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First Sentences

“That Dodge City was the gateway to the Great American Desert probably does not seem to be much of a recommendation for it.” Tom Clavin, Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West.

“The day before Mrs. Starch vanished, her third-period biology students trudged silently, as always, into the classroom.” Carl Hiaasen, Scat.

“It was a foul autumn morning in Jaffa when the pilgrims came out of the church.” Dan Jones: The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God’s Holy Warriors.

“The Government still pays my wages but I no longer think of myself as a bureaucrat.” Gita Mehta, A River Sutra.

“Chief Tecumseh had every right to be vengeful.” Jared Cohen, Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America.

“They are watching me, thought Rupert Stonebird, as he saw the two women walking rather too slowly down the road.” Barbara Pym, An Unsuitable Attachment.

“Enough water, like enough time, can make anything disappear.” Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and Last Trial of Harper Lee.

“Peter Crowther’s book on the election was already in the shops.” Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty.

“The Great War had brought Paul Lewis into the navy in 1918 as a lieutenant commander, but he never seemed quite at ease when in his uniform.” John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.

“The ugliest truth, a friend once told Myron, is still better than the prettiest of lies.” Harlan Coben, Live Wire.

“When Michael Joyce of Los Angeles serves, when he tosses the ball and his face rises to track it, it looks like he’s smiling, but he’s not really smiling—his face’s circumoral muscles are straining with the rest of his body to reach the ball at the top of the toss’s rise.” David Foster Wallace, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments.

“I was never so frightened.” Sarah Waters, Affinity.

“In 1957 legendary CBS newsman Walter Cronkite—lauded as the most trusted man in America—stared into the camera and told viewers that the ‘greatest engineering feat of our time’ was under way.” Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes.

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Snippets

Congress relieved Marjorie Taylor Greene from all her committee assignments. Is this a big deal? When was the last time that a congressional committee did something that was legislatively important?

What do you think MTG will do with all her extra time? Constituent services?

“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” Barry Goldwater said that, causing a controversy. Today conservatives say something different. Complete this sentence: “Defending extremism is . . . .”

Mitch McConnell, referring to Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, said, “Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country.” Before you start thinking warm thoughts about the Senate minority leader, remember that he is the person who concocted a reason why Merrick Garland would not get a hearing on his Supreme Court nomination and then concocted a reason why the Garland concoction did not apply to the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. He’s also the person who told us that the tax cut would not increase the deficit. He has said things time and again that indicate not a belief in conspiracies but just a lack of integrity. I point you to the words of Robert G. Kaiser in his marvelous book Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works and How It Doesn’t about the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act. When the Kentucky Senator backtracked on various pledges, Senator Dodd tried “to shame McConnell and the Republicans who were supporting him—not an easy task.” “Loony lies” apparently depends on who is  singing the tune.

If you thought that the passive and claims of leadership are inconsistent, you have not been paying attention. Marjorie Taylor Greene, in disavowing prior beliefs before the House of Representatives, said, “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.”

A reason this is not a unified country: According to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, in a recent poll, about two-thirds of Dems had an opinion of Marjorie Taylor Greene, while only 44% of Repubs did. Perhaps this is the reason why: In January, Greene was in 472 fifteen-second clips on CNN; 393 such clips on MSNBC; and in 31 on Fox News. It isn’t one country.

A news report of a heated meeting a week before Christmas of Trump and his advisors said that the “entourage went upstairs to the Yellow Oval room, Trump’s living room. Staff set pigs in a blanket and little meatballs on toothpicks on the coffee table.” Two of the best foods every made. Pigs in a blanket! Tiny meatballs on tiny skewers! This could get me to rethink the Trump White House, especially if they got those items from Costco.

The headline: “More Than 760,000 Pounds of Hot Pockets Recalled.” Let the jokes begin.

“There is no such thing as a pretty good omelet.” French Proverb.

Is it true that when Marjorie Taylor Greene was told that the restaurant cut their pizzas into eight pieces, she replied, “Please cut mine into six—I couldn’t eat eight slices.”?

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Sweet Home, Ashland, Alabama (concluded)

Ashland, Alabama, where the spouse’s grandmother lived, felt like the South for many reasons. One was its number of churches. There were a lot, but I am used to that. Wherever I am in Brooklyn, I am almost always within three or four blocks of a church, but in Ashland, as far as I could tell, they were all Protestant ones, and probably more than half were some sort of Baptist or Methodist. I don’t remember seeing a Catholic church, and the nearest synagogue was a county or two away. Mom’s house was literally surrounded by churches. Out her front door and across the street was her Southern Baptist church. (Mom was clearly pleased that I, although not a Southern Baptist, was raised in the Baptist tradition. (See post of June 22, 2020.)) Out her side door and across the street was the Methodist Church.

