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Snippets

I once thought I understood proper tipping, but now I am confused. More and more the machines where I pay ask if I want to leave a tip at places where I seldom tipped before, such as a bagel shop or a coffee bean retailer. But I was very surprised when I went through a toll booth and I was asked if I wanted to tip.

The handwritten sign in the bar’s window said:

          Here’s to Strong Women

                    May we know them

                    May we be them

                    May we raise them

When inside, I said to a favorite server that the sign was offensive. She asked if that was because there was no reference to men, and I replied, “No. Because there should be another line: ‘May we love them.’ ” She gave me a thumbs up and a fist bump. When a bit later I saw the at-least-once-burned owner and said the same thing, she snapped back, “No one believes in love anymore.”

Until recently I was not aware that Stellantis was a major American car maker. Of course, until recently I did not even know that Stellantis existed.

I was only trying to spread hope, but the mother seemed upset when I peered into the stroller and said, “Some two-year-olds get better looking as they grow older.”

All those TV sports shows ought to interview college athletes about their favorite professors and then produce clips of those teachers both in the classroom and interacting with the athletes outside of classes.

A wise person said: “The fact that you cannot serve God and mammon does not seem to have hurt business any.”

The sidewalk sign for a neighborhood establishment said among other things that I could buy “esoteric products” on the second floor. Can you tell me what I could expect to find?

If a son is a “Junior,” is it psychologically harmful to him if his father is not “Senior?” Does this help explain Donald Trump, Jr.?

Trump Sr. boasts that gasoline prices were much lower when he was president than now. He is correct, but even when he is correct, he is wrong. He says that the prices back in his presidential days were much lower than now. They were, but he quotes prices that were much lower than they actually were when he was President and then quotes much higher prices than is true for today. Is there a name for this syndrome where a person tells falsehoods even when the truth favors him?

When Trump took office, the cost of gasoline (“Obama’s gas prices”) were lower than the averages during the next four years. I have never heard Trump mention this.

“The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them” Samuel McChord Crothers.

“The best liar is he who makes the smallest of lying go the longest way.” Samuel Butler.

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First Sentences

“It’s a favorite pastime of Americans, and American conservatives especially, to keep watch for various evildoers scheming to seize the public sphere and rob of us our historic liberties.” Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It.

“Richard Cadogan raised his revolver, took careful aim and pulled the trigger.” Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop.

“Can you remember meeting William Shakespeare for the first time?” Farah Karim-Cooper, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking about Race.

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog name Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of fine spring afternoon.” James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss.

“Olmsted’s letter from Texas about the romance of nomadism was tailored to its recipient: Anne Charlotte Lynch, a New York poet, globe-trotting traveler, and eminent convener of literary salons.” Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide.

“The bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18 September by Miss Emily Wharton, a sixty-five-year-old spinster of the parish of St. Matthew’s in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged ten, of no particular parish as far as he knew or cared.” P.D. James, A Taste for Death.

“Rain drums Chicago’s gridded streets on the early morning of June 9, 1880.” C.W. Goodyear, President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier.

“The Dean, as he lay awake in bed that memorable Sunday night, pondered the astonishing vagaries of the weather.” Michael Gilbert, Close Quarters.

“On May 2, 1938, three special trains, carrying hundreds of German diplomats, government officials, Nazi Party leaders, security agents, and journalists, left Berlin accompanying the Führer on his first—and what would turn out to be his last—visit to Rome.” David I. Kertzer, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.

“In the time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable seaport would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners, man-of-war’s men or merchant sailors in holiday attire, ashore on liberty.” Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor.

“It is hard to imagine working with books—writing an essay, a lecture, a report, a sermon—without the ability to find what you’re looking for quickly and easily: without, that is, the convenience of a good index.” Dennis Duncan, Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age.

“The most powerful man in Indiana stood next to the new governor at the Inaugural Ball, there to be thanked, applauded, and blessed for using the nation’s oldest domestic terror group to gain control of a uniquely American state.” Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan? Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.

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A Memorial for Ruby (Guest Post by Nephew DM)

Thursday, October, 13, 2005 was Yom Kippur. I was off from school as is the case with all the Jewish holidays if they fall during the week. I remember the day vividly; I’ve mentioned several times before that I am blessed (however; sometimes I think it might be more of a curse) with a photographic memory. It was cloudy, gray, rather humid for October, definitely not jacket weather. I went for a run after breakfast, cleaned a bit, showered, then decided I would head out to Willow Grove Mall to see if anything struck my fancy for Greg’s birthday (he would be turning 28 on October 28).

We had discussed getting a dog for quite a while. We wanted a dog but I think both of us were afraid to take the plunge. Dogs are a big responsibility we quipped, if we had one, we couldn’t just take off to go somewhere for a weekend… this was something we spontaneously did now and then. If we had a dog those spur of the moment things were bound to end; for these reasons neither of us made a move.

