My recent resolution to write meaningful commentary here at Yule Tide twenty times per month has put me at on the lookout for material, and this surprise would seem to qualify:
On Saturday, April 1st, 2023, two unrelated soccer games aired simultaneously, live, on U.S. “broadcast” TV. One was on ABC, “German Bundesliga”; the other was on CBS, “NWSL soccer.” The latter league name I didn’t immediately recognize. It is the U.S. women’s soccer league.
This was a real surprise, especially given that the USA’s own top-tier (men’s) soccer league, the MLS, is completely absent from U.S. television as of 2023 (as I mentioned in “Observations at D.C. United soccer opening day 2023“)…
The sensational World Cup of 2022 put me in a curious mood about U.S. Soccer. I found myself, for the first time ever, on the scene of the “opening day” of a pro soccer team. Saturday, February 25th, 2023.
This day I was alone and just “stopping by.” Maybe it was a sociological investigation. Maybe it was a scouting trip. I took no notes at the time, but I believe I can here adequately re-create my observations from the time as I write, a few weeks later.
(Originally written in August 2021 with minimal material; recovered from the “Drafts” folder after the site move; and filled in, March 2023.)
I enjoyed watching the Olympics in summer 2021.
However, a “pall”was cast over the whole year of 2021 and all that happened, or tried to happen, or might, or wished to have happened, under that “pall.” That includes the Olympics. The pall was the extension of the disruptions and panic over a flu-virus. The long-disruption continued to disrupt my own life-plans and goal and aspirations in 2021. Seeing the Olympics disrupted was a symbol of that.
I really resented this phenomenon, a triumphant social-movement with political backing, practically amounting to a coup d’etat (or as I heard someone propose it: a “flu d’etat”). I thought a lot about why/how it happened and continue to do so (in 2023). What social, cultural, political, or technological factors caused this thing? Many ideas have been aired on the matter, but I don’t think we have at all come to terms with them. I don’t think our world of circa-2000 or circa-2010 could have pulled this off, but the world of 2020 did.
Japan, the host of the Olympics of 2020 (–>2021), was captive to the powerful international flu-virus panic coalition and acted in obedience to it. It is somewhat true that in Japan a tradition of civilian use of surgical-masks in public existed, at least I say so based on several visits. I recall how, on my very first pass through Japan en route to South Korea for the first time (2009), a medical team in hazmat suits boarded our plane to inspect passengers for “swine flu” before giving the all-clear and letting us off the plane, where I proceeded to wait for a connecting flight, full of that great-gift of nervous-excitement about what South Korea and hagwon teaching might have in store. I remember distinctly laughing at this over-concern. Soon enough these measures were dropped, and absolutely everyone outside a tiny sliver of medical-researchers forgot entirely about H1N1 “swine flu.” On entry into Inchon Airport, there was a single 3×5″-style card that had about three questions on it, to the effect: “Do you have symptoms of flu? YES / NO.” I circled “No,” handed it to a bored-looking woman collecting them. She didn’t bother even glancing at the card. I proceeded towards the arrival terminal. A few kids at the hagwon made some kid-like comments about H1N1, but soon everyone forgot about it.
Some of the commentary in 2020 praised South Korea as having “defeated the virus” in part by loyal mask-wearing, which (the commentators said) was a pre-existing widespread practice in South Korea. Having spent a number of years in South Korea in a variety of situations, I can say that is false. There was no tradition of widespread mask-wearing in the sense the advocates of the panic of 2020 were alleging. Very occasionally you might see a few masked people during so-called yellow-dust season, but these masks could easily be missed entirely if you weren’t looking for them, and were only seen out-of-doors, not indoors. In short, in my experiences through much of the period 2009-to-2019 in South Korea, none of the mental images I have are of people with masks. I bet if I reviewed all the photos I had from that period, none would include someone with a mask in the background (with the sole exception of the brief MERS panic of 2015.)
I remember having my eye out for differences between South Korea and Japan on my visits to the later. The two very much seemed very similar. Although there is a significant language-gap (especially now that Korea has severed its intellectual association with Chinese-characters), much of what one sees and experiences in the two countries are very similar to an outsider. I remarked, at the time, that the two are almost analogizable to different regions of the same country. In this context, what major-and-noticeable differences there were would stand out. I remember distinctly making a list of “differences between Korea and Japan.” Near the top of the list was that you’d see some people parading around in surgical masks. This strange phenomenon was usually women looking to hide from the public, or so I concluded in 2015, perhaps somewhere in the pages of this blog. This was achieved in Korea usually through other means, as with maybe large-sunglasses and a low-rising hat of some kind, maybe a scarf, but not a surgical mask (before 2020).