One Sunday when we were visiting Ashland, that Methodist Church was welcoming its new pastor. The spouse and I were out and about that afternoon and cutting through the Methodist parking lot on our way to somewhere when we realized we had been spotted by the new minister and his wife. The couple looked like a caricature out of certain kind of movie. Neither seemed old enough to drive. Both were thin, and I expected to see acne on him as he approached with what appeared to be a brave smile. His white shirt might have had some cotton in it, but it was too big and gapped at the neck. His suit was also too big and looked as if it had been bought two days before from the southern equivalent of whatever was two steps down from Robert Hall. And if the tie was not a clip-on, it sure fooled me. The wife was tiny and retiring, but also had a brave smile fixed in place. They looked like a newlywed couple dedicated to the new path on which they had embarked. As he approached, he started to introduce himself, but we interrupted saying with big smiles, “We are from out of town. You don’t need to spend time with us.” It was as if a wave passed over them both, and in an instant they looked more relaxed but also incredibly tired. They thanked us and told us that he had performed his first service as the new pastor and had been meeting people all day. After a few moments of pleasantries, we parted. I had wanted to tell them, “You look like you need a drink.” But this was neither the right town nor the right couple for such a suggestion.

Perhaps we would have chatted with the new couple in town longer if their church had been Mom’s church, but on Sundays Mom headed out her front door. I only remember one time that the spouse and I went with her to the Baptist church across the street. The spouse’s sister and her husband were also in Ashland at the time. The brother-in-law is Jewish, although not religious, but he looked quite nervous as we all got ready for the morning service. I told him to relax, no one was going to know about his religious heritage, explaining that probably they all thought Jews had horns, and they would not see them on his head. I added, however, that perhaps his quite luxurious head of hair was hiding them and perhaps I ought to give him a trim first. He did not see the humor in my tremendously clever wit.

I remember little of that service, not the sermon or the Bible readings, but I do remember the hymns, or really the introduction to them. As we got to the point where we were to rise and rejoice in song, the minister announced that the usual choir director was away and was being replaced by “Shotgun Miller.” I was only half paying attention and was not sure that I had heard it correctly, but “Shotgun” just seemed to hang in the air. What looked like a solid Ashland citizen stood up and led us in song. At the second hymn, the minister merely said, “Shotgun,” and I could not help smiling. At the third hymn, when he said, “Shotgun,” I had to restrain myself from chuckling out loud, and I thought to myself, “Are they just messing with this northern boy, bringing out the clichés, and giving a good show?” But I knew they weren’t.

I shouldn’t mock Mom’s church, however. She was a wonderful person—warm, caring, amusing, charming, tolerant, accepting. She seemed at peace, and part of the reason for that was her religion. When I think on some of the bad aspects of religion, I think of the spouse’s grandmother and what her religion and her church gave to her. From her, I know that for some people religion is meaningful and life-supporting.

I don’t want to seem as if I am mocking Ashland, the South, or small-town life in general. Mom lived until she was 97, and at least in the last twenty years of that time, she resided about half the year with the spouse’s mother in Florida and the rest of the time by herself in Ashland until her final illness, which was short. She could live by herself in her house because she was not really alone. Every day people from the town would look in on her, make sure that she was all right, and ask if she needed some lemons from the grocery or aspirin from the pharmacy. Many people cared about her enough to make efforts on her behalf in ways that I do not expect will happen for me in Brooklyn. She could remain where she wanted to be in a place that held memories.

The visits to Ashland, however, did not make me want to give up my big city life. On the first day of our first visit to Ashland, the spouse and I were heading off to the town square. Without thinking Mom said, “Now ya’ll be careful. It’s Saturday. It’s market day. There is a lot of traffic.” And then she stopped and smiled and said, “But you live in New York,” and laughed at herself.

After seeing the courthouse, we wandered around the square and went into a few shops. In each and every one, an owner or clerk said, “You aren’t from around here. Who are you visiting?” We would answer and explain our relationship to Ms. Herren. They would ask where we were from. Each one of them would comment on how far away, how big, and how foreign New York seemed, but how much they liked seeing it on the Today show. And when we were leaving, all of them said, “You all have a blessed day” or “You give Ms. Herren my best.” By the fourth or fifth exit, I started muttering expletives when I got to the sidewalk. Their sweetness, their niceness was getting under my skin. I knew I was a Big City boy. I was longing for some of New York City’s curt anonymity.

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Sweet Home, Ashland, Alabama

The spouse and I differ on the route we took on my first trip to Ashland, the tiny town in Alabama where the spouse’s grandmother, “Mom,” lived and where the spouse spent childhood summers. (See post by spouse on January 15, 2021.) I thought we had driven through the Midwest visiting friends in Columbus, Ohio, and Peoria, Illinois, and then headed south. The spouse remembers heading south first down the eastern seaboard and heading west after camping in Georgia, on what we refer to as the “demented locals” experience, but that is another story. Part of the reason our memories don’t coincide is that we went to Ashland several times and did not always take the same route.

 Similarly, I can’t say on what trip certain impressions and experiences occurred, but on each and every trip to Ashland, I felt that I was in the South, capital S. Before going to Alabama, I had only been south of Washington, D.C., to Miami, and while that felt different from what I had experienced in Illinois and Wisconsin, it was not The South that had resonated in my mind. Ashland, however, was in that region I had read about in William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty. It was the South I had seen on television when watching scenes of Selma and Greensboro. It was the South of broadcast televangelists.

Ashland physically fit my image of a small southern town. Its population was about 2,000, and I gather that it remains about that size. There was a town square, and a courthouse was at the center of that square, and that courthouse itself was a square. When I first went there, after going up a few steps to an entrance, I had to step over a dog sleeping in the sun on the landing outside the door, and I had to walk past a Dr. Pepper machine to get in. I almost laughed. I thought maybe the southerners were laying on the clichés to play with this northern boy. I took a picture of the courthouse because it looked just like an old southern courthouse ought to look. I enlarged and framed the picture, and for a long time it hung at the top of the steps in my house, but somehow I have lost it.

I think of that building as the courthouse, but it was probably more than that. Ashland is the county seat, and no doubt the structure held county offices in addition to courtrooms and judicial chambers. The jurisdiction is Clay County, and I was struck driving into town by the red clay landscape. For a moment I wondered if that gave the county its name, but then I put Clay and Ashland together and realized that the county was named after Henry Clay and the town after his Kentucky home, Ashland. But if there is a memorial to that early American leader in Ashland, Alabama, I never saw it.

I never saw a memorial either to the town’s most famous native son, Hugo Black, the Supreme Court Justice. Born just outside of town, Black was raised in Ashland and had his first law office on the town square before moving to Birmingham. But at least during his lifetime, Ashland did not want to claim the justice. Hugo Black wrote Court decision after Court decision upholding civil liberties and equal rights and most important to many Alabamans is that Black was on the Supreme Court that ordered the desegregation of public schools and other public facilities. The spouse’s grandmother told us years after Brown v. Board of Education that Hugo Black on a visit to Alabama picked a flight that had a layover in Birmingham so that he could see his son who lived and practiced law there. The son got word to his father, “Don’t even get off the plane; it will be too dangerous for you.” (A famous KKK leader of the 1920s and 1930s was born in Ashland, but as far as I know, there is no memorial to him either.)

The spouse, however, noted some racial changes since her childhood days. We spotted a Black state trooper, Blacks at the public swimming pool, and a Black man in a spirited tennis game against a white opponent. The spouse said these sightings would not have occurred in the Clay County of her youth.

Signs of the old South, however, still lingered. Looking out the window early one morning, I saw a wagon being pulled by a mule as a Black man was going to tend fields. I felt as if I had seen this scene before in a picture from the South of the 1920s or 1930s. And then there was the time that we stopped to get gas at a one-pump station and waited for someone to come to fill the tank. I had only seen Stepin Fetchit’s shuffle in the movies, but now I saw it for myself as it seemed to take five minutes for an old Black man to make it from the building to our Dodge Dart twenty feet away. I understood the walk’s origins, but I wanted to shout, “You don’t have to do that. We are white, but we aren’t from here.” However, some remnants of the old South benefited us. The wife’s metal leg brace had cracked, and we asked the gas station attendant if he knew of a welder and explained the problem. He immediately said that the blacksmith could help and told us where the smithy was. We went there, and the man in an old, old shop did a creditable repair, not charging us much money.

Ashland was also different from other places I had known. This was hammered home when we were driving into the town with the spouse’s mother in the back seat (why we had the mother-in-law with us remains a mystery to me). She commanded, with an uncharacteristic urgency, that we pull over to a small store. It was the last place to get alcohol before arriving in Ashland. Clay County was dry.

(concluded Feb. 5)

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Snippets

The Arizona Republican party censured Arizona Republicans Governor Doug Ducey, former Senator Jeff Flake, and Cindy McCain for showing insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump. House Republicans want to strip power from the Wyoming Republican Representative Liz Cheney because she has shown insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump. Tom Rice, a Republican Representative, was censured by his South Carolina Republican party for being insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. Remind me again: What is cancel culture?

I am reading Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Nobel Prize winning Svetlana Alexievich. This book of oral history contains moving and frightening memories of what happened to Soviet communists who showed insufficient loyalty to Stalin and whatever he proclaimed as orthodoxy.

For years upon years, Republicans claiming a mantle of orthodoxy had tried to drum others out of the party with the epithet RINO (Republican in name only). Remind me again: What is cancel culture?

One of the counts in the Arizona Republicans’ censure of Cindy McCain said: “WHEREAS, Cindy McCain has condemned President Trump for his criticism of her husband. . . .” Remind me again: What are family values?

“You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” John Morley.

I have been avoiding the news programs, but almost every time I do see one, Anthony Fauci is on. When does he do the job for which he is paid?

The sign commanded me to “Seek Unity.” “Really?” I thought. “What has most unified us over the last four years is an obsession with Donald Trump.”

I have seen it reported that neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden drink alcohol. What does that say about whether I, too, should abstain?

“What is said when drunk has been thought out beforehand.” Flemish proverb.

Conservatives proclaim a deep belief in capitalism and free enterprise and an opposition to the regulation of businesses. Yet they now have twisted knickers because of actions by social media companies even though those acts are products of the free enterprise system by capitalist companies. Extensive government regulation would seem to be necessary to prevent these companies from taking such actions in the future. Where are those fundamental conservative principles now?

Remember: Conservatives were the ones who got rid of the fairness doctrine.

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Lessons from Henry Aaron (concluded)

All sports fans learn that players and teams fail. But because sports teams were integrated, I, and perhaps other boys my age, were too optimistic about race relations. My baseball team, the Milwaukee Braves, also brought home to me another lesson not confronted by all sports fans. I encountered it when I was in college, that time when adulthood was supposed to be upon me, but aspects of boyhood still lingered.

At my college in those days, baseball was not considered cool. Few of my classmates indicated an attachment to a team. I did not broadcast that I was a Braves fan, but every day I sought out the box scores from the previous evening to see how the Braves, and more particularly, Henry Aaron, had done. This often took some effort because the eastern school got early editions of New York City newspapers, and they often did not have the box scores from games not played on the East Coast. This would keep me scrambling to find later and later editions. Until I could find out what happened the night before, I felt something like I do now when I have not had my regular quotient of morning coffee.

Then it changed. A Chicago-based group bought the Braves, and they determined that they could make more money if they moved the team to Atlanta. In what increasingly became the norm for sports, television and radio revenues were the controlling factors. While attendance in Milwaukee had dropped off since the Braves’ early days there, the crowds were still respectable. The Braves’ broadcast market, however, was limited to Wisconsin with no way to grow (Chicago had its own teams), and this was a fraction of the market available to an Atlanta team that could hope to capture fans, and ears and eyeballs, throughout the South.

I had assumed without really thinking about it that I would be a Milwaukee Braves fan all my life and that this would always bring back the joys and agonies of my boyish summers. Of course, I knew that money was involved in the game. Players got paid; admission got charged. The essence of baseball, however, was competition, the matchup of pitcher and batter, sunshine, cool evenings, radio voices, a community of fans.  Now I saw it differently. A community may have seen the Braves as their team, but they were wrong. It was not a communal team. Ownership and money triumphed over community.

 A court order required the Braves to stay in Milwaukee one more year, and I kept hoping that the move would not happen. I went to some games in that forlorn year and got some more baseball memories: I saw Don Drysdale hit Mike de la Hoz in the chest, producing a crack like a pistol shot. I watched Maury Wills get picked off first base twice in an afternoon. But it was all sadness, and at the end of the season the Braves decamped.

The Braves had taught me about ups and downs, human failings and successes. They taught me about the optimism of waiting until next year. They taught me that to succeed one had to risk failure and that everyone fails some of the time. But now the Braves set me on another path of understanding. I began the lifelong search for understanding the power of money and ownership.

When I viewed the Braves not as a baseball team, but as a profit-driven corporation, it made me more sensitive to other corporate decisions, especially the decision to move a factory out of a town.

On the one hand, such corporate moves are usually done for a reason different from the one given for the Braves move out of Wisconsin. The factory is relocated not to increase broadcast revenues, but because wages would be lower in the new place. And the moving of a plant does not dash the naïve fantasies of a boy, because few boys fantasize about the ups and downs of a factory. Nevertheless, the move of a factory, I came to realize, was quite similar to the move of a sports franchise. In both cases, those who have the money want to improve their bottom line; they simply want to have more money. And just as a sports team produces a community, a factory also produces a community that includes those who work there, their relatives and dependents, and others who more indirectly depend on the factory workers, such as owners of diners, taverns, gas stations, and grocery stores. The move of a factory so a few people can make more money crushes a community. A lot has been written about the moves or retention of sports franchises; not enough has been written about the moves precipitated by other corporations, and their effects on communities. (One insightful book about the effect of a factory closing on a community is Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein.)