As I was driving down Easton Road in Glenside that morning towards the mall, I remembered I would be passing a branch of the Montgomery County SPCA… what harm would a brief stop cause. I walked in and asked where I could see the dogs they had that were waiting to be adopted. A woman took me to the back where they were in cages. They were all beautiful in their own way…  I wanted to adopt all of them; however, there was this little Lhasa Apso named Simba that I was immediately drawn to. I thought Greg would adore him. Even though I wanted it to be a surprise I realized this would need a consultation from him.

I asked if they could hold Simba. The woman told me there was no holding; you had to adopt on the spot. If you weren’t ready, you’d run the risk of the dog being adopted when you came back. I went out to the car and called Greg on my flip phone (ah… technology). Thankfully he was at his desk and answered his phone. He agreed he’d leave the office a little early and we’d drive up together to see Simba, and perhaps adopt him.

I thanked the woman at the SPCA and picked up a couple of other small gifts for Greg at the mall confident that Simba would still be there when we returned in the early evening. We arrived at the SPCA around 6:30pm and I asked a different woman if we could see Simba. I told her we were interested in perhaps adopting him. She replied, “Simba was adopted this afternoon.”  I was crestfallen.

Greg asked to see the other dogs that were available. I wanted to leave. Greg insisted we look. I relented and went with him into the back. We looked around and he pointed at this little red furball who was staring at the floor. He said, “What do you think of that one?” All of the paws had some white in them, but the front, left paw was striking as it looked like a white glove. The woman who brought us back there said, “That’s Ruby, she was just dropped off this afternoon. The owner said she’s untrainable. She’s about one year old.” We asked to see her.

She was quiet, stared at the floor, shook a little bit. When another dog was brought out to be examined by some other potential pet parents, she let out a little woof.

As we were petting her, the woman said that she still needed to be spayed so if we wanted her, we couldn’t have her until Monday. We looked at each other and said, “We’ll take her… the extra couple of days gives us time to get the house ready for her.”

As we were filling out the paperwork the woman then said, “Oh wait, you can take her now, she’s already spayed. I made a mistake.” We both said, almost in unison, “Since this is your mistake can you at least give us until tomorrow? We have nothing at home for her and need to at least pick up some basic dog things.” Thankfully the woman gave in and said she could make an exception this time; we had until 4pm the next day (Friday) to pick Ruby up.

I picked her up on my home from work and the rest is history. The first couple of days I think she was unsure of whether we were going to keep her; she didn’t let me out of her sight. The little girl watched me shower, watched me grade papers, watched me do everything (Greg had to go away that weekend to visit his parents, so I was solo with the new fur baby). We tried to crate train her, but she cried a lot. On Sunday night (the day Greg came home), I was lying in bed… she hopped in, and Greg looked at her, then at me, and I remember saying, “Fuck it, let her sleep with us.”

So much for crate training.

She slept with us for the next fifteen years until it got too hard for her to jump onto, and then off of the bed. I still miss her weight bumping up against me…. God how I miss it. She would often wait for me to fall asleep and then shift to the other side of the bed. I felt like she knew I was anxious certain nights and wanted to help me sleep.

Ruby completed our little family… she became our child at a time when it was still very difficult for gay men to become parents. Ruby taught us patience, and how to appreciate the simple things again. We didn’t mind missing our spontaneous jaunts here and there on weekends. Our walks down on Forbidden Drive and the Wissahickon more than filled that void. She brought unspeakable joy to the both of us with her kind, playful, and beautiful spirit (furthermore, she was an island of sanity during the pandemic lockdown, Greg’s mother’s illness, my recovery from open heart surgery… I could go on…).

After living with Cushing’s Disease, being attacked by two big dogs, and countless other dust-ups here and there over the years (did I tell you she was a tough cookie as well?) she finally told us she was tired this past week. It may sound cliché, but a true lady always knows when it is time to say goodbye. Ruby is no exception to this, even though she was tough, she was still a true lady. Greg and I decided we needed to respect and honor this even though our hearts are beyond broken.

Thank you, our dear sweet little girl, for the 18 years you gave us… I so wish we could have stolen that first year of your life as well (yes, I am greedy). I can only hope we will see each other again in the future. Words cannot express how much we are going to miss you!

Please know Greg and I love you to the moon and back… always have, always will!

Rest easy our little darling Rubygirl.

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Snippets

Only a couple weeks ago I was singing: “I am getting sutured in the morning./ Bing-bong machines are gonna chime./I still could party/but I must be hearty./So, get me to the OR on time.”

I had my left knee replaced. Because I had the right knee replaced a decade ago, I knew it was not a walk in the park. (Did you get the humor?) Because of the weakness and the opioids, I have missed some of my self-imposed posting deadlines.

