

It’s not right to speak ill of the dead, so don’t read the following aloud: As a lifelong Yankee fan, I hated George Steinbrenner. I’m far from alone. Lots of Yankee fans have hated George Steinbrenner with a passion for years. It’s true he took a losing franchise and made it a winning team again, it’s also true he treated people like dirt, the fans most of all.

He fired Billy Martin so many times I lost track (six). He insulted Joe Torre, one of the greatest managers to ever wear the pinstripes. His quest to wring even more money from the richest sports franchise in the country included battling a cable company’s resistance to charge more money for the YES network and leaving millions of New York fans unable to watch games on television for at least half a season.

Steinbrenner and his offspring tore down the House that Ruth Built and replaced it with an expensive “mallpark” that has hurt local businesses and cost cash-strapped New York City and New York State billions in tax breaks, cut-rate land sales and public infrastructure improvements. The Yankees, who technically rented the old, real Yankee Stadium from New York City, were tens of thousands of dollars behind on their rent. They paved over public parks and broke their promise to replace the park land before the new stadium was built.

Yankee fans and other New Yorkers will be shedding tears for Bob Sheppard; George Steinbrenner, not so much.

Explosions for America

Another July 4^th has passed, and so I have spent another weekend in the countryside with friends, celebrating the independence of my country by blowing up a small part of it.

Actually, my friends and I did not blow up any piece of America, though we set off some very pretty and mostly legal fireworks for a gathering of friends. It was a relatively mild affair, as there were children there to enjoy the show and our host puts too much work into maintaining his property to have his n’er-do-well friends damage it. No one got hurt and no one called the police.

Growing up in Yonkers, the neighborhood teenagers invested heavily in massive amounts of fireworks. I would come out of my building on the morning of July 5^th to find the gutters littered with spent firecrackers, red M-80 shells, and the exploded waste of an evening of gunpowder-fueled debauchery. Once, I noticed that one of the heavy steel garbage cans that served the apartments was face down in the street, blown apart and looking like a discarded banana peel. As a youngster, I yearned to be one of the adults lighting the firecrackers to the disapproval of my parents. Now I am and it’s awesome.

Sure, there are plenty of idiots who blow their arms off or set fire to themselves (full disclosure: a cinder from a sparkler I was holding burned a hole in my shirt this year; I was unharmed), but the overwhelming majority of firework celebrations go off without incident.

The night was aglow this past weekend with firework celebrations sanctioned and unsanctioned, legal and illegal. There aren’t enough police in the world to stop every American from setting off fireworks. And it was a glorious sign that the American spirit is alive and well.

Fireworks are Americans telling their government that we don’t need or want its approval in how we define and exercise our freedoms. It’s we the people taking the celebration and the meaning of America into our own hands. We’re showing our government and the world that we’re not afraid of fire, not afraid of things that go boom, and just not afraid.