The Braves left, but even so, the Milwaukee Braves are still very much a part of my boyhood memories. Those thoughts, however, seem isolating sometimes because they are shared by so few. If I tell a baseball fan that the best lefthanded pitcher, perhaps simply the best pitcher, of my lifetime was Warren Spahn, I am likely to be met with a blank look. I can talk about Bob “Hurricane” Hazle, and the listener has no idea who that is. But the memories, even if not widely shared, are still important to me. They are an integral part of my life. When I look at that picture of Eddie Matthews and Henry Aaron on their last walk off the Milwaukee baseball field, I see the end of my childhood, but I also remember the many thrills those two men gave me; They still hold the career record for home runs hit by a pair of teammates. That white man and that black man walking off together also remind me that there is still hope of racial accord. They were a part of my life that I still remember with joy.

With the death of Henry Aaron, I have been looking at the picture even more than I used to.

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Lessons from Henry Aaron

          With the death of Henry Aaron, many of my memories of him are, naturally enough, about baseball and boyhood. However, his death also makes me think about broader issues in American society, including race and corporate power.

A black and white photograph hangs above my desk. It defines an era of my childhood. Two men in old baseball uniforms–stirrups, baggy pants, no names on the jersey–are walking with their backs to the camera in a narrow, concrete passageway with harsh ceiling lights. “41” is on the left and “44” on the right. The caption to this picture, which I reproduced from a book, said it was Eddie Matthews’s and Henry Aaron’s last trip off the field as Milwaukee Braves. The team would soon move to Atlanta. The Milwaukee Braves would no longer exist.

The Milwaukee Braves were my childhood team. Our radio, and those of our neighbors, was tuned to their games. I could walk down the street on a warm evening with everyone’s windows open and not miss a pitch. I knew not just the lineup but idiosyncrasies of the players. (I did not know as much as some did. At one of our family’s yearly outings to a game, two young women sat in front of us. One said to the other, “Root for Frank Torre.” Torre was the backup first baseman who sometimes came in as a defensive replacement, but he was hardly one with a large fan following. The woman went on, “He’s the only one who is single.”)

 I learned early that the mythic figures on the ball field were actually human. At my first major league game—Cardinals versus Braves—the youth group of which I was a part was in the right field bleachers where there was a low fence that we could stand next to. There he was—Stan Musial. I had heard his name on the radio a gazillion times. I knew that he was a baseball god, and I guess I expected a god-like figure or at least someone as heroic-looking as the good guy in a cowboy movie. But as I stood a few yards away from him, my boyish eyes saw an old man in need of a shave. (It was a low-scoring game, and I remember that Musial hit a home run in the tenth inning to win the game. I have never tried to look up the box score in case my memory is wrong.) 

Baseball players were mortals and, as mortals, often failed. I heard a story that at a dinner honoring Stan Musial after he retired, Joe Garagiola said, “Stan was an all-time great. He batted .333 and got three thousand hits. (Pause.) Wait a minute. What are we doing honoring a man who made out six thousand times?” I learned that even the best made mistakes, and that all players made errors, struck out at inopportune times, gave up home run pitches.

Individuals failed, and so did teams. Of course, the fan of any sports franchise learns that the season generally ends without winning the championship, but still some disappointments are larger than others. That was true for Milwaukee Braves fans. In a four year stretch of my childhood, the Braves finished one game out of first, won a world series, blew a world series, and ended up tied for the pennant but lost in a playoff.  Had a few outcomes been different in this stretch, the Braves would be remembered as the dominant team of an era, one of the all-time great teams. Instead, those clubs, the teams of my youth, are mostly forgotten by anybody who was not a fan.

These are lessons any sports fan learns: Players often fail; teams seldom win championships. These lessons remain with me and seem to speak to more of life than just sports. But the Braves also gave me a false lesson, one that was central to that era of my boyhood. The Braves presented me an overly positive picture of race in the country.

Major league baseball had been integrated a few years before the Braves moved to Milwaukee. The team arrived just as the United States Supreme Court held that segregation of public schools violated the Constitution. I am not sure when I heard about Brown v. Board of Education, but to this third grader, integration was an abstract issue since my own town–fifty miles north of Milwaukee–was all white. Even so, I and seemingly everyone I knew, were adamant anti-segregationists.

It took a while to realize that the whole country did not feel as we did. I think I came to that realization during the Little Rock school crisis. The hate on the faces screaming at that brave little girl in her simple dress filled me with fear and disgust. But I naïvely thought that such hatred could not last for long, and I thought that because of the Milwaukee Braves. How could you not want Henry Aaron–in my ten-year-old (yet carefully considered) opinion probably the greatest ever to play the game–to be in your neighborhood, in your school, in your home? Okay, maybe there were some problems with integration, but baseball seemed to indicate that the hatred would soon disappear. After all, that’s what happened on the ball field. That Lew Burdette was white and Billy Bruton was Black was not an issue. What mattered was whether the Braves won. And, of course, I saw that the Braves all worked together for that goal. Surely these teammates were not concerned about race. If that could happen on the ball field, surely it would soon happen everywhere. Right?

(concluded January 30)

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The WOAT or the WE

As long as he played baseball, I was obsessed with Henry Aaron, and I am saddened by his death. It doesn’t surprise me, then, that recent events apparently unrelated to the batter’s box have jarred loose some thoughts about him. That happened recently when I heard an MSNBC host label Donald Trump the worst president ever.

Of course, slotting Trump into a ranking of presidents is part of the expected exercise whenever a president leaves office. What’s the outgoing president’s place among all the presidents? We have many such rankings. Sometimes they come from professional historians or political commentators; sometimes from polls of “regular” citizens. Even though we have lived through a president’s term, we want someone to tell us where the departing executive stands in the hierarchy of presidents. Is he near the top like Lincoln and Washington and FDR; in the middle like, like—well, if they’re in the middle who can remember them?; or at the bottom like Buchanan or George W. Bush. (And who among us can speak with authority about Buchanan?)

The proclamations about Trump’s standing had me thinking about a sports acronym. Recently it has become commonplace to debate whether some athlete is the greatest of all time – the GOAT. Is it Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Tom Brady? So I thought the television commentators should be using an equivalent shorthand to talk about Trump: Is he the WOAT (worst of all time) or perhaps the WE (worst ever)?

So what does this have to do with Henry Aaron? The attempts to rank Trump reminded me of things that were said when Aaron broke Ruth’s career home run record. Some people, supposedly putting the accomplishment into perspective but really trying to denigrate it, pointed out that it took Aaron many more at bats than Ruth had to get to 714 home runs. Aaron responded, “But Ruth never had to face Juan Marichal.”  (My memory is that Aaron actually said this. I have not fact-checked it. You can do that if you want. Whether Aaron  said it or not, the insight remains.)

Ruth, of course, never did come up against Marichal, an undisputed all-time great pitcher. Ruth’s last major league appearance was before Marichal was born. (I did look that up.) The real point, however, is that Ruth did not bat against his day’s equivalent of Juan Marichal. Because major league baseball was segregated in Ruth’s time, he did not swing against the best pitchers, only the best white pitchers. For example, Ruth did not face Satchel Paige, even though Paige’s prime came when Ruth was playing. Paige was clearly an outstanding pitcher—some think the best of all time. (The GOAT?) In the frequent barnstorming and exhibition games of his era, he faced major league stars and pitched excellently against them. But Paige was Black and could not play in the major leagues in the 1920s and 1930s. (I do not know what to make of the fact that Paige first played in the United States on an integrated team in 1933 in Bismarck, North Dakota. Or at least that is what I read in his biography.)

How many home runs would Ruth have hit if some of the weaker pitchers he faced had been replaced by Paige and other outstanding Black players then barred from the major leagues? We can’t know.

Aaron, however, did face Marichal, as well as Bob Gibson and other outstanding Black pitchers. Baseball had by then become integrated. Perhaps because he had to face all the best pitchers, Aaron’s record is more impressive than Ruth’s. On the other hand, the nature of American professional athletics was changing during Aaron’s career. When Ruth played, baseball was the dominant sport, and the best American athletes concentrated on baseball. That may have been also true at the beginning of Aaron’s career, but by the 1970s, professional football and basketball had become more attractive to the athletically gifted, and probably not all the best American athletes homed in on baseball.

If we were comparing Ruth and Aaron to today’s players, we would have to factor in the internationalization of baseball. While there were Latin American players in Aaron’s day (but almost none in Ruth’s)—after all, Marichal was a Dominican—the influx of Spanish-speaking players has mushroomed since then, and the major leagues are also seeing a steady flow of players from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and even Australia and the Netherlands. Ruth today would have to face the best talent from around the world.