I guess a friend was trying to make me feel better by sending me an internet page indicating that things could be worse. It said that a knee replacement was only the third most painful orthopedic procedure. I don’t know how such things are measured, but two spinal procedures topped the list. Fourth and fifth were ACL repairs and a shoulder replacement. This only reminded me that I have had two ACL operations and one shoulder replaced. I don’t really desire pain, but I am apparently composed of faulty and injured joints.

Two months ago, a friend had a hip replaced, and during his recovery he said that he was told a hip replacement was a relatively easy procedure compared to a knee replacement. After I mentioned the pain rankings, he asked where hips were on the list. I did not know. I only saw the top five, but I told him it was far below the others under the heading “Almost a Vacation.” The friend was not overly amused.

A medical technician told me that she was going to have a manicure later in the afternoon. It soon came out that the next day she was flying to Miami to be with her boyfriend.  She told me that he was from New York but now worked in Florida. I asked what he did, and she replied, “He’s a personal bodyguard. . . . He works for a private family.” I decided to stop my inquiries.

During my recovery, I have listened to a lot of radio. Unfortunately, my local NPR station was having its dreaded fundraising week. I am always fascinated by the matching grants. You know, the ones that say, “If we raise $10,000 by tonight, a donor will match it.” If that amount is not timely raised, does the supposed donor really withhold the money?

It hardly lightened my mood, however, to listen to any news. There was 24/7 coverage of the Mideast conflict. That was not surprising, but I was bewildered not to hear more about or from Jared Kushner. I thought that he and his pappy-in-law had solved the Mideast. On the other hand, the Mideast has apparently made Kushner successful since the Saudis have given him $2 billion to play around with.

And then, of course, there are the shootings that seem to happen even more than Mideast violence. The new House Speaker met the news of the Lewiston massacre with the old recipe—prayers for the evil to end. I assume he believes that God is eternal, and Johnson must know that people have been uttering prayers for as long as prayers have existed. He did not address why prayers should now stop the violence when they have not before.

Of course, in the time of Jesus, apparently evil existed, but there were no mass shootings. Perhaps we should all reflect on that.

At least one of the recent shooters seems to have been mentally ill. Is someone with a mental illness “evil”?

Can you turn the other cheek as Jesus commanded and also carry a gun?

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First Sentences

“They watched as a dead man was brought to the hospital: a fractured skull, blood everywhere, ligaments ripped loose from their mooring—medics had hauled him there ‘in three buckets,’ a bystander remarked.” Reid Mitenbuler, Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age.

“There was an old Jew who lived at the site of the old synagogue up on Chicken Hill in the town of Pottstown, Pa., and when Pennsylvania State Troopers found the skeleton at the bottom of an old well off Hayes Street, the old Jew’s house was the first place they went.” James McBride, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.

“Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

“Everyone in Lamperdown knew that Mr. Behrens, who lived with his aunt at the Old Rectory and kept bees, and Mr. Calder, who lived in a cottage on the hilltop outside the village and was the owner of a deerhound called Rasselas, were the closest of close friends.” Michael Gilbert, Game Without Rules.

“In August 1945, after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered, the soldiers, sailors, and airmen scheduled to participate in the invasion of Japan reacted as you might expect.” Evan Thomas, Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.

“When people ask me what I do—taxi drivers, dental hygienists—I tell them I work in an office.” Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

“Approaching the museum, ready to hunt, Stéphane Breitwieser clasps hands with his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklau, and together they stroll to the front desk and say hello, a cute couple.” Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession.

“Killing someone is easy.” Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club.

“For more than a decade, defenders of democracy have been issuing a stark warning: The world is in the midst of a ‘democratic recession,’ with sign of a turnaround on the horizon.” Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It.

“Jacob Finch Bonner, the once promising author of the ‘New & Noteworthy’ (The New York Times Book Review) novel The Invention of Wonder, let himself into the office he’d been assigned on the second floor of Richard Peng Hall, set his beat-up leather satchel on the barren desk, and looked around in something akin to despair.” Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot.

“In January 1829, Abram Garfield emerged from a shack in Orange, Ohio, swiveled west, and started toward what passed for civilization on this frontier.” C.W. Goodyear, President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier.

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Remember the Panama Canal Treaties

Knowledgeable people find the roots of the Republican Party’s dysfunction in the hyperpartisanship practiced by Newt Gingrich when he became Speaker of the House in 1995. Others find tentacles spreading from the Tea Party movement which emerged in 2009 and brought conspiracy theories into mainstream politics. But seeds were planted twenty years earlier with the now largely forgotten battle over the Panama Canal treaties, which I learned about when I read Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right (2008) by Adam Clymer.

Clymer explains how the fight over the Panama Canal Treaties helped fuel the rise of the modern Right. Both treaties were signed in 1977. One treaty gave the United States the right to use force to assure that the canal would remain open to ships of all nations. The second treaty gave Panama control over the canal starting in 2000.

