When the Los Angeles Dodgers’ batter swung and missed, finalizing Boston’s victory in the World Series, I dispatched a congratulatory text to a friend who, from every spring to fall, night after night, lives and dies with his beloved Red Sox.
He replied promptly that the team contained no malcontents or showboats; that the players like each other, and that it was hard for him to explain how mixed his feelings were.
Yes, the Sox had become world champions. But baseball season was over.
“Baseball is so much better now than America,” he wrote. “It ain’t even close.”
Moments later, on television, the baseball commissioner handed the championship trophy to Red Sox owner John Henry, who said, “It was a diverse group. It showed all of us what you can accomplish as a really diverse group of people.”
Then the team’s manager, Puerto Rican Alex Cora, took his turn holding the trophy and asked the owner if the team could take the sparkling hardware to his hurricane-ravaged home.
I read politics in all of that.
My friend the Red Sox fan was finding human decency in a baseball team, and in the game itself, at a time when he was finding the once-great nation losing decency.
The Red Sox owner was extolling diversity the day after a man in Pittsburgh had slaughtered 11 people because they were different, and while the president of the United States railed with fabrications about distant refugees and asylum-seekers.
And the Puerto Rican manager may or may not have intended a slight against Donald Trump for the lack of recovery attention given the territory when it was wiped out by Hurricane Maria. But it’s what I heard.
The next day, a woman called to say she’d gone to vote, and cried.
People filed in quietly to exercise their democratic right and responsibility. People were stationed about, waiting patiently to help.
No one was shooting anyone. No one seemed mad. Almost without words, everyone simply was trying to make a glorious American exercise work.
It was more than she could take.
She asked me: “Don’t you think this is a big deal, a big time?”
Yes.
“Don’t you think it’s a difference-maker?”
You mean politically, in the midterms?
“Yes.”
I said I hesitated to analyze the pipe-bomb outrage and the Pittsburgh horror in political terms.
“But those are the terms.”
Yes, they are. The solution to the nation’s disease is political. The country must reject at the ballot box the dishonest and divisive ranting of a frightful president who plays to fear and resentment. I simply would prefer to wait a day or two before we commence analyzing the political effect of 11 Jewish worshippers from ages 54 to 97 lying slaughtered by neo-Nazi hate in a synagogue in a great American city.
But, then, why should anyone wait? Kellyanne Conway, a polished Sarah Huckabee Sanders, hadn’t waited that morning on the news shows.
Her purpose had been plainly political. It had been to try to insulate her boss, Trump, from any leadership responsibility in the Pittsburgh horror.
He had spoken days before in code extolling “nationalism.” A few days before that, he had jokingly celebrated a Montana congressman’s criminal violence against a reporter. He had said months ago that there were “good people” among white supremacists in Charlottesville.
Just that morning, for that matter, Trump had tweeted that the news media, for reporting what he does and says, was “the enemy of the people,” applying an old Stalinist term.
But the Pittsburgh executions, Conway contrived, were part of a “growing anti-religiosity” in liberal America as evidenced by late-night comic ridicule of religion.
What a spectacularly cynical lie and play to ignorance that was.
That man in Pittsburgh was yelling as he killed Jews that he wanted to kill Jews. He did not transport himself to a mid-American ex-urban megachurch to slaughter evangelicals.
He was a Trump-era American Nazi, not a man so inspired by late-night comic routines that he went out to kill the first religious people he could find.
So, yes, it’s a big moment. And, yes, politics is the solution.
Let’s just wait a day or two before we poll it.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.