In assessing players from different eras we should not only consider the differing player pools but also that the game has changed in other ways: The pitching mound has been at different heights; gloves differ tremendously from those of yesteryear; night games were not always played or scheduled less frequently; travel was different; the number of double headers has changed; the use of relief pitchers has changed; spitballs, once allowed, are now banned; a ball that bounces over the outfield wall is no longer a home run; the strike zone has varied; and so on.

This all leads me to the wisdom of Bill Russell (again, I have not verified that Russell said this, but the point remains even if he did not) who stated that you cannot compare players from different eras. At best, players can only be compared to other players of the same era. You can conclude that Ruth was the greatest slugger of his day. You can debate whether Mays or Mantle were as good as Aaron, but you can’t meaningfully maintain that Tris Speaker was better than all of them.

And that conclusion should also apply to presidents. To rank Presidents ignores the different conditions during their time in office. You might think Washington did a good job as the first one, but the world he faced and how the government functioned was different from the environment other Presidents faced. Perhaps Teddy Roosevelt’s temperament and abilities suited well the conditions when he was President, but TR would probably have been a disaster as President in 1861. The issues that one President confronts are not faced by another, and the nature of Presidential powers, federalism, and congressional authority have changed over time. As a result, the presidential playing field keeps changing, and it is well nigh impossible to make meaningful comparisons among performers operating in different games.

Rankings of presidents from different eras, while giving occupation to some historians, pundits, and pollsters shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The conclusion that George W. Bush was a better or worse President than James Buchanan or that Barack Obama ranks higher or lower than Grover Cleveland is merely a parlor game (at a time when there are few parlors). As with athletes, at most we can compare presidents within an era, not across the whole history of the presidential game.

Having said that, Obama did seem to have a better basketball game than all the other Presidents, but it is open for debate whether Trump’s golf game, which got a lot of practice while he was president, was better than Eisenhower’s. And certainly Trump must have told more lies about his golf than Ike did.

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

No New Wars

          The transition to a new administration has its rituals. As part of them we examine the incoming president’s agenda, and we comment on the outgoing politician’s accomplishments or lack thereof. I pay little attention to this. Our presidential campaigns are so long that nothing in an incoming president’s plans that should be a surprise. Let’s wait to see what is achieved and not depend on mere hopes or fears. The assessments of the outgoing president always have a partisan tinge, and since I have lived through the administration, I can make up my own mind about the merits of the outgoing president. I especially did not care to hear what Trump said. I assumed that his inevitable and often misleading or untrue boasts would make me angry. I was surprised, then, to hear him say something that was true and even significant: Trump said that he was proud that he was the first president in decades who had not started a new war.

          Many Americans may feel that this is a strange boast. We believe that ours is not a war-mongering nation. Oh, yes, occasionally we have to get involved in wars, but only for the great cause of peace, for we are a peace-loving people. Combat, battles, and killings in the name of the United Sates are the exception for us. Right?

          I then looked at a Wikipedia page titled “List of wars involving the United States.” The list begins with the Revolution and continues to the present. Since Trump had claimed that he was the first president without a new war in “decades,” I concentrated on our involvements over the past forty years. Take a guess how many there were. The list had twenty-seven wars in which the United States was involved during those four decades, but, as Trump pointed out, none started during his tenure in office.

          You might, like me, doubt our involvement in that many wars during those forty years. The last one listed is the American intervention in Libya (2015-present). I read further and learned that in August 2016 we announced that at the request of the Libyan government we would aid in recapturing the city of Sirte from the Islamic State in Libya. We bombed Sirte from August to December with up to 100 sorties and gave other military support to the Libyan government, which retook Sirte on December 6, 2016. Maybe you are different, but I certainly don’t remember this. However, if some country bombed an American city 100 times over a few months, we would definitely count that as a war. While this was not our biggest war effort, it surely counts as substantial military hostilities.

          While being oblivious to the Libyan bombings, however, I had not forgotten about all the conflicts we were involved with. I remembered that we “intervened” in Lebanon and invaded Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. There was the Gulf War of 1990-1991 and a few years later an “intervention” in Somalia. The U.S. was involved with the Bosnian War of 1992-1995 and the Kosovo War of 1998-1999. And, of course, we are all aware of the Afghan War, which started in 2001, and the Iraq War starting in 2003. We are still involved in the Afghan War two decades later, and Iraq is still not at peace. We may not want to recognize it, but our “peaceful” nation has regularly been involved in multiple wars during our lifetimes and throughout our history. It is unusual, apparently, for us to go more than a few years without getting involved in a new war. When Trump says that he is proud of not getting us into another war, it is not mere fanfaronade. (This is word that I have just learned, and I know that I will soon forget it, so I feel compelled to use it while I still retain it. And “fanfaronade” is apt.)