In order to take effect, the treaties not only had to be signed by the leaders of Panama and the United States, they also had to be ratified by appropriate bodies within those countries. After Panama did so in a plebiscite, a political battle ensued in the United States Senate over their ratifications. According to Clymer, this led to the emergence of Richard Viguerie, a founder of modern conservatism, the use of direct-mail marketing, and the rise of single-issue PACs designed to raise money and defeat moderate Republicans.

Although it was President Jimmy Carter who signed the pacts, the negotiations had started under President Nixon. The treaties were thought desirable because they gave America the right to assure the canal’s neutrality, and they removed a flashpoint for much of Latin America, and Panama in particular, by giving Panama control over the canal. Those supporting the treaties maintained that they would increase the security of the canal by helping to remove the threats of guerrilla attacks, which were almost impossible for America and Panama to defend against. 

The treaties were backed by some prominent conservatives, including Henry Kissinger and William Buckley, but they were also attacked by other conservatives in near-hysterical terms. Opponents maintained that this was a surrender of American sovereignty, and furthermore, the military leader of Panama was pro-Communist. Marxists would control the canal and Panama, and the harm to the U.S. as a result would be tremendous.

What is surprising to a modern surveyor of the political scene is that some Senators supported the treaty simply because they thought it was the right thing to do even though they knew that their ratification votes would harm them politically. The single-issue PACs targeted some of these Senators and through direct-mail marketing, inflamed a cadre of voters. Republicans who supported the treaties were defeated in primaries when they stood for reelection. Their overall record did not matter. Their vote on this one issue doomed their political careers. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan opposed the Treaty, and some, including Bill Buckley, maintained that the treaty controversy helped elect Reagan president.

 This is an issue that is now largely forgotten even though its aftermath still affects the United States. A lesson from the controversy has been absorbed, even if that lesson’s source is not remembered. Republican politicians are in fear that if they don’t toe some single-issue lines, a portion of conservatives will target them and defeat them in the primaries. The result is that the politicians cannot develop nuanced positions; compromises are verboten. Instead, the “wrong” stance on individual issues can result in a primary defeat even if the politician accepts the conservative line on other matters. If I don’t completely accept the NRA’s positions, I may be defeated in the primary. If I adopt a moderate stance on abortion, I may be defeated in the primaries. If I have concerns about tax cuts, I may be defeated in the primaries. And so on. The result is a lockstep, hard-right conservatism. Back in 1978, some conservative Senators studied a complex situation and decided that a ratification vote for the Panama Canal treaties was in the best interests of the country. What is remembered is not that their position was right, but that some lost their political careers as a result.

History, of course, has shown them to be right. The Canal functions just fine. Panama is not a hotbed of anti-American Communism. Those who were wrong, however, did not pay a price for their belief. They continued in office. And most of us have forgotten the debate.

In what now seems impossible, Democrats and Republicans joined together to ratify the treaties. Fifty-two Democrats and sixteen Republicans voted for ratification, while ten Democrats and twenty-two Republicans voted against. We have seen little of such bipartisanship since the Panama Canal treaties. On the other hand, since that 1977 controversy we have seen many conservatives benefit even when proved wrong.

The Republican party has been on a forty-year path to its present dysfunction.

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Snippets

Hamas attacks Israel. Is this, as an American Jewish leader said, not only an attack on Israel but on Jews? If so, is the war on Hamas also a war on Islam and Muslims? A related question: Can one criticize or even question Israel without being labeled, or being, antisemitic?

A conservative candidate for president said that the incumbent president should urge, lean on, coerce Egypt into taking in those who are fleeing from Gaza. He did not, however, say that the United States should open its welcoming arms and take in more refugees.

About two decades ago I went to Israel on an unusual junket—all expenses paid to study terrorism from an Israeli perspective. An interlude in the trip was a guided walk around Jerusalem. We started at a place that overlooked Jerusalem. Our exceptional guide pointed out things in the old city; where Bethlehem was and is in the hills near Jerusalem; the Palestinian-controlled territory; the wall marking the boundary (although Israelis called it a fence, not a wall); and a mural-painted wall (this was called a wall) behind us, which prevented Palestinians down below from shooting into Israeli apartments up above.

Our location was a parking lot, and a nearby food van was, like many other Israeli places, playing old American rock and roll. The third song I noticed was Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. I almost laughed at the remarkable fortuity. I know that the song is about a woman’s strength in rejecting a lover who walked out, but what better chorus could there be as I looked out over Israel and Jerusalem than I WILL SURVIVE.

During this trip, because of the sensitive places we visited—military and intelligence facilities—we were accompanied by heavily-armed young men, and in Jerusalem I fell into step with one such escort. A few moments later, some men rounded a corner shouting and elbowing others aside. I asked the escort, born and raised in Israel, what that was about, and he replied, “Just some Arabs showing off.” He and I exited the old city together, and I was visually assaulted by a row of tacky tourist shops. American rock and roll came from them, too, and the first song I heard outside the old city was R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion. I smiled and said to the escort, “That doesn’t seem right for Jerusalem.” He stopped, paused a beat, and thoughtfully said, “I think that is the only way.”

