Personal essays
How do we come back
Declaring victory
“Well the first thing I want to say is, ‘mandate my ass’.”
Man, we played Gil Scott-Heron’s “B Movie” until the grooves wore out.
That was more than forty years ago and it rings true today.
As we watch Arizona set the clocks back 160 years - which is somehow seen as worse than the Supreme Court setting it back 50 years - we are somehow convinced that it’s the will of the people.
And yet when the people are allowed to vote -
and then when the people show up to vote -
we find that it’s not the will of the people.
After Reagan was elected, the Republicans claimed a mandate and set about righting all sorts of perceived wrongs.
Gil pointed out that this mandate was not based on “26% of the American people, but 26% of the registered voters”.
You can draw a line from those Republicans to today’s but how did we get to the 80’s republicans. The ones we used to think were the nice ones who we just disagreed with.
It turns out, many of them were hoping we wouldn’t notice and now we look around and see that the rules have been changed so that our representative government doesn’t represent us anymore.
We’re playing from a disadvantage - and yet this may be our most important game yet.
At the Ballpark
My friend Rick invited me to a Guardians game on Sunday. Cleveland had lost two to the Yankees and when a Yankee homerun in the top of the third put them up 3-0 it looked bleak.
By the end of the inning it was 3-2, then the Yankees made it 4-2 in the top of the fourth before the Guardians tied it up in the bottom of the inning.
I tell you all this because at 3-0 it’s easy to think, “what’s the point? Why do we even bother?”
But when it’s tied you have some hope. The team doesn’t have to do something big - it can do little things that add up to something that is just enough.
With two outs in the bottom of the eighth, a Cleveland home run put the Guardians ahead 5-4.
But, in this play-by-play, thinly veiled metaphor for the upcoming election, you never celebrate early. Sure, three Yankees outs and the game is over - but the game isn’t over.
The Yankees did a little here and a little there and they scored to tie the game.
The problem with the Yankees -
Actually, let me stop there. Unless you’re a Yankees fan, there’s no end to problems with the Yankees.
One of the biggest problems with the Yankees is their fans. There are a lot of them and even when they’re playing an away game they seem to outnumber the home fans.
I’ve been go games in Yankee Stadium and I know that there the fans come late and leave early. But here they were staying until the end.
In the top of the tenth, the Yankees scored two more runs and the chance of Cleveland winning was listed as 21%.
But you don’t quit until the game is over.
In the bottom of the tenth, Josh Naylor hit a ground ball to second that scored his brother Bo. Two batters later Josh crossed the plate to tie the game. The two brothers scoring in the same inning - what a story. Another couple of batters and the Guardians scored and won.
Sibling Day
For all the sports metaphors and horse-race coverage it gets, an election is not a ball game.
And yet there are the stories we tell ourselves to keep going.
In fact, there’s a really nice story of the Naylor brothers from last week.
The Guardians were behind by five runs and Josh Naylor hit a home run to score the Guardians first run. Then two batters later Bo Naylor hit a home run scoring two more runs.
Two brothers with home runs in the same inning on National Sibling Day.
How often does that happen?
Well, forgetting about the Sibling Day thing, it actually happened to the two Naylor’s last year when they became the only brothers to both hit multiple-run home runs in the same inning in history.
Overall, it’s only happened ten times in history that two brothers have hit home runs in the same inning and only nine times if you insist that both brothers be on the same team.
I looked at the list and wouldn’t have known that BJ and Justin Upton did it twice in the same month for Atlanta.
I would have guessed the Ripkin brothers, Billy and Cal, did it for Baltimore. In fact they did it twice as well.
Before that, in 1962 Tommie and Hank Aaron did it. I am ashamed to say I didn’t know Hank had a brother who played.
Before that you have to go back to the 1920s and 1930s.
And that’s the thing about baseball. Its history and records go back that far.
Some people watch the game for the game and some watch it for the history and the nostalgia. It reminds them of sitting in the bleachers learning how to fill out a score card.
Nostalgia
“Yesterday,” says Gil, “was the day of our cinema heroes. Riding to the rescue at the last possible moment.”
Three runs in the bottom of the tenth inning.
“Someone always came to save America at the last moment. Especially in ‘B’ Movies.”
I heard a discussion recently about John Wayne movies. The older man’s eyes got misty as he nodded and remembered. The younger man said that that’s what he thought. And then he watched a couple and there are a lot of things that you can’t think or say anymore.
John Wayne is not who you remember he is.
Gil reminds us that what we do best is “remembering what we want to remember and forgetting what we choose to forget.”
When we hear about the way things used to be, we forget an awful lot.
We remember brothers scoring home runs in the same inning. We marvel that its happened before and read about the nine times that it has.
It feels like a lot. Something that unlikely happening that many times is a lot.
But it’s rare. It’s rarer than a level playing field today - let alone fifty years ago - let alone one hundred sixty years ago.
We roll things back because of the good things we choose to remember, forgetting what it is we’ve forgotten.
Gil says, “Nostalgia, that’s what we want…the good ol’ days…When we gave ‘em Hell”
“When the buck stopped somewhere and you could still buy something with it”
“To a time when movies was in black and white … And so was everything else”
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 212. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe