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southern-god1 · 3 months ago

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Beer And Thunder: Thor and The Southern Avengers

Out of the clear blue Florida sky, there was a massive bolt of lightning, followed by an earsplitting crack of thunder that boomed for miles. The bolt of blueish lighting was immense, and persisted for a few moments, unlike regular lightning. The literal bolt from the blue shook the ground and left a deep crater, as though something had slammed into the Earth at high speed and with great force. From the smoking crater came a large hand, gripping the lip of the crater and hauling someone up.

The figure stepping from the crater was a huge man. No, not a man; a god. Standing at 6 foot 3 inches, he stood tall and strong, and would have loomed over many a mortal. He wore a suit of armored plate that weighed as much as an Abrams main battle tank, yet he barely felt it. His armor covered his chest, leaving his massive biceps free, ready to swing the immense hammer in his right hand. His long blonde hair fell down over his bright blue eyes, and he swept it away. Thor, Son of Odin, frowned in confusion. This was…definitely not Midgard. Or, not the Midgard he remembered. Where was the snow? The “big” and “strong” Viking warriors -small to him, like all mortals- come to offer him tribute and mead? The small mortals bowing before the mighty God of Thunder? And why was it so hot?!? It was hot and humid, like the fires of Muspelheim! In the far distance, he saw strange clusters of steel and glass, rising into the horizon. Ah, mortals! He begin to swing his hammer, before slingshotting himself far into the distance.

It was a fine day in Jacksonville, Florida. There was going to be a Gators game later that day and people were getting ready for tailgates; buying beers, brats, and Yankees to worship them as they enjoyed the game. Huge trucks drove through the streets, blaring both the AC from the vents and bro country from the speakers. That changed abruptly when something came slamming into the pavement, leaving a small indentation where it landed. A huge Ford slammed on the breaks, narrowly avoiding toppling into the hole, front wheels hanging into the hole. Baffled passersby got close, only to see a tall and muscular figure with long blonde hair standing in the hole, climbing out. He was tall, very muscular, and was already sweaty from the heat as he rose and took a look around, surveying the mortals.

“Ah, mortals! I have found you, at last. I am Thor, Son of Odin, God of Thunder, Lord of Asgard, and this land is mine to claim!”

Thor looked around, confused when they did not kneel before him in stunned worship. These mortals were quite tall, some even taller than him. They must be giants? Their words had a strange accent as they whispered.

“Who is he?”

“One of the Avengers?”

“Claim? This is Florida, not California!”

Thor had no idea of where he had landed; one of northern Florida’s biggest cities and the birthplace of Tim Tebow, Jacksonville was full of Southern men who did not take kindly to the idea of being “claimed”. He knew it was hot, and he was sweaty.

“Mortals! Bow before-“

Before he could finish his sentence, a booming voice cut through the crowd.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Thor turned to see a trio of men, each standing at least 7 feet tall, looming over even the Mighty Thor. One of them was a tall and thin -relatively, he was still quite muscular- figure with a scruffy beard, wearing an armored jumpsuit in grey and dark red. His hair and beard was dark brown, and a pair of intense green eyes peered at Thor as he hefted a heavy shield; it was clearly very sturdy, strong, and bore a red, white, and blue emblem Thor did not recognize. It was pointed at one end, enabling it to be used offensively and defensively.

The man next to him was not a man at all, at least Thor didn’t think so. Its flesh was shining in the Florida sun as though made of metal, and was red and blue. A central sphere glowed, as did the creature’s eyes. The only way Thor knew it was alive was that it spoke.

“Getting impressive energy readouts Cap.”

The first man nodded curtly. The third figure loomed over even his comrades; he was a bulky behemoth of a man, huge and beefy, with muscles that made even Thor look small. This impressed and confused Thor. He wore a tight-fitting shirt that hugged his arms, and a pair of mesh-like pants that did little to conceal his beefy ass. It was a mix of red and grey and blue and orange, an odd mix that managed to work surprisingly well. He said nothing, but his blue eyes roved over Thor. He folded his arms over his pecs and smirked, satisfied that he was bigger. The first man spoke again.

“Again, who the fuck are you?”

Thor hefted his hammer.

“I am Thor, Son of Odin, God of Thunder, Lord of Asgard! And yes, I am quite impressive, metallic imp. Who are you? It is clear that you are the lords of this land, aye? You must be related to Frost Giants! But this land is not yours; Midgard rightfully belongs to me. Do you intend to deny my righteous claim as Lord of the Nine Realms?”

The first man almost laughed.

“I’m Captain Confederate, and you seem to be lost; this ain't a damn renn fair…and is that a goddamn hammer?”

The metal man spoke to Cap, evidently the team lead.

“Uh, Cap; Thor was the Norse god of thunder, lightning, fertility, and trees. I think that’s Mjolnir, his hammer.”

Thor brightened.

“So you have heard of me. Good, the mortals still worship me!”

The third man unfolded his arms and strode forward.

“Thor, huh? God of Thunder? I’m Tim fucking Tebow, but you can call me Stonewall. Yer lookin pretty puny for a god, and you sure as hell ain't from here, so you ain't a god. Put down your toy before I have to break it.”

Thor grew irritated and indignant.

“You dare challenge my might, ogre? I shall claim this land for Asgard, and you shall kneel before your rightful Lord. Now, feel the wrath of the Mighty Thor!”

Thor aimed Mjolnir at Stonewall, and there was a huge blast of lightning, arcing from the mighty hammer and into the humungous football players beefy chest. To Thor’s astonishment, the hulking brute was knocked back maybe half a step, but was otherwise unharmed when the smoke cleared. Stonewall glared at Thor.

“That tickled. Now I get to break you.”

Taking two steps forward, Stonewall swung his huge fist at Thor, hitting him right in the chest and sending him flying into a wall. Thor was dazzled, but stood from the wall and charged forth. Just as this occurred, the tall Texan, Captain Confederate, took a running leap, vaulting up a truck and leaping from the roof, coming down as fast and hard as surely as a shell on Fort Sumter, his shield with the battle flag slamming down hard into Thor. The shield itself weighed several hundred pounds, and there were several hundred pounds of Texan muscle behind it as well, propelling the pointing shield down onto his head, a single tiny drop of divine blood falling from his forehead as he was propelled backwards by the impact. Thor roared and emitted a mighty blast of lightning all around him, throwing Captain Confederate back, though he swiftly converted the tumble into a deft roll backwards, already kneeling and using his shield for cover as he fired on Thor with his custom 1911. The bullets compacted into tiny metal discs upon impact with Thor’s massive muscles, completely useless. Cap frowned, concerned by this, as Iron Rebel hovered overhead, blasting Thor with his energy weapons.

The Alabama billionaire hovered in his armored suit, blasting Thor with his repulsors, but was confused. They didn’t seem to be having much impact. His AI, Jaxon, chimed to life.

“Sir, energy levels rising in the target.”

“Explain.”

Colin replied as he kept blasting Thor, pumping up the energy in the blasts, hoping they might prove more effective.

Thor grinned below, and locked eyes with him.

“Energy levels increasing dramatically s-"

Before he could finish his sentence, Thor emitted a burst of lightning directly at him, thunder rumbling through the cloudless Jacksonville sky. The suit was of course, fully insulated, but the sheer power behind the blast shut down his armor, and he dropped like a rock, slamming into the ground and attempting to reactivate his systems, cursing loudly as he did so.