Is he right? Can there only be peace if we lose our religion?

“There are only two gods worth worshipping. Chance and electricity.” Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

“We’ve all been blessed with God-given talents. Mine just happens to be beating up people.” Sugar Ray Leonard. (Why is it always Sugar Ray? Why not Sugar Jim or Sugar Marie?)

Each year, the U.S. gives nearly $4 billion to Israel in military aid, which since the founding of Israel has totaled hundreds of billions of dollars. Only occasionally has this been controversial. On the other hand, some in Congress don’t want any more aid for Ukraine. They contend that sending this money abroad is a drain on our economy. But when I read about Ukraine aid, the story often says that Ukraine is using major portions of the money to buy American-made arms and other military supplies. How much of the Ukraine aid is actually spent in the United States?

“Admiration for ourselves and our institutions is too often measured by our contempt and dislike for foreigners.” William Ralph Inge.

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The Shot Heard ‘Round the World (concluded)

          The writings by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Red Smith about Bobby Thomson’s dramatic home run turned my thoughts to Don DeLillo’s remarkable novel, Underworld, which I had read twenty years earlier. It is not an easy book, or at least it was not for me. I started the book and gave up. A few years later, I picked it up again, this time finishing it, realizing that I had just read something extraordinary.

Don DeLillo’s Underworld starts with a set piece about that mythic baseball playoff game won by Bobby Thomson’s home run in the bottom of the ninth, and echoes of it recur throughout the novel. A few years ago, I thought of DeLillo’s portrayal of that day again in an unlikely place—waiting in line at Kennedy airport for a flight to Rome. I found myself in conversation with the man behind me who was a professor at a university in Naples. He told me that his specialty was Italian-American literature. I had heard of many academic concentrations, but never of this one. I asked what authors interested him and he mentioned Richard Russo. I was somewhat taken aback. When I have read Russo, I only thought that I was reading an American novel, not an Italian-American one. His list did not include Mario Puzo, but he praised John Fante, an author I had never heard of. (Because of this conversation, I have since read Fante’s Bandini Quartet­, which I had trouble finding. My copy was shipped from England. These novels are quite good, and I should thank him for putting me on to them.) He went on to talk about DeLillo, and I asked him about his reaction to Underworld. He was effusive. I asked if he had trouble understanding that baseball game at the beginning of the book, and he gave a charming smile and chortled that he did not have a clue about what was going on. I did not try to explain. There is something so peculiarly American about that baseball game that I did not think a few minute’s conversation on the topic could accomplish much with a foreigner, and, furthermore, while I did feel that the game had some sort of significance besides its mere outcome, I was not sure why.

          Finally, after reading about the game by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Red Smith, I read for the third time DeLillo’s take on it, and I began to understand at least some of the reasons why that playoff lives in American consciousness. Perhaps every moment in American history is some sort of watershed, but this game encapsulated aspects of American history and past culture and foretold changes that were to come.

          In 1951, baseball provided a peaceful connection to the past. “You do what they did before you,” DeLillo says. The Bobby Thomson game was played at a time when America was thinking it could put the sacrifice and horrors of World War II behind it and carry forward a peaceful world. Baseball reminded us of that past. DeLillo has Gil Hodges, a Brooklyn player in that game, say the Polo Ground is “a name he loves, a precious echo of things and times before the century went to war.”

          Baseball also then resonated with a wide swath of Americans, or at least American males. Red Smith, writing a few years after the game, noted that almost every American male had played some version of baseball, whether it was baseball itself, or softball, stickball, five hundred, punch ball, kickball, or myriad other games. In 1951, it was America’s sport and somehow represented a perpetually youthful America. DeLillo writes about Thomson that “he is forever Bobby now, a romping boy lost to time. . . .”

Baseball is just a game, but it could feel more momentous. DeLillo writes, “The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.” And a particular game could feel as if it fit into the tide of American history. Russ Hodges’s producer says about Thomson’s home run, “Mark the spot. Like where Lee surrendered to Grant or something.”

          We readers of Underworld know, however, what its characters did not: that the dominance of baseball was going to fade. A column by Red Smith makes that point. He had driven to Florida for baseball’s spring training, where many major league baseball teams prepared for the regular season. He said that once on these drives he had seen baseball and all those other games being played by men and boys in the various towns along his route, but now he no longer did. DeLillo foreshadows this change by having the broadcasters ask how one is to explain the 20,000 empty seats in the stadium. The sport’s hold on America was still strong, but it was waning.

