Post-Revolutionary Sports Boredom

Former student radical, fugitive and convict Bernadine Dohrn said “I'm so unhappy with electoral politics that I switched to sports radio,” and has dropped NPR in favor of ESPN radio's “Mike & Mike in the Morning.”

Daily Caller

In June of 1850 my comrade Karl Marx was destitute, having been expelled from Belgium the year before.  He had pawned all of his wife's jewelry, but still they were unable to stave off the landlord, who evicted them and their four children, turning them out onto the street before the mobs of Chelsea.

Their beds were sold to pay the butcher, the milkman and baker, and they sought refuge in a squalid boardinghouse in Leicester Square, where Guido, their youngest and still a baby, died.

“Fantasy baseball season is almost upon us, comrade!”

Marx's perennial revolutionary optimism began to fade, so much so that I feared he would take his life.  I would check in on him in his Bohemian rooms from time to time; he rarely bathed, the scene was always one of chaos with all the children, and sometimes I would find him with his head on a pile of foolscap bearing the outline of the six volumes of Das Kapital. I must find some way to keep hope alive in his heart, so that he could finish his masterpiece!

“Karl?” I said softly.  “Can you hear me?”

“Engels?  Is that you?” he said, his voice a ghostly death rattle.

“Yes, Karl,” I said, trying to comfort him.

“What . . . hope is there (cough) that the bourgeois capitalist state will fall to the dictatorship of the proletariat in my lifetime?”

“Anything can happen,” I said soothingly. “For example, this year the Missouri Tigers may be a #1 seed in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament for the first time in history!”

………………………………………………

As I sat with my condemned compatriot Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the Charlestown State Prison, I began to feel that I had done him a grave wrong.  I, not he, had been present at the armed robbery in South Braintree—I alone should be fried like a calamari in the electric chair!

I looked over and saw him—weeping!  And why not?  He had been led astray by me—but somebody had to be in charge.  That's the problem with anarchists, they all think they're the boss of themselves.

Beneath our cell window someone began to play the violin—a doleful air by our countryman Arcangelo Corelli.  “Hey,” I yelled down to the man.  “Cut out the NPR crap!”

“Sorry,” the man said and started to walk away.

“Ask him,” Vanzetti said, barely lifting his head from the hard plank bench, “how the Red Sox are doin'.”

“Hey—goombah,” I screamed.

“Yes?”

“What place are the Red Sox in?”

“Last.”

“How about the Yankees?”

“They're in first place—by nineteen games!”

“Arrgh!” Vanzetti cried.  “Please—take me to the electric chair!”

………………………………………………….

It isn't easy being the #1 Jewish lesbian revolutionary bank robber in America—every Rebecca and Rachel who comes down the pike tries to knock you out of the top spot—but Susan Saxe has fought off every challenger since she knocked off the State Street Bank in Brighton in 1970.  Nobody's laid a glove on her.

Still, after five years on the run, I get the sense that she's had enough of the underground revolutionary life.  Changing locations every day, studiously avoiding class reunions at Brandeis, missing great sales at Bloomingdales.

I look into her room and she's staring out the window listlessly.  “You want me to turn on Channel 2?” I ask gently—I know she likes to watch our local public television station's entertaining pledge drives.

“Screw Channel 2,” she says with assonant assurance.

“Is . . . everything okay?” I ask hesitantly.

“Are you out of your freaking mind?” she snaps.

“What?” I ask, genuinely mystified.

“The Celtics lose the Eastern Conference finals to the goddamn Washington Bullets—in six games—and you ask if everything's okay?”