The clang of Iron Rebel against the ground drew Cap’s gaze, and he rushed to his aid, still firing with one hand at Thor. Stonewall gave his partners a quick glance, and, almost sensing that Colin was ok despite having fallen from the sky, strode towards Thor. The bulky footballer walked forward casually, as though walking out to the middle of Gators stadium for the coin toss. He reeled back to punch Thor again, casually ignoring another blast of lighting as he drew closer. Thor, frustrated that nothing seemed to be hurting the Florida football colossus, hefted a nearby truck that had been abandoned, and hurled it at Stonewall. That caught his attention, eyes widening as it came hurtling towards him. Tim put out his arms, and, to Thor’s astonishment, he caught the truck and simply set it down, gingerly, as though he wanted to avoid breaking a fellow Southerners property. He continued to stride towards Thor, steps leaving small divots in the asphalt as he grew himself slightly bigger with casual ease, gaining two more feet in a few strides, looming over Thor. The thunder god hurled Mjolnir at Tebow’s head, which actually seemed to have an impact; the force behind the throw seemed to hurt, knocking his head back on his neck as though he had just received a strong punch to the face. His casual grin was now an irritated frown.

Thor held out his hand for Mjolnir, waiting for it to come back to him. It came racing back to him, but then, at the last second, the red and grey figure of Iron Rebel rocketed past, snatching Mjolnir from the sky. Iron Rebel was surprised by how easy it had been to chart the hammers course and arrange an intercept pattern. His systems had rebooted and he was eager to do something, so upon seeing him hurl his mighty hammer, he decided he could at the very least take away Thor’s weapon. The hammer strained, exerting force, trying to return to Thor, but Colin’s armor -and his muscles under it- was strong enough to keep it firmly held in his gauntlet. Thor was about to fry the iron pest when Tim Tebow slammed into him with all the force of fifteen freight trains, propelling him backward. His legs, which had driven even other Southern Gods back with their sheer driving force on the gridiron, pumped, combat cleats tearing into the asphalt, muscled arms pushing Thor back, and then pinning him. Thor fell onto his back, and felt an impossibly heavy weight on his chest; Stonewall’s huge combat cleat, pinning him to the ground as if he was a magnet stuck to it. He struggled, but couldn’t move.

“Unhand me, ogre!”

Captain Confederate strode forth, glaring down at Thor, and placed his shield against his throat, the pointed tip like a guillotine blade.

“I should kill you right now for what you’ve done. Challenging us, hurting my friends, causing so much damage. For challenging our honor…”

He pressed the tip into Thor’s neck, a tiny pinprick of blood oozing forth. He did not press it further, thinking. Stonewall spoke up.

“Thanks for that. First real fight I’ve had in ages. That hammer a yers packs a punch.”

Speaking of the hammer, Iron Rebel strode up, still holding Mjolnir, effortlessly keeping it from Thor’s hands.

“Please just cut his head off Jensen. I’m going to have to completely redesign the suit now.”

Thor let out an indignant roar, struggling anew against the combat cleat. Stonewall frowned.

“Naw, that’d be a waste. He’s big, strong, hot, just needs a haircut to get rid of that damn hippy hair and a Rebel Brew to become a real God. Let’s Southernize ‘im.”

Colin was alarmed by the idea.

“WHAT? No! I am NOT being partners with a walking Tesla coil! You saw what he did!”

Jensen paused, seeming to consider this.

“You recovered. Tim’s right.”

He pulled the shield back, resting it beside him, as he reached into a small pouch on his belt. Between his fingers rested a small metal vial, marked “SS-004 CONCENTRATE.” A heavily concentrated form of Southernizing agent, he kept a few vials on his person if he ever ran across someone worthy of ascension during a field op. He opened the vial’s lid.

“I heard ya like beer? Get ready for the best beer of your life. Yer about to become one of us.”

As Thor continued to protest, he leaned down and poured the vial right down his throat. The god spluttered, almost gagging on the substance.

Thor continued to protest the mortals when the scruffy one with a heavy shield poured something right down his throat. He spluttered as it splashed down, the intense taste of hops too much even for him. Almost immediately, a strange heat washed over him. Then, his eyes almost rolled back in his head from the sudden explosion of power blasting through his body. The warmth washed over every inch of his body, every atom suffused with energy and power. His biceps and triceps, already impressive, began to grow before the eyes of the Southerners. Thor’s muscles, be it in his boulder biceps, thunder thighs, princely pecs, or elsewhere, grew hundreds of times denser and stronger in moments, flooded with strength, strong as white titanium. His muscles and sinews stretched, bones popping as they expanded. Sweat covered his body anew, glistening in the hot Southern sun as he kept growing. His cock would be an impressive eight inches when completely soft, balls churning with superior seed as his DNA was augmented and remade into a hybrid of Southern strength and Norse divinity.

As if being diverted from one part of him to another, Thor’s long blonde locks receded back, becoming a much more conservative cut, as a beard grew out, thicker and mightier. His feet strained against his boots, growing several sizes in moments, stinking and sweaty. Thors mind began to change. He felt a haziness wash over him, clouding his memories. No longer had he been entirely Asgardian. No, his father had had some fling with a mortal from the South, and he was the result. A mighty hybrid, raised to take over when his father passed. He felt an immensely strong attachment to the South, having visited it and fallen in love, and now he fought alongside the Southern Avengers when he was not expanding the Asgardian Empire, which he ruled as God-Emperor. Thor looked around, wondering why he was on his back. His armor had expanded to accommodate his new size, but now bore motifs of miniature battle flags alongside norse runes, his dual heritages reflected in his armor and his accent when he spoke. Standing up, he opened his mouth to speak, but something else came out.

“BBBBBUUUUUUURRRRPPPP!”

The thundering beer-heavy shockwave of his burp shook the ground under his feet, and shattered windows already weakened by their fight. He flexed his immense white biceps, soaked in sweat, and proudly proclaimed.

“I am Thor - Son of Dixie!”

He smirked as he flexed, feeling absolutely at home in the Jacksonville sun. The others watched him in awe, and Thor was puzzled.

“What’s wrong my friends?”

Jensen spoke first, improvising quickly. He was pleasantly surprised by the results of the vial. Perhaps because Thor was a god to begin with, the results were especially impressive, making him into a very literal Southern God.

“Nothin Thor. That was just…a damn good burp.”

“Of course it was! What has happened here?”

Tebow spoke up now, clapping Thor on the back; he was delighted by the new stud, his muscles rivaling his own beefy muscles.

“Oh, we took down some terrorists. Made a real mess, but nobody got hurt. Ya did good today Thor. Now, let’s help em fix things up, then we all go out for some dinner?”

Thor nodded enthusiastically, and began effortlessly hefting vehicles that had been turned over.

Two Days Later:

The ground shook as the Yankees prayed, invoking their precious God, imploring him to save them, to deliver them from evil, to watch over them in their hour of need. The ground shaking was itself not unusual; Southerners frequently made the ground shake for one reason or another; walking, burping, farting, rumbling by in their huge trucks. But now the stained glass windows shook dangerously, quaking in their frames as if the saints themselves feared what was coming. They prayed harder. Then, a huge hand ripped apart the church steeple, massive fingers ripping apart the roof and steeple, sending beams falling down into the church and onto the terrified parishioners. The hand pulled away and the remains of the roof and steeple were casually tossed over the titan’s shoulder as if it were merely a beer can. A huge face bent down to peer at the puny Yankees; it was huge, filling the sky, a scruffy dirty blonde beard taking up a lot of the view, each hair easily three times the size of the largest man north of the Mason-Dixon. They didn’t recognize him, but that, again, wasn’t unusual. Southerners came and went, sowing havoc in their wake as surely as ozone follows lightning. He smirked down at the tiny Yankees, and chuckled, voice shaking the ground when he spoke.

“HELLO YANTS! ARE YOU PRAYING TO YOUR RIGHTFUL SOUTHERN GODS?”

The accent was not one they recognized; it was kinda Southern, but there was something else. This was confusing. He peered closer, and his huge lips pursed into an irritated frown.

“ANSWER ME, KNAVES.”

Knaves? What sort of person called someone a knave?

The terrified father seemed to regain some small measure of faith and stood, trembling but still standing.

“N-no, we are worshipping the one true God-“

He was cut off by an amused guwaff from the titanic stud looming over them.

“GOD? THERE IS NOT ONE GOD, PUNY BUGS, BUT AN ENTIRE RACE OF THEM LIKE ME. BOW BEFORE THE MIGHTY THOR, GOD OF THUNDER, PATHETIC YANTS, AND PERHAPS I SHALL TAKE YOU AS MY PLAYTHINGS.”

The terrified Yankees stared up in horror at the colossus. Since when did the so-called gods have dominions? Some were already on their knees, knocked down by falling debris, the quakes from his footfalls or the beer-scented wind from his booming voice. Others, however, refused to kneel, secure in their faith, albeit still alarmed. Thor titan waited for a few moments, before opening his mouth to speak again, only for a hurricane-force burp to rumble forth from his mega stomach. There was an ominous rumble and then when his lips parted, hell burst forth into the sanctuary.

The beer-and-protien-scented shockwave of gas and heat obliterated all the remaining stained glass windows as if purging the land of false idols in an act of masculine potency and southern rage, leaving not a trace remaining. The doors flew off their hinges, one door slamming into and through the store across the street, the other door reducing a passing Yankee to a bloody smear on the sidewalk. The walls bulged and strained, bulging out in crazy angles in some places, completely destroyed in some places. The inhabitants fared worst of all.

The sheer heat of Thor’s massive burp seared them, their screams utterly inaudible as they were cooked to a crisp, burned and charred in a few mercifully quick seconds before death supervened. They had literally been fried by the heat, skin forming a crust-like texture of flash-hardened burns.

A low whistle came from beside Thor. Stonewall towered beside him, having been watching beside Thor as he exercised his power.

“DAMN! YOU COOKED EM!”

Thor grinned with pride.

“DIDN’T KNOW I COULD DO THAT! I WONDER…”

He trailed off and grabbed one of the petrified Yankee bodies, still kneeling in terrified supplication, and tossed it into his gaping maw.

“NOT BAD! CRISPY AND WARM.”

He reached down and grabbed more, as Stonewall just laughed, thunderous laughter shaking the ground. This had been quite a fun way to see Thor in action, allowing Tim to gauge how he was acclimating to his powers. Evidently he was adapting quite well. He knew it had been a good idea to Southernize the colossal Nordic hunk, and this casual display of power and dominance seemed to confirm it. He smiled and patted his friend on the back.

“WANNA GO FIND SOME DUMB PROTESTERS TO STOMP ON, MAKE SOME YANTS BOW DOWN?”

Thor grinned.

“OF COURSE! MAYBE I CAN FRY SOME MORE!”

With that, the two stomped off, Cap joining them, having been busy stomping out a minor disturbance under his boots. The trio of titans stomped off to find more Yants to have fun with, knowing that they would tremble at the sight of the newest member of the Southern Avengers: Thor, Son of Dixie.

How Thor joined the ranks of the Southern Avengers! Hope y'all liked it! Lemme know that ya think; comment, send me a message, or via an ask -anon or otherwise-.

#southernization #southern avengers #story

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thatscarletflycatcher · 3 months ago

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"He told the truth, mainly": what Paul Moses knew about Huckleberry Finn.

(Abridged from Wayne C. Booth's The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction)

Mark Twain had himself done a lot of ethical criticism long before he published his famous warning against morality hunters at the head of Huckleberry Finn ([1884] 1982). I am thinking not mainly of essays like the devastating “James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” but rather of the criticism implicit in his fictions… In short, Mark Twain knew well enough what it means to “find a moral” in a tale, and he knew that every tale is loaded with “morals,” even if it avoids explicit moralizing.

What he was right to fear is the destruction that can result for any story, and particularly for any comic story, when a reader busily extracts moralities rather than enjoying the tale… When he mocked courtly romances in A Connecticut Yankee (1889) and adventure tales in Tom Sawyer and parts of Huckleberry Finn, he must have known that his perceptive readers would never again enjoy those originals quite so much. And as the kind of moralist who increasingly was to lay about him with a heavy cudgel, with fewer and fewer freely comic effects, he had good reason to know that people who put their attention on finding the moral in any human story risk destroying the fun of it. Critics like me who do find a moral are going to be distracted from the sheer joy of dwelling for many hours in the mind and heart of a great natural comic poet, that “bad boy,” Huckleberry Finn.

Even so, I suspect that Twain would have been surprised, and no doubt dismayed, at the floods of moral criticism evoked by the tale. Initially the moralists’ attention seems to have been entirely on the dangers to young people of encountering the aggressive “immorality” of Huck himself—his smoking, his lying, his stealing, not to mention his irreverent “attitude.”... Twain could easily have predicted— and no doubt savored the prediction—that the portrait of an appealing youngster openly repudiating most “sivilized” norms would upset good people…

The uselessness of “conscience” is dramatized with example after example of how Huck’s conscience, actually the destructive morality implanted by a slave society, combats his native impulse to do what he really ought to do—what Twain called his “good heart.” The most famous attack on the norms dictated by obedience to public morality—and especially by official Christianity '’—comes when Huck realizes that he is committing a terrible sin in helping Jim escape slavery. Almost two-thirds of the way through the novel, long after Huck has discovered his love for Jim and has been willing to “humble myself to a nigger” and apologize for a cruel trick (709; ch. 15), Huck sits down to think by himself, after hearing some adults talking about how easy it is to pick up reward money for turning in a runaway slave. Though the pages that follow are probably more widely known than any other passage in American literature, I must trace them in some detail, because they have always provided the evidence used by us liberals in opposing Paul Moses’s kind of indictment.

[I omit that part of the discussion, as it is widely known in how the text is taught in schools]

The Indictment

If Twain could have predicted such conventional distress, he could not have predicted Paul Moses’s response, the response, as we might say, of “good old Jim’s” great-great-grandchildren reading the novel from a new perspective—not Jim’s, not Huck’s, not the white liberals’ of the 1880s or 1980s, but theirs: the perspective of a black reader in our time thinking about what that powerful novel has for a hundred years been teaching Americans about race and slavery. It would surely have shocked Twain to find that some modern black Americans see the book as reactionary in its treatment of racial questions:

For black people and for those sympathetic to their long struggle for fair treatment in North America, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn spirals down to a dispiriting and racist close. The high adventures of the middle chapters, Huck’s admiration of Jim, Jim’s own strong selfconfidence, and the slave’s willingness to protect and guide Huck are all rendered meaningless by the closing chapters in which Twain turns Jim over to two white boys out on a lark. (Jones 1984, 34)

As a black parent... I sympathize with those who want the book banned, or at least removed from required reading lists in schools. While I am opposed to book banning, I know that my children’s education will be enhanced by not reading Huckleberry Finn. (Lester 1984, 43)

Such objections might well have seemed to Twain much more perverse than the cries of alarm from the pious. After all, the book does in fact attack the pious; they were in a sense reading it as it asked to be read—as an attack on them. But when black readers object to it, and even attempt to censor it from public schools (Hentoff 1982), are they not simply failing to see the thrust of scenes like the one I have quoted? How can they deny that Jim is “the moral center” of the work, that Twain has struck a great blow against racism and for racial equality, and that the book when read properly could never harm either blacks or whites?

So I might have argued with Paul Moses. So most white liberals today still argue when blacks attack the book. So even some black readers defend the book today. Many critics have objected, true enough, to the concluding romp that Tom Sawyer organizes in a mock attempt to free the already freed Jim. But most of the objections have been about a failure of form: Twain made an artistic mistake, after writing such a marvelous book up to that point, by falling back into the tone of Tom Sawyer. Not realizing the greatness of what he had done in the scenes on the river, he simply let the novel “spiral down,” or back, into the kind of comic stereotypes of the first few chapters. Though put as a formal objection to incoherence, this objection could be described as ethical, in the broadest sense: the implied standard is that great novels probe moral profundities; because the ending of Huck Finn is morally shallow, the book as a whole ought not be accepted as great.

Seldom is the case made that the ending is not just shallow but morally and politically offensive. Most critics have talked as if it would be absurd to raise questions about the racial values of a book in which the very moral center is a noble black man so magnanimous that he gives himself back into slavery in order to help a doctor save a white boy’s life. Why should this book, so clearly anti-racist, be subjected to the obviously partisan criticism of those who do not even take the trouble to understand what a great blow the book strikes for black liberation? Critics, black and white, are inclined to talk like this: [E]xcept for Melville’s work, Huckleberry Finn is without peers among major Euro-American novels for its explicitly anti-racist stance. Those who brand the book ‘racist’ generally do so without having considered the specific form of racial discourse to which the novel responds. (Smith 1984, 4)

In this view, all the seemingly objectionable elements, such as the use of the word “nigger,” are signs, when read properly, of Twain’s enlightened rebellion against racist language and expectations. The defense is well summarized by one black critic who seems enthusiastic about the book, Charles H. Nichols. Huck Finn, he says, is an indispensable part of the education of both black and white youth. It is indispensable because (1) it unmasks the violence, hypocrisy and pretense of nineteenth-century America; (2) it re-affirms the values of our democratic faith, our celebration of the worthiness of the individual, however poor, ignorant or despised; (3) it gives us a vision of the possibility of love and harmony in our multi-ethnic society; (4) it dramatizes the truth that justice and freedom are always in jeopardy. (Nichols 1984, 14)

Accepting the first two and the last of these, with minor qualifications, must we not question the third? Can we really accept this novel as a vision of the possibility of love and harmony in our multi-ethnic society?

It was in an effort to answer that question that I recently read the great novel again, asking what its full range of fixed norms appears to be, a century after its composition, and thus what its influence on American racial thinking is likely to be. While I found again the marvelously warm and funny novel I had always loved, I found another one alongside it, as it were. That novel looks rather different. Here is how a fully “suspicious” interpreter might view it:

“This is the story of how a pre-adolescent white boy, Huck, reared in the worst possible conditions no mother and a drunken, bigoted, cruel, and impoverished father—discovers in his own good heart and flatly against every norm of his society that he can love an older black slave, Jim—love him so strongly that he violates his own upbringing and tries to help Jim escape from slavery. Huck fails in his sporadic attempt to free Jim, but Jim is (entirely fortuitously) freed by a stroke of conscience (the same ‘good heart’?) in his owner just before she dies. (There is some problem of credibility here, since she presumably has good reason to believe, along with others in her town, that Jim earlier killed Huck Finn; but let that pass.)

“At the beginning and again at the end of the novel, Jim is portrayed as an ignorant, superstitious, boastful, kind but gullible comic ‘nigger,’ more grown child than adult. Naturally affectionate toward and uncritical of his white masters, he is almost pathetically grateful for any expression of sympathy or aid. During the central part of the novel he is turned into something of a father figure for Huck; we see him as a loving father of his own children (full of remorse about having beaten a child who turns out to be deaf); and as a deeply loyal friend (once he has found that his ‘only friend’ is the almost equally ignorant but less gullible white boy). He becomes, for large stretches, an ideally generous, spiritually sound, wonderfully undemanding surrogate parent. The implication is clear: wipe slavery away and you will find beneath its yoke a race of natural Christians: unscarred, loving, infinitely grateful people who will cooperate lovingly with their former masters (with the good ones, anyway) in trying to combat the wicked white folks, of which the world seems to be full. (There are no other black characters—just the one ‘good nigger.’) Only occasionally through these middle chapters does the author reduce Jim again to the role of stage prop. Whenever he gets in the way of the author’s plan to satirize the mores of small town and rural American society, he is simply dropped out of sight— and out of Huck’s mind: an expendable property, to be treated benevolently as part of the implied author’s claim to belong to the tiny saving remnant of human beings who escape his indictment of a vicious mankind.

“All the more curious then that we find, especially in a couple of chapters at the beginning and in a prolonged section at the end—al- most a third of the whole book—that Jim is portrayed as simply a comic butt, suitable for exploitation by cute little white boys of good heart who have been led into concocting a misguided adventure by reading silly books. There are moments in the novel when we expect that Huck Finn will discover behind the stereotype of the ‘good nigger- mistreated’ a real human being, someone whose feelings and condition matter as much as those of whites and who at the same time is not, under the skin, merely a collection of Sunday school virtues; a white prince in disguise (‘I thought he had a good heart in him and was a good man, the first time I see him. Then they all agreed that Jim had acted very well, and was deserving to have some notice took of it” [905; ch. 42]). But we lose this hope early, and we are not really surprised, only disgusted, when Huck forgets all that he might have learned and allows himself to take part in Tom’s scheme to free the already freed Jim. Huck is in one sense invulnerable to our criticism here, because he thinks that he is still ‘wickedly’ freeing a slave, his friend. But the novel, like the mischievous Tom Sawyer, simply treats Jim and his feelings here as expendable, as sub-human—a slave to the plot, as it were. We readers are expected to laugh as Tom and Huck develop baroque maneuvers that all the while keep Jim in involuntary imprisonment. Twain, the great liberator, keeps Jim enslaved as long as possible, one might say, milking every possible laugh out of a situation which now seems less frequently and less wholeheartedly funny than it once did.”

”Twain’s full indifference to what all this means to Jim, and his seeming indifference to the full meaning of slavery and emancipation, is shown in the way he exonerates Tom for his prank and compensates Jim for his prolonged suffering. I italicize (superseding Twain’s italics in this passage) the moments that now give me some trouble as I think about what the liberal Twain is up to:

We had Jim out of the chains in no time, and when Aunt Polly and Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally found out how good he helped the doctor nurse Tom, they made a heap of fuss over him, and fixed him up prime, and give him all he wanted to eat, and a good time, and nothing to do. And we had him up to the sick-room; and had a high talk; and Tom give Jim forty dollars for being prisoner for us so patient, and doing it up so good, and Jim was pleased most to death, and busted out, and says:

“Dah, now, Huck, what I tell you?—what I tell you up dah on Jackson islan’? I tole you I got a hairy breas’, en what’s de sign un it; en I tole you I ben rich wunst, en gwineter to be rich agin; en it’s come true; en heah she is! Dah, now! doan talk to me—-signs is signs, mine I tell you; en I knowed jis’ ’s well ’at I ’uz gwineter be rich agin as I’s a stannin’ heah dis minute!” (911; “Chapter the Last’’)

All nice and clear now? The happy-go-lucky ex-slave, superstitious, absurdly confused about the value of money (he happily clutches at the gift of forty dollars while Huck, by the final turn on the next page, gets six thousand), reveals himself as overjoyed with his fate, and all is well. But just what is the “vision of love and harmony” that this novel “educates” us to accept? We find in it the following fixed norms:

1. Black people, slaves and ex-slaves, are a special kind of good people—so naturally good, in their innocent simplicity, that the effects on them of slavery will not be discernible once slavery is removed. Some few whites are like that, too—the Huck Finns of the world who miraculously escape corruption by virtue of sheer natural goodness.

2. Black people are hungry for love (essentially friendless, unless whites befriend them) and they will be (should be) obsequiously grateful for whatever small favors whites grant them, in their benignity.

3. White people are of three kinds: the wicked and foolish, a majority; the foolish good— essentially generous people like the Widow Watson who are made foolish by obedience to social norms; and naturally good people, like Huck, whose only weapons against the wicked are a simulated passivity and obedience covering an occasionally successful trickery. We may find also an occasional representative of a fourth kind, the essentially decent but thoughtless trickster, the creator of stories, like Tom— and Mark Twain. They will entertain the world regardless of consequences.

4. The consequences of emancipation will be as good as they can be, in this wicked world, so long as you (the white liberal reader) have your heart in the right place—as you clearly do because you have palpitated properly to Huck’s discovery of a full sense of brotherhood with Jim. You needn’t worry about his losing that sense almost before he finds it; after all, Huck, our hero, is not responsible for anything that society might have done or might yet do about the aftermath of slavery.

5. All institutional arrangements, all government, all “‘sivilization,” all laws, are absurd—and absurdly irrelevant to what is, after all, the supreme value in life: feeling “comfortable,” as Huck so often expresses his deepest value, comfortable with “oneself,” that ultimate source of intuition which, if one is among the lucky folk, will be a sure guide.”'

6. The highest form of human comfort is found when two innocent males can shuck off all civilized restraints and responsibilities, as represented by silly women, and simply float lazily through a scene of natural beauty, catching their fish and smoking their pipes. As Arnold Rampersad says, “Much adventuring is [like this novel] written by men for the little boys supposedly resident in grown men, and to cater to their chauvinism” (1984, 49). The ideal of freedom, for both blacks and whites, is a freedom from restraint, not a freedom to exercise virtues and responsibilities— which is to say, in the words of another black critic, Julius Lester, “a mockery of freedom, a void” (1984, 46). The final addition to that blissful freedom-in-a-void is to be (or to identify with) a rebellious white child cared for and loved by the very one who might otherwise be feared, since he might be expected to act hatefully once free: the slave, toward whom the reader feels guilt. If we will just let nature take its course, those we have en- slaved will rise from their slavery to love us and carry us to the promised land.

After Such Sins, What Forgiveness?

What can we reply to such a picture? Not, I think, that it is irrelevant to our view of the book. Not that such a suspicious reader “does not know how to read genuine literature, which is not concerned with teaching lessons.” And not, surely, that the fixed norms central to the power of this book are all to the good. The events of the past hundred years have taught us—since apparently we needed the teaching—that America after Emancipation and the aborted Reconstruction just did not work that way, though white northern liberals until this last quarter of a century tended to act as if it did, or should. Nor can we take what is perhaps the most frequent tack in defending Twain: “He rose to a great moral height in the middle of the book, then simply got tired, or lost touch with his Muse, and fell back into the Tom Sawyer gambit.” That line will not work because the problems we have discovered are not confined to the gratuitous cruelty and condescension of the final “evasion.” Though they are most clearly dramatized there, they run beneath the surface of the whole book --even those wonderful moments that I have quoted of Huck’s moral battles with himself.

In the critical literature about Huck Finn, | find three main lines of defense of the book as an American classic.” In all of them, the novel is treated as a coherent fiction, not as a work that simply collapsed toward the end.

The first is the simplest: the attribution to Huck, not to Mark Twain, of all the ethical deficiencies. Since Twain is obviously a master ironist, and since we see hundreds of moments in the book when he and the reader stand back and watch Huck make mistakes, why cannot we assume that any flaw of perception or behavior we discern is part of Twain’s portrait of a “character whose moral vision, though profound, is seriously and consistently flawed” (Gabler-Hover 1987, 69)? In this view, the problems we have raised result strictly from Twain’s use of Huck’s blindnesses as “an added indictment against the society of which he [Huck] is a victim” (74; see also Smith 1984, 6, IO).

Clearly this defense will work perfectly, if we embrace it in advance of our actual experience line- by-line: dealing with any first-person narrative, we can explain away any fault, no matter how horrendous, if we assume in advance an author of unlimited wisdom, tact, and artistic skill. But such an assumption, by explaining everything, takes care of none of our more complex problems. If we do not pre-judge the case, the appeal to irony excuses only those faults that the book invites us to see through, thus joining the author in his ironic transformations. Our main problems, not just with the ending but with the most deeply embedded fixed norms of the book as a whole, remain unsolved.

George C. Carrington similarly defends the ending as of a piece with the rest of the novel, and in doing so he also defends the novel as the work of a great moral teacher who “knew what he was doing.” But he discerns not so much a great conscious ironist as an author exhibiting great intuitive wisdom, a kind of sage. The questionable norms are indeed to be found in the work, but they are fundamentally criticized by it: the views and effects I have challenged are themselves challenged by the great art of Twain, an art that in a sense goes beyond his conscious intentions. The work’s moral duplicity in fact is a brilliant portrayal of the national dilemma following the collapse of Reconstruction. Twain “could not help paralleling the national drama-sequence,” Carrington says; the story of Huck is “rather like” the story of the northern middle class, many of them former Radical Republicans who had fought to free the slaves, [who had become] irritated by the long bother of Reconstruction, became tired of southern hostility, and were easily seduced by strong-willed politicians and businessmen into abandoning the freedmen for new excitements like railroad building. . . . The spirit that led the country to accept the Compromise [of 1877, that abandoned the goals of Reconstruction] might ironically be called ‘the spirit of 77.’ Absorbed in his work and his new life in Hartford, Twain shared that spirit. He thought the Compromise a very good thing indeed... . Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is thus not only a great but a sadly typical American drama of race: not a stark tragedy of black suffering, but a complex tragicomedy of white weakness and indifference. It is one of those modern books that, as Lionel Trilling says, ‘read us,’ tell ‘us’… about ourselves. . . . The meanness of Huckleberry Finn is not that man is evil but that he is weak and doomed to remain weak. . . . Twain did not shirk the presentation, but managed to avert his gaze from the subject’s Medusa horrors by looking at it through his uncomprehending narrator. .. . By experiencing and accepting the ending we can perhaps take a step toward a similar level of self-awareness. A novel that can help its readers do that is indeed a masterwork and deserves its very high place. (1976, 190-92)

