This E.M. Swift dude has me captivated

November 22nd, 2006 | Posted by PostmanE

I’ll try to make this as quick as possible, as it’s late, I want to sleep and I know you don’t pay attention for longer than 10 seconds anyway. But this feels worthy of your noble attention, if not of a full-on analysis.

There’s actually nothing to analyze here - just E.M. Swift saddening me by telling me the God’s honest truth:

I say this with authority, since I grew up in Chicago and since most of my childhood friends are stupidly loyal Cubs fans. They blindly cheer the team down every dark alley it leads them. They don’t boycott the Cubs. They don’t boycott WGN. They don’t boycott the Chicago Tribune, despite having a perfectly decent alternative in the Chicago Sun-Times. They don’t switch allegiance to the White Sox, who won the 2005 World Series and were in the hunt in 2006 until the final week. Cubs fans are enablers. They show up, win or lose, shell out their dollars, and enable the team to be bad and the Tribune Company to be a bad caretaker of their dreams.

OK, one more:

Here are my predictions. Cubs fans will again buy more than three million tickets in 2007. The Tribune Company will sell itself, which will mean a new owner for the Chicago Cubs and a real reason for Cubs fans to hope. Soriano will not stick in center field. And the team, struggling to break .500, will make it 99 years without a World Series championship.

I am a Cubs fan, and I agree with all of this. I thought I didn’t for a few minutes there … and then it sank in. This is all absolutely correct. The Cubs are a bad team, spending like crazy on the wrong areas, owned by a borderline-evil parent company so driven by the bottom line it’s willing to sacrifice quality journalism AND quality baseball until a sale is just around the corner. That’s all completely true, and there’s nothing I can (tangibly) do about it, except to stop supporting a baseball team I love.

So don’t mind me: I’m going to go down some Prozac, write some emo poetry about Jim Hendry, and paint my fingernails black. It’s getting awfully depressing in here.