IT’S MID-APRIL, and that means two topics are filling the op-ed sections across America’s newspapers:

(1) Calls for income tax “reform” (i.e., commentators wishing lower taxes for members of their particular favorite subcultures, and higher taxes for members of other subcultures); and

(2) Conservatives (plus a few highbrow-academic liberals) pontificating prosaically about baseball as The Most Perfect Thing On Earth.

I happen to like baseball. I just don’t like most of the people who write about it as some secular/sacred rite.

Herewith, some of the real resons folks such as George Will love the sport:

• It’s got lots of numbers and stats. Those academic types love such abstract-logic building blocks. So much more fun to keep track of numbers and stats than to follow a sport where raw athletic prowess makes more of the show.
• It can be long and boring, and hence reward its diehard adherents with the sanctimonious feeling of being able to appreciate something that puts ordinary people dozin’.
• It’s not based around a male sexual metaphor. Instead of relishing in something as crudely pagan and life-affirming as symbolic insemination moments (like football, soccer, hockey, et al.), it symbolizes an obsession Republicans can more easily identify with–
• It’s all about control vs. chaos. That PBS miniseries five years ago noted that baseball’s “the only game where the defense controls the ball.”
• The defensive star is at the literal center of the action. A soccer or hockey goalie merely stops offensive attacks. A baseball pitcher, by contrast, is the start of every play, the instigator of all action, the man who’s personally credited with winning or losing the game for the whole team.
• The game ends with the regaining of control (i.e., an out). The only exception is a bottom-of-the-last-inning play that scores a go-ahead run. The offensive side can only cause enough moments of chaos that cause enough damage before order is regained.
• It has a historic hierarchy. Major League Baseball as we know it was formed in 1903. The same 16 teams were in the same 11 Northeastern cities for 50 years. And in most of those years, the three New York teams regularly stood atop the standings; the old St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators regularly occupied the cellar. Everywhere else, baseball was “The Minors,” teams graded AAA to D and usually controlled by a major-league team’s farm system.
• A “Perfect Game” is one in which nothing happens. In bowling, the only other major sport to have the concept of a perfect game, such a game is one in which everything happens.

But you don’t have to dislike baseball just because certain tweedy butt-kissers like it. There’s plenty to enjoy about the game. If the Repubs can root for the defensive players who maintain order, you can root for the hitters and runners who, every so often, succeed in breaking through for glorious moments of triumphant chaos.

TOMORROW: James Twitchell, an academic author who (hearts) the culture of marketing.

ELSEWHERE:

• If you liked the They Might Be Giants cover of “Why Does the Sun Shine?”, here’s the original, along with the rest of the Science Songs LP series! (found by Memepool)…

…for the know-nothing videophobes in our audience (ignorance of your culture is NOT considered cool):

• Bill Maher asked Newark mayor Cory Booker why America’s economy needed to keep growing all the time; doesn’t everybody already have more than enough? Booker quietly reminded him that not everybody does. Another guest, bio-ethicist Peter Singer, chided Paul Allen for devoting too much of his charity money to projects in the affluent Northwest; Booker chimed in with the observation that plenty of folks and organizations in the NW could really use that money.
• Angie Mentink on Fox Sports Net Northwest, during a postgame discussion of the UW men’s hoops team and its historic Pac-10 regular-season title, on why the team and its fans should save some celebration energy ’til after the Pac-10 tournament: “There’s a difference between feeling ‘happy’ and feeling ‘satisfied.’ It’s something I’ve tried to teach my husband about.”
• A Today segment discussed frugal living with a tabletop tableau of “simple life” stuff—a Netflix envelope, a Scrabble board, a package of store-brand toilet paper, a drip coffee maker, etc. Excuse me, but you think we haven’t already familiarized ourselves with these?Unless the show’s producers are on the vanguard of a new media meme. Let’s call it “the upscale downsizing.” This schtick is to talk about economizing precisely for people who haven’t had to economize. It demographically separates the newly downscaled from those of us who’ve already been here a while.

Just saw the documentary Obscene, a profile of longtime Grove Press/Evergreen Review publisher Barney Rosset. Rosset specialized in hibrow and “daring” lit for the GI Bill generation of college kids and for their ’60s successors.

He also specialized in anti-censorship court battles. He successively succeeded in legalizing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and the film I Am Curious (Yellow).

Now in his 80s and still feisty, he’s full of colorful stories about his life and times.

But the most shocking image in the movie involves a right-wing smear campaign against Evergreen Review in 1972.

The magazine, in its last years, had become part lit journal and part “artistic” skin mag. One issue contained an essay by WA’s own Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The appearance of Douglas’s words within the same staples as erotic art photos was enough to give then-House Minority Leader Gerald Ford an excuse to call for Douglas’s impeachment.

