One night when I was 19 years old, a friend and I found ourselves at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe for some reason or other. It was an open mic night, and we watched, dumbfounded, as a long cavalcade of middle-class neo-bohemians expressed their racial grievances at absurd length.

Wanting to hoot down the whole show, my friend signed up to take the mic. He spoke at length about the problems the great composer Charles Mingus had publishing his memoir under its original, unprintable title, which incorporated an unprintable epithet; brows were quickly furrowed and scowls unveiled. After the show, as we were riding the D train back into Brooklyn, three scruffy poets of indeterminate ethnicity came up to us and brandished a knife, and it took half an hour to convince them that quoting the proposed title of a book did not constitute an insensitive race incident, much less one worthy of a fight.

These days, whenever I think about Barry Bonds and the millions of words that have been written about him, I think about that night. There are a lot of people who could fit the role of the knife-wielding poets, so eager to take offense at life that they lose all perspective and end up on the D train brandishing their outrage.

Who would you cast as the clueless wielders of the blade? Those who defend Bonds, contrasting the treatment he’s received to that Mark McGwire has received and claiming that this shows Bonds is the victim of racism? Those who damn Bonds and ridicule the notion that anyone might mail him a death threat because of the color of his skin? The odd few who defiantly applaud him when he comes to bat? The large majority that jeers him and throws rubbish at him while he stands around in left field sneering at them? You could make a case for any and all of them, but what’s important is what they have in common: They’ve all lost any frame of reference. They’re looking for a reason to shake their fists in wrath and denounce enemies and ideologies. That neither exists hardly matters.

Bonds, the best player to ever step on a field, is completely irrelevant. He remains the best hitter in the game, but he plays for a lastplace team, and no matter how good he still is, he just has the feel of some old fossil hanging around to finish out his career records. He’s a more famous Craig Biggio. There’s no sense of anticipation or tension in his interminable chase of Hank Aaron’s career home runs record, which seems to exist mainly as a series of embarrassing video clips featuring him twirling, prancing, and preening for the cameras at home plate while he lofts another ball into the stands during yet another 5-4 San Francisco loss.

Off the field, he’s also irrelevant. I suppose it’s possible at this late date to retain some interest in his various arrogant, boastful statements, the possibility that he might be indicted for one of a variety of low-grade crimes, or his status as a symbol of greed and corruption; but every day I read the newspaper and learn about crooked politicians doing wrong and lining their pockets with cash for doing it. Bonds doesn’t really register as notable or important in any of these areas. If he is elected to Congress and then caught stuffing his freezer full of bribe money or selling CIA contracts, I’ll change my mind; until then, no.

For these reasons, it remains a mystery to me that people remain so passionate about the man. There are reasonable people who will claim, in perfect seriousness, that there’s no real evidence that Bonds spent most of this decade as a walking chemistry experiment to rival Hunter S. Thompson. And there are perfectly reasonable people who will claim, in perfect seriousness, that Bonds has done extraordinarily corrupt and evil things and shamed baseball. Both sorts of people will, in a manner of speaking, sit down in the D train and wave their knife around, offended because you don’t share their passionate conviction that Bonds means something important.
And who’s watching, bewildered, as the knife is waved around? Of all people, it’s Bud Selig, a craven and ridiculous ditherer who has, almost by accident, done something noble by refusing to make any proclamation about the supposedly burning issue of whether or not he’ll be in attendance when Bonds finally breaks the record. People of one cast insist that his refusal to say he won’t attend constitutes tacit approval of Bonds’s atrocities; people of another cast cry out in anguish that Selig is dishonoring baseball by entertaining the notion of shunning someone against whom no charge has been proved.

Selig, meanwhile, has done the honorable and sane thing. Presented with a nation of lunatics, he’s mocked the whole thing. He’s perhaps done it inadvertently, but he has done it. His refusal to be pinned down on the Bonds matter is a hilarious affront to anyone who manages to get truly worked up over something so pitiably trivial as the disgraced old fossil’s broken chase for a meaningless record. In a day when he’s expected by everyone to care, deeply and passionately, he quite obviously doesn’t, and simply wants to get away from the whole inane scene. I hope that whatever he decides to do, it makes everyone who’s decided to be angry quite angry. There’s nothing as funny as the sight of someone who’s gone temporarily mad over nothing at all.

tmarchman@nysun.com