People are generally averse to being told they are stupid. This can cause problems in moments of conflict. In the United States, we have been living with conflict 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, ever since the late night of the election day in 2000, when Florida collapsed, Dan Rather lost to Fox, and the backroom cigar-munching team of dark-suited old school politicians who made up the inner sanctum circle of George W. Bush's key team launched Operation Freedom Bound, something they have been working over in their minds and between secret memos since the Nixon administration or beyond.

For the most part, they have succeeded. It used to be books to which I applied the metaphorical one-liner: bound, not gagged. Now, with a twist, we can see that Operation Freedom Bound has indeed made significant progress towards its final goal of both binding and gagging the freedoms we as Americans were brought up from birth and conditioned at every stage of our educations to love and cherish and worship like a god. But it's real old school back here in the good ol' US of A., and there is no value in worshipping vague and judicial ideas of freedom and personal liberty when we must wage war against vague ideas like terror, and when there is the hardline religion of the One True God Who Is Our Lord And Savior.

For the time being, we're still allowed our favorite national pastime, and thank God, because football is falling apart at the seams and nobody loves hockey again anymore. Hitler tried to hijack the 1936 Olympics, and everybody's favorite gang of neo-cons, as has been well documented, is eminently envious of that Fascist age in Europe, is hijacking our 2006 World Series. They've got Jeff Suppan doing campaign ads opposing stem-cell research. They cap it off with the favorite American Madison Avenue bait and switch, complete with rousing folk music. It wasn't enough that they repeated the theft of their forefathers - of the peoples'  Woodie Guthrie. They took it further. They stole Mellencamp, who was booed in 2004 when he promoted John Edwards at a concert in his home state of Indiana. They stole the hippies, they stole Woodstock. They stole Martin Luther King for crying out loud. And Katrina. And 9/11. And Vietnam. And that's not even the worst of it.

The worst of it is the Spanish-language Chevy commercials, luring immigrants to embrace America and inspiring red state truck-driving flag-wavin' baseball fans to grow their respect for immigrants just enough to give the issue a political solution which allows big business to keep their labor force as well as their profits. Those ba****ds. Everything is compromised.

And it's not helping that Dennis Hopper is advertising a financial organization.

The little man in my head is preventing me from mentioning Corey Lidle's act of terrorism and Erik Walker's instant strange disappearance. Thank the Lord for the little men in our heads.

The smell from outside varies every couple of hours. It alternates between freshly-spread cow manure coming from a five-mile radius of lively farmfields, and hot new M&Ms coming from the factory across town. And of course sometimes one of the dogs takes a s**t on the carpet. When our three-year-old smells something funny or interesting, he says, "Whats that sell?" and his little nostrils sniff like a puppy's. He likes to watch baseball, and has even gotten his older brother interested as well. It's him, the older one, who asks the questions about balls and strikes and fouls and walks and pop-ups, and I'm laying there with my two sons teaching them baseball during a throwback World Series and I'm out of my mind with masculinity and pride. I don't want my children growing up watching propaganda baseball games. That is simply unacceptable.

It's not very late tonight but I'm very tired. I watched the first three games of the series through the antenna like in the good old days. Still in the process of moving, and I didn't make much progress this evening as far as putting things away or organizing at all. But now we have the satellite back.

And isn't it wonderful that baseball is getting back to what it used to be? We're down off the steroid horses and, yes, the Mets are out with their subtle genius but still, all things considered, the Detroit Tigers against the St. Louis Cardinals is just about as old school as you can get. And they're living up to it. We've had enough of drug pushers and vein poppers in the other major sports (each of them). It's about time we were reminded that the only way to cheat in this country's national pastime is with dirt on your fingers and friendly rivalries between managers.

It wasn't my Jose Reyes, but it was the Cardinals' Reyes who sealed the first game out of reach from Detroit, and then Kenny Rogers gave a throwback performance more important than Schilling's two years ago.

The coaches' friendship is perhaps the best thing to come out of Rogers's hand that night. Frank Robinson, or Mr. Anal Retentive-Manager, as we like to call him back home, complained that there was this new and growing fad between certain managers and players which put an unnatural kind of favoritism between some and not others in certain situations. Saying that it would have been his job as a manager to go out and fight the call, force the issue. It's for the fans and the players, and managers have no place interfering in that. You know what that is, dear reader? It's boring as hell, that's what it is. And it's not new, either, Frank. It goes way back, to when you were a kid, obviously not paying attention.

And all of this is being compromised by our elected leaders. Maybe this is what we need, to have our national pastime threatened. But will anyone even notice?

On these streets surrounded by the smell of always either chocolate or s***, you need to pay attention. Sometimes the sky is falling, and I'm sorry to report that even if it were, nobody around here would do a goddammed thing about it. Good night and good luck, suckers.