We see a press junket event with Ford and two other Repubs. Jerry holds up the magazine, lingering on each page of the nudes, demanding that we all be outraged.

Two years later, Ford would become the beneficiary of another impeachment drive, and would propagate the self-image of a conciliatory Mr. Nice who just wanted to bring everybody together.

It’s good to learn this other side of Ford, as just another right-wing sleazemonger.

…for important occasions, no matter how miraculous modern-day media might be.

Thus, the growing list of places holding inauguration parties early Tuesday morning.

Gatherings will occur at places as big as the Paramount and as intimate as Cafe Racer on Roosevelt. Also: Spitfire in Belltown (hosted by the fab Kerri Harrop), the Baltic Room, Bill’s Off Broadway, 88 Keys (hosted by AM 1090), Sport downstairs from KOMO/KVI (hosted by MoveOn), Palace Kitchen Ballroom, Central Cinema, Seattle Center House, and the South Lake Union Discovery Center. Events at Town Hall and the Triple Door are sold out.

As usual, this annual list (the most reliable of its type published anywhere) reports the people, places, and things that will become hot or hot-hot during the following year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-hot now. If you think everything that’s big just keeps getting bigger, you probably bought WaMu stock in ’06.

…that snow in the city should be seen as an adventure rather than an ordeal, Eli Sanders chimes in with thoughts on how to embrace and extend isolated incidents of a “culture of street joy.”

So we’ve finally had it. The Big One. The Perfect Storm (Western Washington version). The utter catastrophe the TV stations breathlessly threatened/promised every fall and winter since at least 1991.

I won’t disparge the impact this has had on the homeless (who deserve a better lot in life year round).

And the big snow’s timing has left thousands unable to leave or enter the area for holiday reunions; not to mention leaving already-troubled retailers bereft of holiday shoppers.

And, no matter what week it occurs, a snow like this will be tough for car commuters and truck shippers. This time, it also hit bus and train travelers hard.

But damn if it isn’t the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

And the most joyous.

The first non-sticky flakes of Saturday the 13th were all the “white Christmas” miracle I’d come to expect here in the ol’ Puget Sound convergence zone. It was lite; it was white; it went away.

The local newscasts (which, like their counterparts on stations across the country, are built and budgeted exactly for these huge visual-crisis moments) promised/threatened an even huger blast the following Wednesday.

It didn’t happen.

Those of us who’d been through this in the past figured, “Ah, of course. They’ll always threaten but not deliver.”

Then, in the predawn hours of Thursday, the big snow came.

And came.

And came some more.

For four days.

Without getting into crude sexual puns, let me simply state how much I’ve loved it.

As I’ve written here in the past, snow in Seattle is a rare treat. It turns us all into children. Most of us can’t do our normal daily dreary work lives. All we can do is play, and coccoon, and enjoy the company of whoever’s closest to us, and reconnect with those in our most immediate vicinity.

And enjoy the blanket of pure precipitory wonder.

But by this point, even a Snow Miser like me feels a little melancholy while walking through the winter wonderland.

Can there be such a thing as too much beauty, too much joy?

When does it turn into, as the cliche goes, a “great and terrible beauty”?

Sooner for many other people than for me, that’s for sure.

But now, I’m starting to feel the ten-day itch.

At some point, any holiday from the ordinary must conclude.

Lovers who’ve ignored the world beyond one another’s arms must resume doing whatever they do to stay fed. Children must return to school. Trucks must be able to get stuff to and from us. The wheels of commerce must turn again.

But the visceral memories remain—of street sledding on flattened cardboard boxes, of mugs of cocoa or Irish coffee thawing frozen fingers, of strangers becoming instant allies inthe great adventure, of our normal wintery dim grey turned blinding white.

A final thought: It just so happened that this snowapalooza occurred around and on the solstice, the day after which everything becomes just a little brighter. This has been the last winter solstice of the Bush era; the economy’s in the undisputed dumps, the nation’s civic fabric is in tatters, but the hope of better times already beckons.

(Apologies to Lynda Barry): A coalition of local government and nonprofit groups has issued its fourth triannual Communities Count report, documenting how King County residents live and/or survive. The full report’s online; a highly condensed version was issued as a tabloid circular in Thursday’s local dailies.

A lot of it’s not pretty, as seen in these headlines from the report’s newsprint version:

“The gap between rich and poor continues to grow.”

“Almost half of all jobs available in King County do not pay a living wage.”

“The richest fifth earn nearly half of the county’s income.”

“Public transportation doesn’t work for working parents.”

“Too many lack health insurance.”

“Domestic violence continues to be a major problem.”