On the Olympics, when Japan announced it would delay the Olympics, then ban most international visitors, impose certain brutal requirements of quarantining and testing for those few allowed in, even ban domestic spectators, it made my heart sink. That was not because I wanted spectators, but because it signaled there was still a lot of fuel left in the flu-virus panic which was causing so much real damage as I perceived it, including damage to my own life-plans and hopes and goals. Japan’s series of cutback and draconian measures related to the Olympics were signals that this strange social-movement, this global-scale politicized obsession over one flu-virus, would last through not only annus horribilis 2020 but also probably through calendar-year 2021, and (as I guessed some time in maybe spring 2021), if it lasted strong through 2021 it would very assuredly continue through the winter 2021-22 (flu season), but then if we are so lucky it could fade0out in spring, when flu viruses always fade, which is what happened.
I had never really believed the central claims behind the panic (if “claims” is even the proper term; it was all rather highly sensationalized from the start). The claims emerged into a hegemonic social force emerged, beginning some time in March 2020. I recall having evaluated the claims and rejected them, on available data, in mid-March 2020 already. It became a lonely time indeed because so few were on that side (many more were later). I saw the panic as a social phenomenon divorced from the data, and got very little for being right about it. Seeing friends embrace the panic was dispiriting. I felt like one of those characters in a Twilight Zone episode who wakes up to find aliens have taken over normal people’s thoughts.
Here I am in spring 2023 filling in this bare-bones draft, putting meat on what I wanted to say. Having written a thousand words, I overshot my target, but I hope someone at some time (perhaps myself much later) gets some use of this. As I try to recall now the Olympics of summer 2021 two years on, I realize that I don’t recall any specific sporting events. I do recall watching some of them. I did watch some of them, and followed with some interest. But I don’t readily recall any of it. Instead I remember the “pall” over the whole thing, a “pall” over the whole of the early 2020s.
One reason I don’t remember many specifics of the “2020” Olympics (held in mid-2021) is that so much of public life was depressed and anti-social even into that time. An event like an Olympics or a World Cup of soccer is necessarily public-spirited. I can recall specific scenes of previous Olympics, but when I draw into my memory-bank I often come up with scenes involving other people in some way (which, alas, is the sociological purpose of sports spectacles for the large majority of those in any way peripherally involved). I conclude that we, humans, are not meant to experience life “through screens,” if that’s all there is to it.
I was again at an MLB baseball game yesterday, June 16.
The Washington Nationals defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates, at Washington. Neither team looked very good and but for a two-run home-run, the game was a toss-up.
They announced attendance as 16,800. Of 42,000 seats, giving a total ticket-sale figure of 40%. This in addition to what must be a few thousand staff, almost all of whom looked bored almost all the time (which I find an awkward part of the experience whenever I have been at baseball games here).
Thoughts follow on observations and some memories, the usual things I tend to drift into writing on these pages.
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Bikeshare to stadium
I went to the game with my dad, who invited me. He has a friend who sells him tickets at discounted rates. He has been a baseball since youth, though seemed much more of a fan in the 2010s than I remember him being in the 1990s.
I persuaded my dad to go to the stadium by bikeshare after parking in North Arlington. In all there were four legs round-trip, and he did three by e-bike (free because I have so many credits) and I did them all by regular bike as usual (free always for members).
From looking at the stations around the stadium, I estimate something at least 150 people attended the game by this method, with probably an equal numbers using private (non-bikeshare) bikes. Armed guards watch over these private bikes during the game in a little cove on the east side of the stadium, which they call a “bike valet.” If my estimate is right, around 300 people of 16,800 attendees went by bike, 1.8%. Since many attendees were children, or elderly, or obese or otherwise disabled, this must mean up to 3% of able-bodied attended by bike.
One effect of the Virus Panic disruptions is the end of the bikeshare system’s “bike corrals,” four stations downtown manned in the mornings by small teams who would keep docks open, in other words, guaranteed parking. I used these. They did not return at all in 2020 and don’t look likely to return in 2021, though maybe by fall they might.