The 1950s was the beginning of many changes to America, and the famous playoff stood on that cusp. Looking back at that game, there seems to be a time up until Thomson’s home run and a different time afterwards, and DeLillo creates scenes in the grandstands that indicate changes soon to come. No one knows, as far as I know, what happened to the baseball Thomson hit once it landed in the left field seats, but in DeLillo’s telling one Cotter Martin wrests it away from others scrambling for the ball and leaves the park with it. Cotter, an African American youth, has sneaked into the ballpark and is seemingly befriended by a white man seating nearby. Of course, almost all Americans in 1951 knew that a major change in our race relations had occurred only a few years before when the major leagues’ color barrier was broken when the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, who played in the famous game. A few know that the next scheduled batter after Thomson was Willie Mays, who would not have been playing if that color bar had not been bashed. In 1951, it may have seemed that we were finally making great peaceful strides towards resolving our racial problems. Bill Waterson, the white man talking with the black kid in the novel, seems to capture that, but we readers know that racial peace and resolution faced many violent episodes after 1951 and still has not been reached.

Emmitt Till and the Birmingham church bombings, snapping dogs and firehoses, bus boycotts and many killings were soon to come. And DeLillo has Waterson turn creepy towards Cotter. The white man wants the baseball that the boy has fought for. Bill yells at Cotter that he is going to get the ball and threatens violence. He chases Cotter out of the stadium and through the surrounding streets, and Cotter is only safe with his new possession when he makes it into the black Harlem that was not far from the Polo Grounds.

The game also stood on the cusp of a great change in American mass culture: the rise of network TV. The coast-to-coast broadcast of the game was itself a harbinger of that, but DeLillo signals it in another way. He has Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor, and J. Edgar Hoover together in attendance. (I do not know if Sinatra, Gleason, and Shor were at the game, but I know Hoover was there.) They joke and drink, but Gleason keeps saying that he should be at rehearsal for “The Honeymooners,” an icon of 1950s television that was to air for the first time in two days.

But something else happened on the very day of Thomson’s home run that would greatly change America. Until 1951, Americans had been little bothered by the thought that they might be killed at home by a foreign government, but on October 3, 1951, the same day as the famous playoff game, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. We learn that fact when a message is delivered to Hoover informing him of that blast. After that October day, Americans could never again safely tuck themselves into bed the way they had before. The always present strain of paranoia in American now had a much firmer basis, and that paranoia was going to dominate the U.S. in coming years.

An apocalypse was now palpably possible, and DeLillo, a master of portraying American paranoia, has sheets of Life magazine float down from the upper deck onto Hoover. Those pages contain a reproduction of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s panoramic painting of apocalyptic slaughter. Hoover becomes mesmerized by the images of incredible agony, and the painting and its horrific portrayals recur again and again in the novel.

We want that baseball game to be a kind of unifying experience. DeLillo has Russ Hodges, the Giants announcer, think “this is another kind of history. He thinks [the fans] will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with a protective power. . . . Isn’t it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping of strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses—the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?” The game may have been memorable, but almost instantly it was only a memory. This prologue concludes with a drunk in a raincoat running the bases who leaves his feet to slide into second base: “All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborne form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things to come. . . . It is all falling indelibly into the past.”

DeLillo had first published his depiction of the baseball game as a magazine piece before the book was written. He titled the piece “Pafko at the Wall.” (Andy Pafko was the Dodgers left fielder who watched the ball sail over his head into the stands.) When DeLillo placed this piece as the beginning portion of Underworld, he re-titled it as “The Triumph of Death.”

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The Shot Heard ‘Round the World

It is baseball playoffs time. I just yawned as I am sure many others do about baseball and its postseason. This indifference, however, is a bit misleading. Many may talk and write about baseball’s demise, but attendance at major league games increased this year. More people went to the parks than in the years immediately preceding Covid. Even so, baseball and its playoffs do not gain the national attention they once did. We don’t anoint them with the significance of past years, nothing like the playoff that ended with the most famous home run in history — the home run that many at the time and even since saw as some sort of American turning point that went beyond baseball.

          I wasn’t aware of it when it happened. It was on television, I have read, but my family did not then own one. It was on the radio, but I did not care. I was aware of little beyond our backyard and our block, even though I ventured further than that to attend one of our two years of kindergarten. I was six years old.

          But my world changed a lot during the next three years, and when I was nine, I learned about it. By then the Braves baseball team had moved from Boston to Milwaukee. I had become a baseball fan, and the New York Giants had traded Bobby Thomson to my Braves prior to the start of the 1954 baseball season. Almost every mention of Thomson referred to that famous home run (only Babe Ruth’s “called” shot could compare) which Thomson hit on October 3, 1951. With the season nearing its end, the Giants were far behind the Brooklyn Dodgers—13 and a half games. The Giants, however, went on a tear winning 37 of their last 44 scheduled games. The regular season ended in a tie, which produced the National League’s first playoff, a two-out-of-three affair. The Giants won the first game; the Dodgers the second. In the decisive contest, the Dodgers were winning 4 to 1 going into the bottom of the ninth. The Giants scored one run and got two more runners on base. Thomson then hit a three-run homer that won the game and the National League Championship for the Giants. (The Giants went on to lose the World Series to the New York Yankees.)

