There’s a sci-fi novel by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Stephen Barnes called The Legacy of Heorot in which colonists on a new, Eden-esque planet complete with cute fish they dub samlon, are confronted with a hellish alien monster which is ultra-deadly and nearly impossible to kill. But they do manage to kill it finally in a heated battle. It’s only after they kill it that they realize that the samlon it had been eating and which are now in a population explosion are actually the same creature in an earlier stage of life. In short, they have just removed the one thing keeping the population of the monsters in check. Thus begins the all out war between the colonists and an army of these creatures.
That initial monster is the Curse of the Bambino.
By breaking the curse, the Red Sox humiliated the dreaded Yankees and won the World Series. And Red Sox nation rejoiced.
But now we see that the Red Sox, in keeping the curse intact, were protecting us from something much more sinister, something far more evil. And now that evil has been unleashed.
First, the Patriots lose. Then Kerry loses. It’s only going to get worse.
OK, melodrama aside, I’m pretty bummed about things right now. I won’t go into liberal navel-gazing except to say that it is clear that as much as the Red Sox needed to play the game like the Yankees to actually beat them (that is, buy all the best players it could get) so, too, the left needs to start playing the political game the way the right does: they have to get nasty. And that’s just sad.
What’s next? As Ashleigh Brilliant said, “Sit back and enjoy the crisis.”