Take Me Out to the Polity: Baseball as a Synecdoche for Community in George F. Will's Men at Work

Jacques Barzun had it wrong. If we are to understand Americans, we must understand not only baseball, but also how Americans write about baseball. That is, we must understand myths—the stories we tell ourselves about the struggle between good and evil, stories that we use to represent more accessibly, through ritualistic form, the profound and even ineffable aspects of the human condition. A major function of myth, Ernst Cassirer argues in The Myth of the State, is a kind of metamorphosis: to make public and social what are otherwise private, subjectively felt experiences. One such transformation is particularly important, the transformation of uncertainties: myths organize, and therein attempt to control uncertainties by placing them in public narrative which explains them and