I think the bikeshare system also used to run these “corrals” at certain other places during major events, but I haven’t seen any in a few years. One was during baseball games. A small team would keep docks open — as the station got full, remove some bikes and keep them in a pile, allowing new arrivals to cruise in and park. This was a great system, but is now gone. We got there very early — 3pm — and the main station across from the main entrance was full by about 4:30pm, and most others in the area were also at or near full.
There are no real hills going to the stadium, which sits on the west bank of the Anacostia River not far above where it meets the Potomac, which makes bicycling there theoretically practical. In practice it’s still a little hard, which is a disincentive to people doing it. Make things like that easy or people won’t do it.
The good thing about rolling in early was walking around the empty stadium:
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Reflections on stadium-anchored “gentrification” success, mid-2000s vs. early 2020s
I must say, the baseball stadium has been a success in anchoring the major gentrification of this area, which had sunk to some pathetic depths of crime by the 1970s, fading into the 2000s, something near a half-century lost. Optimists in the mid-2000s predicted the new stadium would turn things around decisively and they were right, or at least sis definitely right if we lean on Correlation and ignore that pesky bug in the ear called Causation.
In some pictures taken from the Nationals stadium, you’ll see large, new-looking apartment buildings near it. These are new-looking because they are new.
The river sits on a site adjacent to the Anacostia River. The very name “Anacostia” conjures up some unpleasant images, even today, to many. The general area was once an anchor of Washington’s years-long claim to being Murder Capital of North America. No Washington baseball team was national champion between 1934 and 2019, but quite a few years had Washington ranked Number One for crime, or at least homicides.
I remember assuming that crime would more likely persist. I was wrong in being skeptical that the plan would work, because the stadium today is surrounded by luxury apartments.
In my partial defense, the general area is still not exactly the kind of safe a good neighborhood in pre-1960s Washington would have been, and there is a modest siege mentality, of the kind that must be felt by residents of those Brazilian luxury apartments walled off from favelas but all the same directly adjacent to them (this is much more visceral in the development in Maryland just outside DC caleld “National Harbor”).
I had some dealings in one of these new apartment buildings in 2014, when I worked for a time for a Korean Phone English company. The agent for the company ran the business out of his home, I assume, and met me in the lobby. (Was that in a legal gray area?) The building was pleasant once scanned in, inside the security zone, but still subject to the unpleasantly high-security feeling. I expect that had faded somewhat by the end of the decade as things marched on.
Of course many other areas also improved. The 2010s were the lowest-crime since the 1950s (and early 1960s). Since the annus terribilis of lockdowns, artificial major recession, riots, and major breakthrough by anti-police rhetoric, a series of reverses starting in spring 2020, crime is back up around its long-term late-1960s-to-mid-2000s running average.
Since the lockdowns began there started to emerge unmistakable signs of major social blight in parts of Washington, things that seemed a thing of the past by 2019. The abandonment of downtown with the Virus Panic led directly to the mayor deciding to cede several downtown blocks to a protestor zone. For now fifteen months the mayor has also refused to allow police to clear homeless camps in public parks, originally citing the Virus (of course!), but now just through intertial inaction, I guess. This is to the bafflement of many. The tent citynear the Watergate Hotel has dozens of tents now, and I have seen some unpleasant scenes in it. But no sign of homeless tent-cities near the stadium yesterday.
If Washington’s sudden decline persists, the anchor of the stadium are will probably not feel its effects on game- or event-days.
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The rollback of the Virus Panic
The capacity restrictions seem finally gone. I interpret this as another signal that our agenda-setters want to move on from the Virus Panic. Had they been responsible social stewards, they’d have moved to limit social/economic/psychological damage from the start, let people make their own decisions, and for God’s sake not deliberately fan Panic flames (which they did). I noticed clear signs of a sustained campaign to unravel the Panic starting in mid-May 2021. The tone shift seems to predate that. Maybe they were waiting for spring? Of course when flu season ends, flu viruses recede dramatically in our climates.
In the Washington baseball stadium case, the authorities lifted the stadium attendance capacity cap from 33% to 100% less than a week ago. For this game, the market bought 40% of the tickets. (It was a 4:00pm weekday game and I don’t know how many of those ever sell out, especially mid-season for a mediocre team; though the Nationals won the World Series in 2019, they don’t look like the same team now.)
The market figure and the arbitrary capacity restriction end up being similar figures — 33% vs. 40% — which means if the local government still demanded the 33% limit, three thousand who attended yesterday could not have done so, a simple deadweight loss to those people and to ticket and food/beverage revenue and whatever else they tossed their money into.
The other good news, from my perspective (as a pretty hard-line anti-VirusPanic person since late March 2020), is the absence of mask busybodies, those who demand people wear masks or adjust them properly, which became a strange feature of Virus Panic world since masks became mandatory by law by about May 2020.
(Looking back now, Mask-ism was a strange escalation by the Virus Panic regime, right when they should have moved decisively to slay the Panic beast and let people make their own decisions — which they finally did one year later, but for one year masks became a disturbing feature of lived reality, led by the decisions of Western political demagogues riding Virus Panic to popularity or power-grab, my interpretation of events.)
The fingerprints of the old regime are still all over:
With half of June gone, I see continual good news on this front. An event like a major-league baseball game, and what restrictions are imposed or not, and how people behave, these seem pretty significant indicators to me, especially in one of the Big Blue strongholds of what became a bizarre, reality-detached Flu Virus Cult. O understand much of Europe is still mired in this, and Australia is for some reason the worst off of all, being subject to disgraceful terror-panics when even one “positive case” comes out in a region.
There are still individual Panickers, of course. I still see people still riding a bicycle with masks on, something I will just never understand.
I was moving around the stadium for, it must have been fifteen minutes before I saw the first spectator with a mask. Later I saw a few others, some actively wearing and some with it hanging off their face or neck or whatever in some way — all looking ridiculous to me and I would hope looking ridiculous to the eyes of History. It’s hard to estimate, but maybe 5-15% of spectators had masks with them at all, and most of those were not actively wearing them at any given moment, which puts the total actively wearing at any given time well below 5%. Up from 0.00% in 2019 and all previous years.
This little estimate of mine applies to spectators. The staff is another matter. The staff mostly had conspicuous signs of masks — I assume they are still under a private mandate. My non-scientific estimate is least half actively wearing them at any given time, but not too high above that 50% line. Some conveniently took long or indefinite breaks from the mask in the afternoon heat and seemed no longer to be subject to mask-busybodies or supervisors. Their mask rate is much down from peak-Panic periods since the mandates started coming in in spring 2020.
This is all really good news, but as long as anyone has a mask to me means a sign of the social contagion (which I’ve called Virus Panic here) is still in circulation.
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Miscellaneous baseball memories
I do not follow baseball, nor do I follow any sports with any regularity today. I did when I was a kid.
I played baseball up to around age 12, always prompted by my dad, whose own preferences and interests generally steered my activities at those ages partly to my low-level resentment. Not long ago I came across a team picture from 1996 of my our team and my dad kneeling alongside, as coach. I hardly remember him being coach. I think there were two coaches and the other one was absent on picture day.
I liked playing baseball, I think, and am glad I was able to do it and had a period of great interest in the sport (i.e., when I “followed” it), because in the end it’s the mark of one plank of our culture. Baseball has been with us about two centuries, though the lineage of the game may not be what the legends claims (invented by a young man named Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, about 1840 — later General Doubleday). People who don’t know the game expect American men to know it and be able to explain it.
I wouldn’t mind playing again, especially a lower-stakes version as with plastic bat and hollow plastic ball. My cousins in Connecticut called this “whiffle ball,” but I don’t know how common that name is.
(I played cricket once, in 2012, on an island off the west coast of Korea, with a mish-mash of vacationers including British coworkers, and did amazingly well to their surprise. Baseball skills are transferable, though the rules of the game are different. Cricket vs. baseball strikes me as a good analogy for how languages differ and how language families work.)
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Baseball games, 1990s vs. 2010s/20s
I attended a few Baltimore Orioles games in the 1990s, the closest team to me at the time before the Nationals came in. I was at one one as late as July 2005, with my aunt N. and cousins B. W. and M. W.; the Orioles were playing Boston, which is B. and M.’s favorite team and, they being through the area at the time, decided to attend and for some reason invite me. (They are from near the Yankees-Red Sox fandom dividing line that runs through central Connecticut and decisively side with the latter.)
