CURRENT ISSUE 11/23/04 Front Page Weekly Features Ain't That America? Ask Zarxnol McQuigly & Moss Moth's Diary Musing With Mitch Newsmakers Say the Darndest Things! Probe Poll Still Life With Joan Info Previous Issues Crap Shop Who's at Fault? Contact Us! Aye, mateys! Get you some Daily Probe booty!	Tuesday 10th November There is a crisis in national, nay world, identity here. Gnashing of teeth, jaws clenched to bursting, eyes nearly popping out onto sidewalks. Other people refusing outright to be like us. They must be put to the sword, the cry goes 'round. The actual, living, breathing reality of divergent persons offends. People who live in direct opposition to us are an AFFRONT. Red-state people in blue states, blue-state people stuck in red states. Worker vs. slacker, capitalist vs. communist, atheist vs. believer, one kind of believer vs. another kind of believer, vegans vs. vegetarians, lawn fertilizer proponents vs. crabgrasserians. But I look on the whole thing as benignly as Lincoln must have beamed at Cadet Robert E. Lee's moment on the dais at his West Point diploma ceremony. Surely nothing untoward can happen as a result of intractable philosophies at war with each other? I am able to take the Olympian view because my baseball team won the World Series and nothing, nothing, can touch me. What's hysterical is that the whole region, for a period of a month, engaged in what is called by the psychological experts as "magical thinking." I have a friend who wore the same pyjamas in front of the television set, which accumulated the expected vintage niffiness, for the final eight playoff games. He confided to me that he believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that his pyjamas were the sole reason that the Boston Red Sox broke through the 86-year championship drought. I smiled indulgently, as one would at a cannibal who points at his stomach and grunts, but the claim was beyond pathetic for a rational adult to have made. A grown man! A child could tell you that the real reason the Red Sox won is that I wore the same dugout sweatshirt for all the final eight games. It has been sent on unwashed to Cooperstown, postage due, where doubtless a wing will be built to house it. I expect to hear back any day.
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