While it seems remotely possible that an author with a mind as ironically devious as Twain’s could have worked, consciously or unconsciously, to ensure that some few readers over the centuries would read the work in this special way, obviously most readers have not done so—no doubt because the book itself offers no surface clues to support such a reading. Indeed, both of these defenses spring more from the critics’ ethical programs and ingenuity than from anything that the novel proposes for itself. On the contrary, a vast majority of the artistic strokes, especially during the “evasion,” seem explicitly de- signed to heighten our comic delight in a way that would make these interpretations implausible. They both depend on the wisdom and insight of a reader who has learned to see through the “surface” of the book and recognize that it in fact mocks naive readers who laugh wholeheartedly at Tom’s pranks. They thus leave us with the question, What then happens to the great unwashed, for whom so much of the book has proved totally deceptive? Well, they are going to identify mistakenly with a deceptive implied author who has in some sense worked to take them in. Meanwhile, the real author is above all this,

creating a work that a few discerning readers can make out, after weeks, perhaps years, of careful study. In short, the defense may work well if what we are thinking of is maximum fairness to Twain, but it doesn’t work at all for the critic who cares about what a book does to or for the majority of its readers, sophisticated or unsophisticated. A third influential defense, considerably more complex, has the virtue of leaving the reader able to laugh at the troublesome ending, though embarrassed by the laughter. James Cox argues that Twain set out, through the attacks on Huck’s conscience that lead to his great moment of decision to go to hell, to enact a conversion of morality into pleasure (1966, 171-76). The form implicit in such an ethic demanded an ending that celebrates pleasure and makes everyone “comfortable,” including of course Huck and Jim. But at the moment of choice, that same form requires not the election of pleasure but of another “conscience,” the northern conscience that combats the southern conscience of Huck’s upbringing: “In the very act of choosing to go to hell he has surrendered to the notion of a principle of right and wrong. He has forsaken the world of pleasure [his own eternal salvation] to make a moral choice” (180). It is that conscience which validates, in Huck’s eyes, his going along with Tom, even though he thinks until the end that Tom, who was brought up right, is unbelievably wicked in working to free Jim.

The result is that when we exercise a “northern conscience” that confirms Huck’s choice and find ourselves laughing at the burlesque, “we are the ones who become uncomfortable. The entire burlesque ending is a revenge upon the moral sentiment which, though it shielded the humor, ultimately threatened Huck’s identity [as a natural hedonist]” (181).

If the reader sees in Tom’s performance a rather shabby and safe bit of play, he is seeing no more than the exposure of the approval with which he watched Huck operate. For if Tom is rather contemptibly setting a free slave free, what after all is the reader doing, who begins the book after the fact of the Civil War? This is the “joke” of the book—the moment when, in outrageous burlesque, it attacks the sentiment which its style has at once evoked and exploited. . . . This is the larger reality of the ending—what we may call the necessity of the form. That it was a cost which the form exacted no one would deny. But to call it a failure, a piece of moral cowardice, is to miss the true rebellion of the book, for the disturbance of the ending is nothing less than our and Mark Twain’s recognition of the full meaning of Huckleberry Finn. (175, 181)

Again we see here a critic who saves the novel by rejecting the reading that almost every white reader until recently must have given it. Each reading considers “the reader” —the “we” of these passages—to be plainly and simply the white reader, and neither one considers closely the effects on the white reader who does not feel uncomfortable with the ending. But surely the most common reading of this book, by non-professional whites, has always been the kind of enraptured, thoroughly comfortable reading that I gave it when young, the kind that sees the final episodes as a climax of good clean fun, the kind in fact that Brander Matthews gave it on first publication:

The romantic side of Tom Sawyer is shown in most delightfully humorous fashion in the account of his difficult devices to aid in the easy escape of Jim, a runaway negro. Jim is an admirably drawn character. There have been not a few fine and firm portraits of negroes in recent American fiction, of which Mr. Cable’s Bras-Coupé in the Grandissimes is perhaps the most vigorous, and Mr. Harris’s Mingo and Uncle Remus and Blue Dave are the most gentle. Jim is worthy to rank with these; and the essential simplicity and kindliness and generosity of the Southern negro have never been better shown than here by Mark Twain. . . . Of the more broadly humorous passages—and they abound— ... they are to the full as funny as in any of Mark Twain’s other books; and perhaps in no other book has the humorist shown so much artistic restraint, for there is in Huckleberry Finn no mere “comic copy,’ no straining after effect. (Matthews 1885, 154; qtd. in Blair and Hill 1962, 499-500)

If that is in fact what most white “liberals” have made of the book until recently, it dramatizes the inadequacy of the defenses we have so far considered. A book that thus feeds the stereotypes of the Brander Matthews kind of reader insults all black readers, and it redeems itself only by inciting some few sophisticated critics, many decades later, to think hard about how the story implicates white readers in unpleasant truths. That is surely not what we ordinarily mean when we call a book a classic. Even if we find a reading that at some deep level vindicates Twain for writing better than he knew, our ethical concerns remain unanswered.

Still hoping that I might someday see more merit in these defenses by others, I turn to my own efforts and find, to my considerable distress, that each of them seems almost as weak as those I have rejected. We might first use the “conversational” defense that worked for Lawrence: though Twain’s racial liberalism was inevitably limited, though he failed to imagine the “good Negro” with anything like the power of his portraits of good and bad whites, though in effect he simply wipes Jim out as a character in the final pages, he has still, by his honest effort to create the first full literary friendship between a white character and a slave, permanently opened up this very conversation we are engaged in. We would not be talking about what it might mean to cope adequately with the heritage of slavery, in literary form, had he not intervened in our conversation. There is surely something to this point, but unfortunately the argument fits Twain less well than Lawrence. Twain is not a great conversationalist, not at all “polyphonic”; rather, he is a great monologuist. We have seen here that he is not particularly good at responding to our questions: the critics I have quoted have had to do too much of the work. A great producer of confident opinions—many of them by the time he wrote already thoroughly established (for example, slavery is bad)—he never probes very deep. His positions on issues have not stimulated the kind of public debates that continue about Lawrence’s views. Instead we find collections of colorful expressions, like Your Personal Mark Twain: In Which the Great American Ventures an Opinion on Ladies, Language, Liberty, Literature, Liquor, Love, and Other Controversial Subjects (Twain 1969). Twain has opinions about many matters, but their intellectual content or moral depth would not give many TV shows serious competition. His mind takes me into no new conceptual depths; he is conventionally unconventional, so easily seduced by half-baked ideas that one would be embarrassed to offer him as a representative American intellectual.

Might I “save” him, then—or rather myself, because he is after all quite secure on his pedestal—by talking of the healing, critical power of laughter, the sheer value of comedy? Here is what I might say: “Let us celebrate Mark Twain’s preeminent comic genius, his gifted imaginings of beloved but ludicrous characters in a (quite ‘unreal,’ quite “unconvincing’) world of their own, a world in which I love to spend my days and hours and from which I emerge delighted that my world has included that kind of sheer delight. Samuel Johnson says somewhere that the sheer gift of innocent pleasure is not to be scoffed at, in a world where most pleasures are not innocent. Twain redeems my time by providing me a different ‘time’ during which my life feels quite glorious.

