Take Me Out to the Lynch Mob

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Sports Saturday

I came across a fine article by someone using a William Carlos Williams baseball poem to better understand the nature of mobs (Ocean Beach Rag, April 13, 2012). Jim Miller argues that “The Crowd at the Ball Game” accurately captures the multifaceted nature of people when they are massed together.

Williams begins his poem by describing spectators as moving uniformly and being delighted by their “spirit of uselessness.” But what from one vantage point seems harmless appears “venomous” from another. The specter of the mob also haunts our nightmares, something that we are warned against. The mob is seen as something that the brave and the foolhardy defy. It must be saluted by gladiators, whose lives may soon depend on its whims.

Williams worries about the vulnerability of women and Jews since that crowd that is so beautiful can also turn ugly. By the third stanza, he is making references to the Inquisition and the Reign of Terror.

And then, just as suddenly, the poem switches back to the seeming harmlessness of a cheering and laughing group of people. The final words, however–“without thought”—suddenly take on new and dark associations. 

The Crowd at the Ball Game

By William Carlos Williams

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them —
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius —
all to no end save beauty
the eternal –

So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful
for this
to be warned against
saluted and defied —
It is alive, venomous
it smiles grimly
its words cut —
The flashy female with
her mother, gets it —
The Jew gets it straight –
it is deadly, terrifying —

It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution
It is beauty itself
that lives
day by day in them
idly —

This is
the power of their faces
It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently, seriously
without thought

Miller is impressed with Williams’ double vision:

Here Williams is admiring the expansive largeness of the crowd à la Walt Whitman. There is something compelling about the loss of individual self in the larger, collective self for which we yearn.

But there is also danger, that part of the crowd to be “warned against.” And it is that same loss of self that is saluted that Williams thinks we also need to defy. It is the venomous, grimly smiling crowd that leers at the flashy female and makes the Jew, the outsider, uncomfortable.

You may want to be embraced by the loving crowd but the mob might lynch you.

And then the poem returns to “the beauty that lives day by day in them” and the “power of their faces” cheering and laughing “without thought.” So is this terribly beautiful crowd out of “Song of Myself” or Triumph of the Will or both?

I appreciate how Miller contextualizes the poem:

When Williams wrote this poem in the twenties, baseball was rapidly moving away from its rural, mostly white, Anglo Saxon roots, and attracting a larger, urban, fan base—working class crowds full of immigrants and more women (although the Negro Leagues were still the only place where African Americans were welcome to play). At the same time the Klan was very active and Fascism was soon to be on the rise in Europe. Thus, the embrace of the living crowd is tempered with an awareness of the potential for the ugly lynch mob.

Nor is the danger only in the past. Miller makes a passing reference to the San Francisco Giants fan who was assaulted and permanently brain damaged by Los Angeles fans outside Dodger Stadium two seasons ago. A Giants fan himself, Miller begins his piece, “Having emerged from the season opening series against the hated Dodgers with no beer or blood stains on my jersey…”

But Miller is not automatically against crowds, even with their capacity for violence. Using the Williams poem to clarify his ideas, he says that sports fandom is not just an opiate for the masses, not just bread and circuses to keep their focus away from more important issues. People find something of substance when they lose themselves in a crowd:

To yearn for the crowd is to yearn for belonging in community—to dream of some kind of connectedness with your fellow humans. People look to sports for a sense of something larger because, as Robert Putnam noted in Bowling Alone, social capital has severely eroded throughout our society. So people look for some kind of connectedness.

In other words, it’s okay to root, root, root for the home team. Just don’t succumb to violent tribalism.

One other note: I love the reference to Milton’s Satan in the title of a book Miller has written: Better to Reign in Hell: Inside the Raiders Fan Empire. I haven’t read the book but if Miller finds similarities between Al Davis, the late self-absorbed owner of the Oakland Raiders, and Milton’s narcissistic anti-hero, he’ll get no argument from me.

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