The Bronx Bomber Syndrome

Celebrating irrational hatred...

Image from cafepress

Some years ago during a phone call with an old friend I mentioned that I’d been raised as a Giants fan and so, of course, hated the LA Dodgers.

“Why,” she interrupted, “do you hate the Dodgers?”

Her question stopped me right in my tracks. It occurred to me for the first time that the real benefit of sports fandom was less about the opportunity to express support for someone or something I love, and more as a vehicle to express my irrational disdain for someone or something I hate without any corresponding need or demand to explain my disdain or hatred.

It simply went without saying that Giants fans hated Dodgers fans and vice versa. As a law of nature. Upon further reflection, however, it seemed to me more than a little curious that as a Giants fan I knew the ins and outs of the Dodgers lineup at least as well as I knew the ins and outs of the Giants lineup.

And of course everyone who wasn’t a Yankees fan hated the Yankees — the Bronx Bombers. Everyone knew Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and Whitey Ford. Beloved and renowned as they were individually, everyone who wasn’t a Yankees fan hated the Bronx Bombers nonetheless. Apparently, when all is said and done, it’s the irrational hatred, not the love, that truly motivates us.

I call this innate need to hate the other side the Bronx Bomber Syndrome, and it applies to every team sport and/or tribal pursuit. Progressives, for instance, hate and seem to know much more about straight white men than they love, know, or can recite about the various tribes, pronouns, and actual agendas of intersectional alternatives. Which is why conservatives find it much easier to hate progressives than to explain their own loyalty for any Republican candidate except Donald Trump.

Of course, the same seems to hold true of politics. I remember as a kid in 1960 how much my parents hated Goldwater — and how much they seemed to know about him as opposed to how little they felt compelled to know about JFK. The same was true with Nixon and Reagan: they hated them and knew much more about them than they loved or knew about Hubert Humphry, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, or Walter Mondale.

People who hate Trump seem to know much more about why they hate him than about why they love or admire Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton. In retrospect, it seems that the wholesale imposition of utterly irrational COVID mandates were much more about getting rid of Trump than they were about getting rid of COVID. Likewise with the summer riots of 2020, when the Democratic Party enlisted BLM and Antifa shock troops to burn down and loot poor black neighborhoods — ostensibly in the name of solidarity and anti-racism, but actually as a massive fundraiser to finance the political effort to rid the country of the real menace: Donald Trump.

Turns out our irrational hatreds are the ties that bind. They’re also the things that sell corporate media — per Matt Taibbi’s observations in Hate, Inc., a near-perfect indictment of cable and digital commercial profit models that manufacture and prioritize enmity to the exclusion of the truth and the common good.

It gets even better: Our irrational hatreds are fully extensible as well. Baked into just about every institutional P&L, our irrational hatreds now support and finance entire grievance industries — and eventually show up in labor market statistics.

Any remedial self-examination might better begin with an exploration of our irrational hatreds and tribal beliefs than with the whys and wherefores of our tribal loyalties — a much harder endeavor these days simply because our irrational hatreds far outnumber our loyalties, all of which exist less to offer support for the tribal members themselves and more as conduits to express their disdain and hatred for other tribes.

Like everything else in the 21st century, what begins as self-examination almost always devolves into an exercise of irrational hatred for something or someone else. Like everything else in the 21st century, what begins as self-examination almost always resolves in the accrual and exercise of unexamined power. Today, endlessly trained in the linguistic martial arts of fear and hate, we are finally and fully empowered to disempower everyone else.

On second thought, forget the self-examination part. It’s way too dangerous…