          Whatever you may think of Trump’s foreign policy moves, rejoice in the fact that he did not start the equivalent of another Iraq war, the greatest foreign policy blunder of the last generation. He did not have us invade another country under false pretenses that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, untold casualties, and striking numbers of refugees; cost us trillions of dollars; massively increased our national debt; helped cause more instability and terror in the Mideast; and made our country less safe. We still feel the harmful effects of the Iraq war. I find it hard to give any sort of praise to Donald Trump, but I am glad that in the last four years he did not involve us in yet another shooting war.

Posted on by rjonakait

Three Musings

Three Musings

1)Whither Alabama and Mississippi?

Although I am sure that there are many reasons that Georgia voted for Biden and then elected two Democrats as Senators, the mobilization of Black voters is seen as a cause, and surely Stacey Abrams must be given considerable credit. The voting in Georgia might herald an important path for Democrats: Set a ten-year goal to make Mississippi and Alabama politically competitive. Of course, even though Democrats can now compete effectively in Georgia, it does not mean that Alabama and Mississippi can ever lose their deep red status. All three have large Black populations—Georgia at about 30% Black is in between Alabama at 26% and Mississippi at 38%–and that is a reason to believe that Democrats could compete better in Alabama and Mississippi. However, Georgia’s political shift may not be a roadmap for Alabama and Mississippi. Even though all three have large Black populations, Georgia is more dynamic than the other two. Georgia’s population grew about ten percent in the last decade with both Blacks and whites attracted there from the north. That shift has not been true for Alabama which grew only about three percent and Mississippi whose growth has been stagnant. There is little to attract people to these states. Mississippi ranks 50th among the states in household income and Alabama 46th. On most measures of health, the two states have dismal rankings. For example, only West Virginia has a lower life expectancy than Mississippi with Alabama only two states above Mississippi’s ranking. (Both Blacks and whites in Mississippi and Alabama have life spans shorter than the national average.) Similarly, most measures of education place those two states right at the bottom of the country.

Georgia does not have particularly impressive rankings on such metrics either—33rd in household income and 39th in life expectancy—but it is significantly better than Mississippi and Alabama on such measures. Georgia is admittedly ahead of the other states, but even if Georgia has become politically competitive, it does not necessarily indicate that those other states can become so, too. Nevertheless, because of their low rankings and meager population growth, these states ought to become targets of Democrats. Alabamans and Mississippians might be made to realize that a political change would be good for them. And, of course, Democrats should want to make lives better, and here are two states where living conditions have no where to go but up.

2) Sue the Hell Out of Him

As I have said on this blog recently (see post of January 13, 2021), I have mixed feelings about trying Trump for criminal charges after he has left office. I also have mixed feelings about an impeachment trial. But I am hoping for all sorts of civil trials against him, both because he has regularly used litigation as a bullying tactic and because some suits might make him accountable for words and actions for which he has taken no responsibility. For example, I hope Ruby Freeman sues him. Freeman was just an ordinary worker in the Georgia election process, but Trump named her as the person who put 18,000 “fake” ballots through a scanner producing 54,000 bogus votes for Biden. Even though this was conclusively proved false, our then-president said about her, “She’s a vote scammer, a professional vote scammer and hustler.” This slander no doubt produced death threats against her and required her to go into seclusion. Normal life may never return to her. I hope that she can get enough money from Trump at least to receive a fraction of the security that Trump expects Americans to pay for him.

3) A Republican Conundrum

Here’s an interesting dilemma for some: The Republican Party might be helped if Trump is convicted in the Senate of the impeachment charges and barred from future public office. If he remains free to run for president again, he will probably act as he did in the ten years before he ran for the presidency and make frequent noises as if he will run in 2024. Instead of Republican officeholders dominating Republican politics and policies, Trump will. This can make it an interesting wire-walking adventure for some who want to be president. Let’s just say this includes Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. Cruz and Hawley will want the backing of the Trumpistas, but as long as there is a chance Trump himself will run, the first question those two Senators will be asked is, “Do you back Trump for president?” It will be interesting to hear their replies. In fact, Cruz and Hawley will be better off if Trump is barred from taking office again. Then they can pledge allegiance to the Trump flag, tell us the election was stolen, and how they should be elected to continue on with the Trump legacy. But, of course, they can’t do that if they vote to convict on the impeachment charges. Instead, they have to hope that enough other Senators will vote for conviction so that Republican paths to the Presidency don’t have to step over a possible Trump candidacy.

Words to remember on Inauguration Day. “Visits always give pleasure—if not the arrival, the departure.” Portuguese Proverb.