in my humble opinion Root for the home team

Author: Daniel Roberts

As I write this, the Boston Red Sox have just finished off a World Series that, in truth, was a four-game joke. Sorry, Colorado fans, but even when it was close, it felt like watching a major league baseball team play a bunch of eighth grade Pony Leaguers.

Ironically enough, I was in Ohio while the Sox were beating their previous opponents, the Cleveland Indians. In fact, on the night of game 5, I went to a big party at Bowling Green. I showed up wearing a Sox shirt and hat. Pretty dumb.

As soon as I arrived, some guy peeing outside saw my Sox shirt and promptly called me a name that I think members of MOQA would not have been pleased to hear. Nice, huh?

Yet when I entered the party, it all changed. Yes, everyone was wearing Indians gear, and at first I got some dirty looks. But then I defended myself by saying, "I'm from Boston." This apparently changed everything, and soon everyone there wanted to meet me. I was representing my turf, and I was not doing it just to rile people up, but because I genuinely care about the performance of sports teams from my city.

Back on campus a week later, I went to Deborah Fisher's proto-Apologia for the tire sculpture. At her lecture, she showed us an earlier artwork of hers called "New Orleans Elegy." She had created it after Hurricane Katrina. It was basically a craggy slab of steel, with rusted bronze rivulets meant to symbolize roads that had flooded. She told us that on her blog, after posting images of the work, she received angry posts from New Orleans residents berating her for depicting their city as dead or dying, and reminding her she had "no right" because she did not live through the catastrophe, and she was not from New Orleans.

Fisher argued that the destruction of New Orleans was a "shared experience," but once I considered it, I agreed with the angry Louisianans (Louisianers?). Fisher even admitted she has never been to New Orleans. As I recalled my time cheering the Sox over in enemy territory, I felt that no outsider could truly know what it is like to be from a certain place.

There is an undeniable sense of identity that comes with one's geographic roots. Katrina victims are right to not want their city portrayed by a warped, outdoor slab of corroded brown trash. It is just like how people now see the Red Sox as a villainous team with some of the best players in baseball, but in Beantown we still think of our boys as the same lovable, underdog team they have always been - one World Series win in 2004 has not changed that.

So the book "Maximum City" can get hot in the states, but American readers would never truly understand what it is like to live in Mumbai. Or I could hurry up and finish "What is the What," the latest Dave Eggers novel about one man's childhood as a Sudanese refugee, and I can feel politically informed and intellectual - but still, I would really have no idea of how it felt to live through the Sudanese civil war.

Hometown pride is why my friend Mark adores "Mystic River" and "The Departed" and cannot wait to see "Gone Baby Gone." It is why my first-year roommate Siddharth loved hearing about my cab ride with a guy from India over fall break. Hometown pride is why, even though we all love Middlebury, we go home for short breaks during the year and always feel reluctant to come back.

And all of this proves why Hillary Clinton, who is from Illinois and grew up in Chicago rooting for the Cubbies, cannot possibly claim to be a Yankees fan!

Daniel Roberts '09 is an English major from Newton Mass.