Of Yankees and Monsters
I just finished watching Bronx Zoo ‘90: Crime, Chaos, and Baseball. It is a documentary series on Peacock about the embarrassingly disastrous New York Yankees 1990 season. As a Red Sox fan, I would have enjoyed the story more without the final episode in which George Steinbrenner returns from exile and the Derek Jeter-led Yankee dynasty begins. It’s kind of like in the Avengers when Thanos wiped out humanity: a bummer of a way to end an otherwise enjoyable story. But hey - we’ve got to throw the Yankee fans a bone every now and then, right? They get weird and act out if you don’t kiss their asses.
But the most interesting part of the doc to me was a relatively small side story that kind of blew my mind (spoiler alert, by the way). In early 1990, Yankee outfielder Mel Hall spotted a pretty 15-year old girl in the crowd and started “dating” her. It was a typically disturbing pedophile story with Hall using his celebrity status to groom her and convince her family to allow it. Mindblowingly, Hall even included a prom picture with her in the family section of the Yankee yearbook… which the Yankees apparently had no problem with. It was fucking gross and no one really said anything to protect her. Well… almost no one.
This is the part that fucked me up. As typical in these stories, Hall isolated his teenage victim by keeping her away from her friends and family holed up in an apartment at Trump Tower. She rarely went outside without him, but on one occasion she was out by herself. A man that they both knew and socialized with stopped her and said something along the lines of, “Are you ok? If you need help getting out of this relationship, let me know. I will help you.” Finally, an adult reaches out to help her! What a good person, right?
That person: Donald Trump.
What? The ‘grab em by the pussy’ guy? The guy who famously barged into the dressing rooms of teenage beauty pageant contestants? Buddy of Jeffrey Epstein? This guy saw a teenage girl in trouble and acted with empathy? Isn’t this guy a monster? What the fuck?
My first urge was to qualify this seemingly selfless behavior by assigning Trump some other vile ulterior motive. Maybe Trump wanted to fuck the teenage girl himself. Perhaps this was more about his inherent racism against Mel Hall. Failing to find my conjecture satisfying due to lack of evidence, I moved on to other explanations. Maybe 1990 Trump was more capable of empathy than 2020s Trump? But my clinical understanding of narcissistic personality disorder (which Trump clearly suffers from) doesn’t jibe with that. That level of narcissism is formed in childhood. Trump at 35 would be just as narcissistic as Trump at 75. I was baffled. How did this happen?
Then another question hit me: why am I jumping through so many hoops to make this act of kindness make sense? Through watching this story, I discovered a strange need inside me: I need my monsters to be monsters. Amoral narcissists like Trump can’t have moments of behaving like normal, empathetic human beings. That shakes something deep inside me. It feels wrong. And I think I’m not alone.
We love to villainize people who do horrible things. It makes sense - it helps us cope with living in a world where these unspeakable acts happen. Serial killers, child rapists, terrorists - the perpetrators of these crimes must be a separate species from us. It helps us categorize them, put them in a box, and thus feel safer. It’s a natural response, I guess. When we see a pedophile on To Catch A Predator, we don’t see them as a sick person worthy of any empathy. We see them as a demon to be humiliated by a television host and then tackled by cops (who wait for an interview to be conducted for some weird, probably not legal reason) and whisked out of the humanity pool forever. I understand the urge. I do it myself. But I don’t know - something about it doesn’t sit right with me.
A similar thing happened when I was watching Quiet on the Set, a documentary about Nickelodeon’s kid shows in the 90’s. The doc portrays showrunner Dan Schneider as a perverted, mean-spirited tyrant who made women and children’s lives way more difficult than necessary for making stupid kids’ television. The doc series was pretty exploitative and sensationalist, but no one can argue with the fact that Dan Schneider was a sexist bully.
But then, former child star Drake Bell told a harrowing tale of extensive sexual abuse at the hands of a trusted adult on the set. When he finally disclosed the abuse to the network, there was only one adult from the show who was supportive of him. You guessed it: Dan Schneider. Wait - what? Isn’t he a horrible human being? How can someone be capable of both kindness and cruelty? It doesn’t fit!
I’m not sure why I’m so stuck on this. It would be easier just to write off Trump’s and Schneider’s moments of kindness as random outliers and get back to demonizing them. And don’t get me wrong - their actions deserve demonizing. But something just doesn’t sit right with me about our tendency to dehumanize people, even the worst of us. I think it’s dangerous.
For example, let’s talk about sexual assault. (Wow - this is a really fun article this week, Brendan!) If you ask most women, either they or someone they know have experienced some level of unwanted sexual contact, ranging from groping to coercion to rape. It’s a goddamn epidemic. And yet… none of my male friends sit around and talk about the women they’ve assaulted. As far as i know, I don’t know any rapists. How are the numbers of women being assaulted so high but I don’t know any rapists?
The answer has to be: of course I know rapists. I just don’t know they’re rapists. Because they don’t slink around shadowy corners in trench coats and unmarked vans. They are among us. They ARE us. When we dehumanize people, we become blind to the unpleasant reality that we all have dark sides. And I think that sort of willful ignorance makes us less safe. When we think of people who do awful things as inhuman boogeyman (no relation), we don’t see the very human bad actors hiding in plain sight.
There are no such thing as monsters. We are the monsters. It feels better not to think about it, but we’re adults. We need to face hard things if we want to better protect the vulnerable.
Normally, this is the point of the article where I make some sort of joke to tie the whole thing up, but… I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’ve got on this one. I recognize this was some out-of-left-field heavy shit. Thanks for sticking with me to this point and… Yankees suck?
Boogie Writes is a completely independent endeavor by one hard-working funnyman trying to make his way in the world today (which takes everything you’ve got.) If you like what you read, please subscribe, support, and tell a friend! Also - do you need advice? Of course you do! Send your queries to brendan@brendanboogie.com with “Dear Boogie” in the subject and get some solid or at least passable advice!