          There have been other exciting, season-concluding home runs. Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays hit one to end the 1993 World Series, and even more dramatic was the end to the 1960 World Series. The New York Yankees had won three games over the Pittsburgh Pirates in blowouts, outscoring their opponents 38 to 3. Pittsburgh had won three close games. In the seventh and deciding game, the Yankees were leading when Pittsburgh scored five times in the bottom of the eighth after a ground ball took a bad hop hitting Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek in the throat and wiping out what appeared to be a double play. Down two runs, the Yankees scored twice in the top of the ninth with the aid of some unorthodox base running by Mickey Mantle. Pittsburgh’s second baseman Bill Mazeroski, who averaged a mere eight home runs per season and who had already hit a decisive home run in Game 1 of the series, led off the bottom of the ninth. On the second pitch, he hit a miraculous home run over the left field wall to win the game and the baseball championship for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

          And since 1961, Super Bowls, NBA, college football playoffs, and college basketball championships have concluded on exciting, improbable plays. Even so, that 1951 game with Bobby Thomson’s home run seems to live on in the American consciousness in ways Mazeroski’s homer and the other exciting games have not. Or maybe I just think that because several things I have read recently and a conversation with a Neapolitan have placed that game high in my consciousness.

          One of the books was the 1997 memoir of her childhood by the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait Till Next Year. She was raised in a middle class New York City suburb that emerged after World War II in a family of rabid Brooklyn Dodger fans. The 1951 playoff between the Giants and Dodgers was a momentous event in her eight-year-old life. In those days, playoff and World Series games were played during the day, and her teachers had allowed their charges to listen to the first two games on the radio, but Doris asked to stay home on the afternoon of the decisive game to watch it on that new instrument, a television. Her mother readily consented. She was not alone. Half her classmates also were not in school that afternoon. But the spectatorship was many more than diehard New York and Brooklyn fans, for a continental cable had been finished a few months earlier, and these playoffs were the first nationally televised sporting event.

          Kearns, as she then was, describes the tension of a close game, with the Dodgers scoring three times in the top of the eighth to take a 4-1 lead. And then the fateful bottom of the ninth. The Giants had scored to pull within two runs and had two men on base. The Dodgers’ pitcher Don Newcombe was tiring, and the manager replaced him with Ralph Branca. “I was horrified,” Doris writes. “Images of Branca’s other failures filled my mind.” She pleaded for this move to be rescinded. “But my pleas were fruitless. The stage was set, the moment irrevocable. Ralph Branca stood on the mound, and Bobby Thompson was advancing to the plate.”

          And the home run came, and along with it, she reports, “the never-to-be forgotten voice of Giant announcer Russ Hodges. ‘There’s a long fly. . . . It’s gonna be . . . I believe.’ He stopped for a moment. Then, as the ball dropped majestically into the lower decks of seats, there came that horrifying shout. ‘The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!’”

          Broadcasts were not routinely recorded in 1951, but many of us have heard Hodges’ depiction of the famous Bobby Thomson home run 1951. Doris Kearns Goodwin makes it seem as if she heard it on the television, but the reports I have read said that his call was preserved on a tape recording by a Brooklynite made off the radio. Perhaps Hodges was simultaneously broadcasting on radio and TV, but that seems unlikely, and if the Goodwin family was listening to the radio while watching the television broadcast, I would have thought the Goodwins would have been listening to the Dodgers announcer, Red Barber. (Barber, it is reported, pronounced Hodges overexcited call as “unprofessional.”)

          Perhaps Doris really did hear Hodges make the call. Perhaps, like me, she heard it later. It is memorable, and perhaps she conflated it into the actual memory. What’s clear is that for her this game produced what has been sometimes called a “flashbulb memory” in which a memory of a momentous event becomes, we believe, indelibly etched into our mind. We probably all have some of these. Research, however, has shown we are often mistaken in details of these memories. (When I looked at some of this research for an academic project, they were called flashbulb memories. With the decline of flashbulbs, I wonder if researchers now use a different term.)

          Kearns Goodwin makes clear the importance of the event. “It was the worst moment in my life as a fan. . . . From that moment to this, Bobby Thomson and the Brooklyn Dodgers would be forever linked, the mere mention of his name calling forth in every Dodger fan instant recognition, comradeship, a memory of where they were, how they felt.”

          Doris had been posting the baseball scores in the window of a local butcher shop whose owners were Giants fans. She was so miserable that she avoided the shop until she received a bouquet of roses from the owner (“It was the first time anyone had sent me flowers.”), imploring her to come back because she was missed. “My excitement about the flowers drained my humiliation and pain over the Dodgers’ collapse.” She went to the store and posted the last Dodgers’ score of the season.