One thing I noticed in the 2010s, in the handful of times I attended games in various capacities and situations, and which I was reminded of very much yesterday, is the lower share of people actually interested in the game in any way than what I remember from the 1990s. (Reader beware, I was just a boy in the 1990s and everything impressed me. Even trying to adjust for that, I really think this is true.)
Many of the people attending are just at these games as a social event and spend the entire time chatting or hanging around in the rear area, and any of the game they witness if almost by chance. These are people there as a form of social signaling. This is true of many, perhaps most, of the women attending, and many of the men, too. A little sign of how so much of the world is oriented towards women, especially younger-end women in that consumption decisions are much more driven by women (per anyone with contact with lived-reality, but also spending studies).
It’s hard to untangle exact motivations in individual cases but the social dynamic of “attending = prestige” does seem to exist, like an umbrella under which individuals operate. In any case this is great news for the Nationals as a business, because if the stadium is a ‘prestige’ place to be, sales go up, attendance goes up, sales of merchandise goes up, prices can go up (or stay crazily high, $30+ t-shirts, whatever).
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Airport-style security comes to stadium — Why?
I started this writing on the rapid retreat of masks as symbol of the retreat of the Virus Panic coalition, which is good news. I realize there was something else in yesterday’s experience that seems pretty bad news and which I want to put to paper here. It is: the hugely increased security at the front gate, and seemingly also inside the stadium.
They interrogate everyone entering now, often for several minutes, and subject them to airport-style security with the same level of rigor and tone that the benighted TSA does. The TSA, perhaps the USA’s most hated agency of all since its founding in late 2001. Is it actually a government agency? For practical purposes it seems to be, and after twenty years another government agency was born never to be reigned back in.
Most people have demonstrated their full willingness to go along with whatever, as long as whoever it is eventually waves them through. Last year taught us this willingness includes even month-after-month-after-month of endless, rolling shutdown orders, based even on the thinnest of justifications and apparently no cost-benefit calculations at all, throwing social and economic life into disarray. Compared to 2020, a little increase in stadium security looks minor.
Still, for some reason I was surprised and annoyed by the new security regime. I was in the stadium over four hours without but one or two brief sips of water from a drinking fountain. I would’ve had more but they made me throw out my water bottle at the security gate because it was already open. (What the heck?)
This is all dramatically different than what I remember. As recently as summer 2019, the last time I was at a game (which was with coworkers and worth a full post of its own if I get around to it), I remember sailing through security and taking more time scanning the ticket to get in. This time the ratio was reversed.
I remember airports in the 1990s. I think the baseball stadium security in June 2021 was in some ways at least as strict as airport security was in the 1990s and in some ways stricter. Absolutely no bags are allowed. All open water bottles must be inspected and dumped if opened. There were several other procedures. What is the meaning of this?
I don’t know who gave these silly orders for airport-style security at the baseball stadium gates. I also sense they may never get rolled back now. I’ve heard this called the “ratchet effect.“
Me / December 2011
Picture by Na-Yeon, a friend of Danielle’s.
I tried to play soccer on Saturday. I failed. Only two players showed up. We had lunch, instead, and went home.
I played soccer almost every Saturday between September 2011 and July 2012. We haven’t played since then.I don’t know why people stopped showing up, but I can say it was one of my favorite things to do. The players were mostly foreigners (mostly English teachers), largely British, with a few Korean regulars, too. Most of us were not very good (a few were), but no one minded. It was all in good fun, and spirits were always high: Whoever showed up would play. Sometimes it was more than 20 people, sometimes fewer than 10. Always enjoyable, to me. I have good memories of these games.
We played in the easternmost neighborhood or Incheon, called Bupyeong, at a middle school maybe halfway between the recently-opened (as of November 2012) “Samsan Gymnasium” and “Gulpo Stream” subway stations (삼산체육관역 and 굴포천역) [Map]. I walked there from my home in central Bucheon, 40 minutes away on foot, across Lake Park. Here is a map:
The red-arrow in the map is anchored on a crossroad north of where we played. Due to varying “availability” (the ancient principle of “forgiveness not permission” was followed), four or five of the schools south of this intersection were used for games at various times.
If you click on the “Satellite” version of the map and you can see a big lake to the east. That is “Sang-Dong Lake Park”. I walked through it every time I went to play soccer. My home is off to the east, not far. Seoul is off further to the east, if you zoom out.