These research-backed statements are based on long-term trends that far predate the current crap in the “larger” economy. The material lives of non-zillionaires have sputtered, stuttered, and slowly sank WHILE the urban condo towers and the suburban McMansions sprouted, while the financial markets boomed, while countless purveyors of “luxury” products and services emerged, while upscale slick local magazines came into print hawking fabulous leisure lifestyles.

Teenagers have bodies. They have sexualities. They have occasional tendancies toward ill-advised behavior. Get used to it.

The Census Bureau confirms it. The economy’s sucked for years for most non-zillionaire Americans.

I write this item most years. This year, my first impulse was to simply call for anything but Palin (or Joe the Plumber). But there are other alternate suggestions: Mad Men‘s retro-swank dudes and dudettes. Keith and Rachel. Rachel and Pat. Darcy Burner’s “” T-shirt. Wall-E. A ruined stockbroker. The young Kirk and Spock. The geezer Indiana Jones. And kind reader Eric Scharf suggests, “You gotta give props to anyone industrious enough to fabricate a giant acorn costume.”

…but I’m still not panicking about the supposed verge of national economic collapse. However, one Dmitri Davydov sees parallels and differences between what happened to the ol’ USSR and what might happen here. One big diff, according to Davydov: Soviet citizens were used to making do without material plenty or the prospect of material plenty.

This year’s most famous (real) pregnant teen happens to live in a town that’s a homonym for the name of last year’s most famous (fictional) pregnant teen. The result, of course, is a Photoshopped movie poster advertising that quirky comedy hit, Juneau!

In recent months, the local news media have rediscovered crime in Belltown. This happens every year or two. By year’s end, they’ll surely cycle back to ranting about exurban meth labs and copper-wire thieves at construction sites.

The situation here will remain.

For decades, the City’s unofficially moved drug dealers and streetwalkers (whose industries cannot be eradicated) along to wherever they’d seem less visible—from Chinatown to lower Pike Street, then to upper Pike/Pine, then to Second and Bell.

As long as this was a sparsely populated commercial district, unsightly forms of commerce could occur in relative discretion.

But Belltown is now a high-rising abode for the affluent.

It’s also a nightlife zone, where the legal drug of alcohol is sold and consumed in quantity.

This brings a lot of people here. At night.

Some of them get noisy and rude, especially after closing time. Some of them also consume non-legal drugs. (Remember, illicut-drug buyers are often rowdier than illicut-drug sellers.)

So what can be done?

A consistently stronger police presence can help deal with the 2:15 a.m. fights, and could drive illicit-drug marketing further into the shadows. But the underlying situation would remain.

Our little half-square-mile will still have drinkers and druggers and street people and frat boys and little-black-dress girls and corporate executives and people who belong to two or more of these categories.

It’ll be a piece of work to get all these folks to coexist more peacefully.

And that would really be a news story.

I’ve been trying to develop a simple essay/open letter, perhaps in the form of a .pdf e-booklet, to help persuade remaining conservative voters toward the Progressive side in this and future elections.

My brother, the unemployed naturopath, would like a simple side-by-side book. Each two-page spread would juxtapose something George W. Bush said a few years ago with something he said more recently on the same topic.

I foresee two problems with this approach:

• Examples of overt double-headedness from Bush himself are relatively rare; he’s notorious for living in, and publicly promoting, a reality distortion field of facts-be-damned consistency.
• Bush’s name isn’t appearing on any more ballots. Despite the liberal blogosphere’s catch phrases about “Bush’s third term” and “John McSame,” this election’s not really a referendum on the Bush legacy. It’s about how we’ll deal with that legacy’s multiple tragic results.

So: What other approaches could one take?

I’m currently thinking of a values-based approach. I’d ask my intended readers what they truly believe in–perhaps faith, prosperity, health, safety, security, opportunity, truth, beauty, public ethics, an honest reward for honest work, or simply a good burger at a decent price.

Then I’d explain, item by item, how the right-wing coalition’s various components have afted against all of these values, and how they’ve instead propagated greed, fear, graft, corruption, recession, and needless bloodshed.

Then I’d show how each of these values is far better served by a progressive-populist movement (as respectfully differentiated both from conservative DLC Democrats and from exclusionist college-town “radicals”).

I won’t expect such a document to convert everyone. Not every follower of conservatism does so out of any true adherence to higher values, however defined. Some are just plain bigots, war lovers, and extreme nationalists. I call these folk “tribal conservatives.” They’ll stick with their chosen tribe to the end.

Then there are the folk who care only about money and other forms of raw power, and who’ve sided with the Right as their best bet for achieving those aims. They won’t likely switch either. If they do vote Dem this November, it would be a mere conversion of convenience.

But we have a chance with the people who still believe in something beyond themselves, at least a little.

I’m interested in any advice from you as to how to win them over.