THE RED SOX were playing the Angels in Anaheim last Sunday. I tuned in on the Internet with Boston one run down in the sixth, just moments before future Massachusetts governor David Ortiz drilled a three-run homer to right. A hollow silence usually descends over the ballpark at such a reversal, while the announcer mumbles, “Well, Joe, that Ortiz blast sure took the wind out of this Anaheim crowd’s sails.” But nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the crowd erupted in howling, clapping, stomping delirium. You could hear the beery drone of sung tributes. There were 40,000 people in the stands, and the audio evidence was that two-thirds of them were rooting for Boston.
How could this be? This was not a pennant race, when infiltration by visiting-team fans is common. Nor was the game being played in New York, through which a significant number of Bostonians can be expected to pass. No, this was Orange County, a distant place of pretty much moored people. One can only assume that the ballpark was filled with New England-born residents of Yorba Linda and Huntington Beach and Garden Grove. I imagine these Sox-supporting exiles as exactly like other Southern Californians–clinging to their native dialects and eating their native scrod equivalents–with the slight difference that no California politician will ever get elected by warning that Bostonians are swamping the school system.
In sports terms at least, Bostonians around the country constitute a diaspora more than an immigration. I, for one, am more likely to take up clog dancing than I am to begin rooting for the Orioles over the Red Sox. Wayne Gretzky versus Bobby Orr? I can only second a friend’s judgment that Gretzky is not fit to hold the plate on which the jockstrap of the Great One rests. Such judgments are matters not just of prejudice but of objective evidence, and they apply to more than sports. Anyone who thinks Krispy Kreme doughnuts hold a candle to Dunkin’ Donuts, for example, is a barbarian. We are, it must be said, a proud people.
If Bay Staters are turning into the unmeltable ethnics of the new millennium, it is only because we are replicating elsewhere the model of assimilation that has been practiced in Boston for the past century. This model of assimilation is called non-assimilation. I remember my high-school soccer coach, Mr. Cunha, who, after thirty years in the country, had mastered only two phrases: “Hello” and “Put you’ foot to it.” Jeesh! . . . a soccer coach who had last laid eyes on Portugal in 1946 and had yet to learn the verb kick! I also remember my first boss, Leo Tramonte, born in this country but who read the Italian papers all day and spent every vacation in Italy. Pronouncing his homeland Ih’ly, with a glottal stop instead of a T, was the only concession he would make to native habits. To tour the abandoned manors of the routed Massachusetts Brahmins and to see the trappings of abject Anglophilia–the English plantings, the Punch subscriptions, the Landseer stag prints–is to realize that nostalgia for origins was a vice even of those who repudiated it in others.
So until the mid-1970s, when a Bostonian asked, “What are you?” the proper answer was “Polish” or “French” or something similar. In no case was it to exceed four syllables. The reply “I’m an American!” would have been met with rolled eyes as the utterance of a wise-ass. To reply, “Well, let’s see, I’m a quarter . . .” meant you were probably from another part of the country. Intermarriage was something certain Irish and Italians did together; your parents could explain it to you when you turned 14.
This ethnic close-knitness exists no longer, but its ghost looms over the Democratic convention this week. For it was national Democrats who heedlessly wiped it out during the tragedy of busing in the 1970s. The decidedly unintegrated Irish and Italians of South Boston and Charlestown were chosen–by the liberal civil-rights heroes of the all-white suburbs–to bear the brunt of integrating Boston’s schools. When the locals objected to the scheme as highhanded, they were condemned as some undifferentiated rabble of American white racist yobs. This was not how the locals, who up to that point had been unanimously Democratic, viewed themselves. They expressed their disagreement by abandoning their party in such numbers that Ronald Reagan won Massachusetts twice.
Presumably many of these voters were among the crowd roaring for David Ortiz in Anaheim. But who knows? Who are the Massachusetts diaspora? Are they proselytizers or political refugees? Will they show up at your door in Michigan and Oregon, begging in their cute little pahk-the-cah accents that you vote for their countryman Kerry? Or will they pull the lever for Bush in Anaheim and Houston and Raleigh-Durham, grateful to have fled the old country’s superstitions and wound up in the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On their votes may hinge the election, which will take place just days after the Sox win the World Series.
–Christopher Caldwell
