Tuesday, February 27, 2007

reprise on the city of brotherly love

Some of you may have noticed that I had a post about Brett Myers, and that it was removed. You may have noticed that I changed my snackbar quote (the one at the top of the sidebar over there) instead. I stole that from TBF, and when he shared that with me (he posted it somewhere else), only THEN did I realize that Brett Myers was That Guy. I read my post and it sounded totally shallow - yes, tickets.com sucks - but it made me seem like a total lightweight. So I took it down.

In an email discussion with Bob Sikes yesterday (who I still offer much gratitude towards as one of the first folks to acknowledge Mets Grrl), I shared part of this thought process with him. And then today, he came back and suggested that I needed to offer my thought process to the rest of you. Combined with this some levity in the blogosphere at a MetsMerized headline entitled, “Brett Myers Can Beat His Wife, But Not The Mets,” and my discomfort as a female at 1) the headline and 2) the humor around it, I decided that he was right.

I only learned about Brett Myers last year when I was doing some research online, looking for other blogs by female baseball fans. I found a blog written by a Phillies fan (which I cannot find any more - it was on MLB blogs), an older woman who was distressed at the Phillies for a lot of reasons, but whose ire turned into moral outrage over what she perceived to be their non-handling of the incident in Boston between Brett Myers and his wife. None of which I knew about, because it happened when I was not yet clamoring to watch Sportscenter every night.

However, Google is your friend. I typed a few words into the search box, and bingo. Within 15 minutes I was sharing this woman’s outrage. I understand PR, I understand spin, I understand damage control. But there are some things that are inexcusible.

There are things that are funny, and there are things that are not funny no matter what. I can make off-color jokes, and laugh at things I shouldn’t laugh at, I’m not saying that I’m perfect. I’m not trying to start a First Amendment debate here - I’m not proposing that we legislate that you can’t make jokes about certain subjects. But on a personal level, there are things that aren’t funny to me: racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, and assholes who beat the crap out of their wives. I’m not going to laugh at wife beating jokes, and I should be able to say that I think that people who are making them and are laughing at them are wrong, and maybe they should think about it a little and perhaps make the choice to not do so.

Which is what I’m doing here.

There is no shortage of pejoratives one can direct at Brett Myers. I issue a challenge to the rest of the blogging community to avoid this particular direction and take our humor up a level for the rest of the season.