          The memorability of the game and the pomposity of its importance to some sports fans is seen in a continuing reaction. Goodwin writes that she now lives in Concord, Massachusetts, that is celebrated as the site of the first battle of our Revolutionary War, which was commemorated in a famous line from a no-longer famous poem written in the first half the nineteenth century. When she takes visitors to Concord’s Old North Bridge and sees the inscription on the monument there, ‘the shot heard round the world,’ “I think privately of Bobby Thomson’s home run.” This characterization, however, is not confined to her private thoughts. Thomson’s homer was characterized with the Revolutionary War line almost from the moment that ball landed in the stands. I recently tested my assumption that that playoff result lives in the minds of many Americans who had no personal connection with the game. I asked a biergarten drinking buddy, who was born twenty years after it happened, if he was familiar with Bobby Thomson’s home run. He immediately said, “The shot heard ‘round the world.’”

          I have also been dipping into American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith edited by Daniel Okrent. Smith, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning sportswriter, is best known for the four-times-a-week columns he wrote for New York City newspapers in the four decades after World War II. Of course, he wrote about the famous home run with a lede, published on the day after the game, that has been characterized as one of the best: “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.” Okrent labels that opening and the rest of the piece “the platonic ideal of a column about a major sports event.” I found Smith’s recounting to be enjoyable, and his often-remarkable prose is always worth examining. However, what first struck me in the October 4, 1951, column is that the writer immediately sensed that Thomson’s home run was not just one among many exhilarating sports events that he had seen. It stood alone. Not just to the rabid fan of one team or the other, it was, as they say, a game-changer even to the seasoned sportswriter, who could no longer believe that he had seen it all.

          But I noticed something else in Red Smith’s column. He mentioned that there were “34,320 witnesses” to the game. The later depictions of that afternoon make it seem as if the whole country or at least all interested in sports or at least all of New York City or at least all of its baseball fans were living and dying with each pitch. On the other hand, the Polo Grounds, where the game was played, had a capacity of 55,000. More than 20,000 seats were empty. Perhaps the game was not as important when it was played as its extraordinary outcome later made it become.

(concluded October 16)

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Snippets

A recent article about a Sarasota bar owner who supports gun rights and gives “lessons” on the Second Amendment in his bar got me to thinking. His version of the Second Amendment — a version espoused by others of his ilk — asserts that American freedom rests not so much with an armed militia, army, or law enforcement but with an armed civilian populace. Without guns we would soon have an oppressive autocracy denying freedoms to the populace. This reasoning simply doesn’t pass muster. Most people in this country do not possess firearms and yet they are able to exercise their rights. They speak freely, go to church, and vote. Their rights have not been taken away because they don’t have a gun.

In fact the pro-gun constituency comes up short in giving us examples of gun-toting masses preserving freedoms. Perhaps it can be claimed that private property has been made more secure by firearms, but what about all those other rights? When has carrying a gun preserved your right of free speech or your right to a jury trial? On the other hand, try to think of when one person carrying a firearm has deprived others of their rights. Our history is filled with examples of guns used to prevent others from speaking freely or peaceably assembling. Every time a gun has been used in a robbery it has been used to deny someone’s right to property. Every time a gun has been used in a murder or a wounding or even in an accidental shooting, the bearer of that gun has denied the individual rights of others.

 Furthermore, our history is replete with instances in which masses of armed civilians denied freedoms to others. For just a couple of the many examples, read David Zucchino’s Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy or Charles Lane’s The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction.

          Some also proclaim that guns should be carried for self-defense, and that a well-armed citizenry makes us all safer. Good people with guns can stop the bad people. I thought of this while reading about Charles Boles who was in California during the Gold Rush. The author says that Boles “no doubt carried a Colt revolver and a bowie knife—almost all men did in California, for there was very little law enforcement in the early years of the gold rush. Man—and the fledgling state’s few women—knew that they were responsible for their own self-protection.” Thus, California in the early days was a paradise to some self-described libertarians: Little government but widespread gun-packing. This surely must have been a safe place to live. Of course, it was not. “Heavy drinking, coupled with an armed populace, led to astronomical homicide rates, among the highest in peacetime America. In the 1850s, California saw murder rates twenty to thirty times greater than the current national rate.” So says John Boessenecker in Gentleman Bandit: The True Story of Black Bart, the Old West’s Most Infamous Stagecoach Robber.

As Jose Maria Luis Mora said, “The word liberty has often served for the destruction of the substance of liberty.”

I, like others, feel that Hunter Biden is being singled out for his gun violation. I am confident that many good ol’ boys have bought guns without disclosing their substance abuse problems and did not get indicted. If his name weren’t Biden, Hunter would probably not be facing jail. On the other hand, I can’t have much sympathy for him. Without his last name, Hunter Biden would not have made all the money he did. If you are going to take credit for the rain, then you have to accept the blame for the drought.

“A weapon is an enemy even to its owner.” Turkish proverb.

You can check this out: More gun deaths are suicides than homicides, self-defense, accidents, or good people killing the bad.