“It is true that in that world, in that time, there are dangerous simplifications and moments of embarrassment: it is a world inhabited only by good guys and bad guys, clever ones and stupid ones, and Twain tries to lead me too easily to think that I—one of the good and clever ones—can tell which are which. There are marvelously absurd clowns and villains, and I don’t have to reproach myself (as I do in life) for finding them clownish and villainous. I relish here good, honest, wholesome, intense sentiment; I relish an absolute sureness that everything will turn out all right and a freedom from the ‘uncomfortable’ burdens of conscience. Just think of that achievement. Twain has portrayed a world of cruelty and misery, a world of national shame, a world in which good people will in fact always be bested by the bad, and he makes us believe that everything must turn out all right! How many other novels can I think of that I can re-read again and again, teach to students and teach again, decade after decade, and still wish, after each re-reading, that they would go on longer? Huck Finn thus provides me with a kind of moral holiday even while stimulating my thought about moral issues. What a gift this is, this terribly misguided, potentially harmful work! If you try to take it away from me (you censors, black or white) I will fight you tooth and nail.

“How, then, you ask, does Huckleberry Finn differ from simple escape literature of the kind that we enjoy for an hour and then dismiss without a second thought? It does so in two ways, both of which we have hinted at already. The first is the quality of the escape: line by line, Twain simply rewards my returns with exquisite pleasures that are not so much ‘escape’ from life as the kind of thing life ought to be for. The second is a somewhat different form of our ‘conversational’ defense of Lawrence. Though Twain’s fantasy of the innocent boy discovering within his natural self the resources for overcoming society’s miseducation about ‘difference’ threatens us with the kinds of dangers I have described, it also moves us with a mythic experience that can lead to endless but fruitful inquiry into what kind of creatures we are. It is no accident that it is Huck Finn of all Twain’s works that stimulates controversy about the ethical quality of its ending and about its central situation. Somehow the fantasy/myth touches us at our most sensitive points.

In brief, long before Paul Moses and Charles Long had ever led me to think ethically about the book, it had already done its true work in this respect. The vivid images of that great-hearted black man crouched patiently in that shed, waiting while the unconsciously cruel Huck and the consciously, irresponsibly cruel adventurer Tom planned an escape that almost destroys them all— hose images haunted me even as I laughed, and they haunt me still.

“I can never know, of course, just how much miseducation the novel has provided while haunting me in this way. Who am I to say that simply thinking about the book can have removed the kinds of distortion that my black friends have pointed out. But I do believe that the mythic force of that book will be a permanent possession, a permanent gift, long after we repair black/white relations as we find them in the twentieth century. Just as Homer’s epics can now no longer harm our children in the specific way that worried Plato—shaking their confidence in the rationality and decency of the Greek gods—I suspect that Huck Finn will survive the longed-for time when racial conflict is no longer a political and moral issue in our lives.”

I seem to have grown warmer in this defense than in any of the others. But always at my back I hear the voices of those readers—including myself now—who see that the infatuation is not after all innocent. They remind me that the hours I spend in that world are after all fantasy hours; whether or not I see them as that, they have the power to deflect my imagination in dangerous ways. Jim is the “Negro” we whites might in weaker moments have hoped would emerge from slavery: docile, grateful for our gift of a freedom that nobody should ever have had the right to withhold, satisfied with a full stomach and a bit more cash than he’d had before. The picture of pre—Civil War America is a fantasy picture, in which all of the really bad occurrences are caused by caricatures of folly and evil, none of them by people who look and talk like people of our kind.” The battle in the novel for freedom from oppressive Christianity is a superficial battle, at best, and the encounter with the realities of slavery is even more superficial. The story thus offers us every invitation to miseducate ourselves, and therein lies the task of ethical criticism: to help us avoid that miseducation. The trick is always to find ways of doing that without tearing the butterfly apart in our hands.

It should be obvious that I am by no means “comfortable” (to use Huck’s word) about the incompatibilities that my project has led me to here. Having made my case against the book as honestly as possible, I now find a distressing disparity between the force of my objections (along with the relative weaknesses in the various defenses), and the strength of my continuing love for the book. My ethical criticism has disturbed a surface that once was serene. But instead of making the work and its creator look at least as great as before (Austen), or renovating a wrongly denigrated author (Lawrence), I have somewhat tarnished my hero, and since I cannot wipe from my mind the readings that black critics have imposed, I cannot, by a sheer act of will, restore Twain’s former glow. Still, though much of Huck Finn amuses me somewhat less when I read it now than it did in times irrecoverable (the recent reading was, like Cox’s, considerably more solemn than the one Twain himself obviously hoped for), the achievement still seems to me quite miraculous. On the other hand… Such a non-conclusion is disturbing to the part of me that used to seek unities and harmonies that others have overlooked, the part that once spent two years attempting to discern the form of Tristram Shandy, the part that still delights in having once “demonstrated” that Sterne actually brought that “unfinished” work to a close (1951), the part that has often earned its keep by teaching students how to see unities where others have seen only chaos. But should we not expect to discover irreducible conflicts of this kind, if each of our imaginative worlds must finally be constituted of manifold values that can never be fully realized in any one work or any one critic’s endeavor?

What is not in question is that the ethical conversation begun by Paul Moses has done its work: it has produced what I can only call a kind of conversion (both words come from the Latin convertere, “to turn or turn around”). Led by him to join in a conversation with other ethical critics, my coduction of Huckleberry Finn has been turned, once and for all, and for good or ill, from untroubled admiration to restless questioning. And it is a kind of questioning that Twain and I alone together could never have managed for ourselves.

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dinosaurwithablog · 5 months ago

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JD Davis hits a double, driving Judge home!!! Finally, Davis shows us what he can do!! Congratulations, JD!!!

TORO TORO TORRES!!! Welcome back, Gleyber. A 2 run homer!!! What an explosion of offense. It's nice to have you guys back!!! I've missed you.

#jd Davis #gleyber torres #toro toro Torres #home run #double #we're back #explosive offense #my boys #love #happiness #thank you #sharing #baseball #ny yankees #sports #ny baseball #bronx bombers #let's go yankees

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aybaybader · 2 months ago

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i mean aaron judge has to do something eventually right?

#i hate that we have to rely on one person to carry the offense 🧍#cmon cap #aaron judge #new york yankees #yankees lb

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baseballupdates · 15 days ago

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2024 MLB Silver Slugger Winners

American League

C: Salvador Perez (KCR) 1B: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (TOR) 2B: Jose Altuve (HOU) SS: Bobby Witt Jr. (KCR) 3B: José Ramírez (CLE) OF: Aaron Judge (NYY) OF: Juan Soto (NYY) OF: Anthony Santander (BAL) DH: Brent Rooker (ATH) UTIL: Josh Smith (TEX)

Offensive Team of the Year: New York Yankees

National League

C: William Contreras (MIL) 1B: Bryce Harper (PHI) 2B: Ketel Marte (ARI) SS: Francisco Lindor (NYM) 3B: Manny Machado (SDP) OF: Jackson Merrill (SDP) OF: Teoscar Hernández (LAD) OF: Jurickson Profar (SDP) DH: Shohei Ohtani (LAD) UTIL: Mookie Betts (LAD)

Offensive Team of the Year: Los Angeles Dodgers

#mlb #baseball #silver slugger #winners #2024 mlb awards

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gerritcole-coded · 2 years ago

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The rays are too annoying fir the yankees to get shutout

#COME ON #yankees lb #did our offense fucking leave with oakland

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bmkc2a · 1 month ago

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Shohei Ohtani’s Shoulder Injury Clouds Dodgers’ World Series Path

Los Angeles, October 26, 2024 – The Dodgers’ Game 2 victory over the Yankees to claim a 2-0 lead in the World Series was quickly overshadowed by a shocking twist: Shohei Ohtani, the team’s multi-talented sensation, suffered a left shoulder injury in the seventh inning while attempting a stolen base. The star player's setback left fans, teammates, and managers holding their breath as the Dodgers now face an uncertain path forward in their title quest. Here’s a look at how the injury happened, its implications for the Dodgers, and what it means for Ohtani’s role in MLB.

The Injury: What Went Wrong During the Slide?

In a critical moment of Game 2, Ohtani reached base and made an aggressive move to steal second. As he stretched out his left arm to reach the bag, he landed awkwardly, immediately showing signs of discomfort. Dodger Stadium went silent as trainers quickly assessed Ohtani, who eventually left the field, cradling his shoulder. Initial reports are mixed, but the injury could potentially be significant enough to impact his performance or availability in the series.

Medical Analysis: Understanding the Risks of a Shoulder Injury in Baseball

Ohtani’s injury is suspected to involve strain or possibly minor ligament stress, which commonly occurs when athletes extend joints beyond their range. According to Dr. James Mallory, a sports medicine expert, “Shoulder injuries from aggressive slides can range from muscle strains to dislocations, both of which can affect power and rotation—key for a player like Ohtani.”

Given the high stakes of the World Series, the Dodgers are expected to monitor Ohtani closely, possibly employing MRI scans to determine the severity. If Ohtani’s injury proves minor, the Dodgers may cautiously reintroduce him into the lineup. However, if recovery requires more time, they will need to make immediate lineup adjustments, as each game in the World Series is pivotal.

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Shohei Ohtani’s Role in the Dodgers’ Road to the World Series

The Dodgers have relied heavily on Ohtani since signing him in a landmark deal earlier this year. Ohtani’s numbers during the regular season—over .300 in batting average and high slugging metrics—were crucial in the Dodgers’ drive toward the postseason. His dual role, even though limited to hitting in this series, gave the Dodgers added flexibility and a reliable offensive force.

Ohtani’s ability to produce in clutch moments is exactly why the Dodgers brought him aboard. In Game 1, he notched two key hits, contributing to their initial win. His injury now places additional pressure on the Dodgers, as his left-handed power and adaptability are unique in their lineup.

Dodgers’ Strategic Adjustments Moving Forward

Should Ohtani be unable to return, manager Dave Roberts will need to make critical lineup decisions. The Dodgers’ reliance on Ohtani as a designated hitter and occasional left fielder means that his absence could affect both offense and defense. Without him, Roberts will likely have to rotate players like Max Muncy and J.D. Martinez into heavier-hitting roles to balance the lineup.

Roberts commented, “We’ll do whatever we can to get Shohei back, but our team is prepared to step up.” While confident, Roberts hinted at more conservative offensive strategies moving forward, as he navigates a Yankees bullpen well-equipped to exploit lineup shifts. Expect more bunts, base hits, and defensive plays to help control the game, as Roberts adapts to the loss of Ohtani’s left-handed power.

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Yankees’ Strategic Shift: Taking Advantage of the Dodgers’ Dilemma

Ohtani’s potential absence offers an opportunity for the Yankees to refocus their pitching plans. Without having to navigate around Ohtani, Yankees pitchers can concentrate on Dodgers’ right-handers and lean more on the Yankees’ left-handed bullpen options. Yankees manager Aaron Boone has already signaled possible shifts in their bullpen usage, suggesting his team is prepared to target Dodgers batters now vulnerable in Ohtani’s absence.

As the Yankees recalibrate, they’ll seek to cut the Dodgers’ momentum, seizing on any opportunities the lineup change might create. Boone emphasized the importance of “staying aggressive and attacking weak spots,” making it clear the Yankees intend to take advantage of any perceived gaps in the Dodgers’ lineup.

Fan Reaction: Social Media’s Response and Global Support for Ohtani

As word of Ohtani’s injury spread, fans around the world voiced their concerns. Within hours, #GetWellSoonShohei trended on Twitter, with fans sharing supportive messages and photos. Japanese fans, in particular, held watch parties for the World Series, with entire communities rallying to support Ohtani, whose journey to MLB has become a cultural phenomenon in Japan. Ohtani’s popularity is a testament to his role in elevating baseball’s global reach, with fans from all corners of the world united in following his career.

Many Dodgers fans on social media expressed frustration with the stolen base attempt, questioning whether Ohtani’s health should have taken priority over such a risky play. Others praised his dedication, framing the stolen base attempt as symbolic of his commitment to winning a title for Los Angeles. Fans await updates on Ohtani’s condition, with many emphasizing the need for him to prioritize recovery—even if it means stepping back.

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The Broader Impact: What Ohtani’s Absence Means for MLB’s Global Reach

Ohtani’s injury resonates beyond Dodger Stadium. As one of MLB’s most marketable stars, his absence could impact the World Series viewership, particularly in international markets like Japan, where his influence has been transformative. Major League Baseball, which has actively promoted Ohtani as a global ambassador, faces a potential loss in overseas engagement if he misses additional games.

For MLB, Ohtani embodies the sport’s potential to capture international attention, encouraging younger generations and aspiring athletes. His absence in the World Series may prompt discussions around the role of two-way players and the demands placed on athletes juggling multiple skill sets at an elite level. His injury highlights the risks of his unique role, sparking conversations about player safety and the physical limits of baseball’s two-way stars.

The Dodgers’ Next Steps: Roster Shifts and Possible Replacements

If Ohtani is indeed sidelined for upcoming games, the Dodgers will have to reconfigure both the lineup and defensive strategies. Players like Betts and Freeman, who already bear significant responsibilities, will likely step up further. The Dodgers may look to Muncy and Martinez for additional offensive power, though neither fully replaces Ohtani’s left-handed versatility.

The Dodgers’ 2-0 lead does provide some breathing room, but the Yankees’ resilience means each game remains critical. Roberts may consider calling on younger talent or other bench players, trusting in their postseason preparation to help secure the title. Regardless, the Dodgers’ path will test the entire lineup’s depth and adaptability in Ohtani’s absence.

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The Psychological Shift: Dodgers Rally Around Their Injured Star

A loss like Ohtani’s often fuels a team’s emotional drive, galvanizing players to push harder. Ohtani’s teammates have expressed unwavering support, and many have cited his work ethic and dedication as a source of inspiration. Veteran Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw commented, “Shohei has been a warrior all season. If he’s not out there, we’re going to play for him.”

The injury could serve as a unifying moment for the Dodgers, motivating the lineup to perform in Ohtani’s absence. With their superstar temporarily sidelined, the Dodgers may find new energy in the shared goal of securing a title not only for themselves but also for their injured teammate.

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Final Thoughts: Can the Dodgers Overcome Without Ohtani?

The Dodgers’ historic 2024 season has been shaped by Ohtani’s incredible talent and versatility. Losing him, even briefly, poses significant challenges, but the team’s depth and adaptability could carry them through. If the Dodgers succeed without him, it will reinforce their reputation as a team that can endure hardship without losing momentum.

Alternatively, if Ohtani’s recovery allows him to return to limited action, his presence—however small—could be the emotional lift the team needs to secure victory. Either way, the Dodgers’ resilience will be tested, as they strive to bring home a championship title with or without their star player.

In a season filled with unforgettable moments and dramatic shifts, the 2024 World Series now has an added layer of intrigue. Shohei Ohtani’s injury is yet another twist in a story of perseverance, resilience, and the pursuit of greatness. Whether he returns or watches from the sidelines, Ohtani’s spirit will remain embedded in every inning, pitch, and play, as the Dodgers chase baseball’s ultimate prize.

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