Couldn't watch

It’s been reported that when Yankee Stadium was being built in 1922-23, the sounds of construction were clearly audible at the Polo Grounds, the National League Giants’ longtime home just across the Harlem River in upper Manhattan. It must have been a galling distraction to manager John McGraw, who detested the American League in general, and Babe Ruth in particular.

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Our family’s first real vacation came in the summer of 1964. There are lots of things about those three weeks to Canada and back I remember, but few more vividly than New York, and none more vividly than Yankee Stadium.

We were staying at the Holiday Inn on 57th Street. When Dad came into the room and asked if we wanted to go see the Yankees that night, my brother and I did a whoop, and our mother probably did a silent sigh of relief. (Even midtown Manhattan would be relatively quiet with the two of us out of pocket for a few hours.) I did my best Whitey Ford windup, which I thought was pretty good until my smartass kid brother pointed out scornfully that Ford was a lefty.

It would be the first major league game either of us ever saw in person, and the last until the Braves came to Atlanta a couple of years later. It was a doubleheader with the White Sox, and we sat down the third base line. The Yanks swept; Ford pitched the second game; Pepitone homered. Mantle, Maris, Kubek, Richardson all played. It was the last year of that great Yankee dynasty of the ‘50s and ‘60s; Bob Gibson and the Cards would stop them cold that October, and the Yankees wouldn’t make it back to the Series again until the mid-‘70s.

When it was over, we walked past the outfield monuments to take the train back to Manhattan.

***

I should have watched Sunday night’s farewell to the Babe’s Cathedral, but I couldn’t – I just couldn’t.

In a world that keeps changing and morphing and vanishing too damn fast, one of the few things that for me all but defined permanence – something that was there long before I was born and would surely be there long after I die -- has been Yankee Stadium.

Wrong again.

I know the old ball park has deteriorated; even the renovation that saved it once is now more than 30 years in the past, and a friend who saw a Yankees game there just a couple of years ago described it perfunctorily as “a dump.”

There are no doubt a hundred perfectly logical and rational reasons why the Bronx’s most familiar and visible landmark since 1923 can’t be saved, and not one of them is good enough. All of them together wouldn’t be.

I bet even McGraw is pissed.

Ebbs and eddies

Vocabulary update
Any criticism of Sarah Palin, any unflattering account, however factual, of her record, her past or her own words, is “vicious” and “hate-filled.” It is anti-woman, anti-Christian and anti-working mother.

Please make a note in your political glossary.

Give it a rest
Some readers of my newspaper column have suggested that I’ve pushed the connection between contemporary Republican rhetoric and 1950s Red-baiting Senate witch hunter Joseph McCarthy one time (OK, maybe two) too many.

One offered to buy me a ticket to Russia or China (irony is clearly not this political analyst’s long suit); another expressed the wish that I’d been around when McCarthy was in his heyday (actually I was, but I was about 2 years old) so the good senator could have exposed me for the crypto-Marxist that I am.

They might have a point – not about Russia, China or Marx, I hope, but about overplaying the McCarthy card. Believe it or not, I’m probably as tired of evoking that shameless sleazeball’s memory as some folks are of hearing about him.

So here’s the deal: I’ll stop mentioning McCarthy when right-wing pols stop using him as a role model.

Sports spots
Auburn’s “win” against Mississippi State last Saturday night was excruciating. My impression, after three games, is that this supposedly explosive new offense is not just bad, but virtually unwatchable.

One more time seeing that unit break the huddle, line up over the ball and then break formation to stand around cluelessly to wait for a sign from the sidelines would have had me throwing something through the screen of an almost brand-new TV.

The look on Tommy Tuberville’s face as that travesty of a football game dragged on suggested that he’s starting to suspect he bought a bill of goods in O-Coordinator Tony Franklin. If Tubs saw any more offense or any more coordination than the rest of us did, he’s keeping it to himself.

Does Auburn now have its very own Dan Henning?

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Piety Parade

A characteristically detailed essay in the Sept. 8 issue of The New Yorker raises the always-hot issue of faith-based voting.

In “Party Faithful,” author Peter J. Boyer’s big-picture implication is that Barack Obama has a realistic chance to wrest large chunks of a dependable core constituency away from a Republican Party still lukewarm toward, and skeptical about, the religious convictions of John McCain.

With the up-front acknowledgement that I am among the world’s worst political handicappers and analysts, I’m not so sure Boyer is right. More to the point, in this specific context I’m not sure I care.

Both McCain and Obama – as Boyer notes and every observer is well aware – have “values voter” problems. McCain first alienated his party’s right wing by condemning its two highest-profile evangelical polemicists, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, as “agents of intolerance"; he soon thereafter alienated the political center by accepting the endorsement of wing-nut End Timer John Hagee.

Obama, of course, has – and deserves – a Jeremiah Wright problem he will never completely shake as he tries to convince Americans in the political center, where elections are won, that he respects and shares their convictions.

Boyer’s essay begins with a detailed analysis of how Karl Rove engineered a “Catholic strategy” for George W. Bush, using as his blueprint Ralph Reed’s earlier success in mobilizing evangelical Protestants. That a lengthy essay on the politics of faith begins on those notes should tell us something about what we’re really dealing with here.

This is election-as-jihad, an exercise in chest-thumping public piety that has probably always been with us, but which has become a cynical political science over the last 30 years or so.

It hijacks the language and postures of faith -- not faith as a defining value system that might tell us something profound and authentic about the men and women who would lead us, but as a carefully and calculatedly crafted tool – one shaped suspiciously like a wedge.

With this tool gripped firmly in hand and waved high aloft for all to see, politicians swagger through campaigns not like Lincoln and Douglas debating for an Illinois Senate seat in 1858, but rather like the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn gleefully exploiting the Christian charity of gullible hicks at a tent revival.

Boyer concludes that Obama has “begun to transform the faith-unfriendly Democratic image that made the Republicans’ 2000 and 2004 strategies possible.” It’s a transformation which even Rove claims to admire:

“The overt hostility of some elements of the Democratic Party is being usefully scrubbed away by Obama,” Rove tells Boyer. “And, for that, everybody in America ought to be thankful.”

So Karl Rove looks approvingly on Barack Obama’s appropriation of the rhetoric of faith. For that, everybody in America ought to be skeptical.

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FearFest 2008

"We live in a dangerous world, and we need a president who understands the lessons of Sept. 11, 2001...”
-- President Bush, addressing Tuesday night’s session of the Republican National Convention.

If you expected to be spared having 9/11 wagged in your face, you should’ve been watching something else.

Here’s one of the “lessons of Sept. 11” we’ve all learned: Republicans will be conflating the misbegotten tragedy in Iraq with the terror attacks of 2001 for as long as there’s anybody still listening. They feed on fear, with the same shameless ravenousness of Democrats feeding on economic resentment, and the most terrible and terrifying day in the memory of most living Americans is just too rich a dish to pass up.

So it’s the muscular Republicans against the wussy leftists, patriotism against treason, victory – however they choose to define that, however long it takes and however many more lives it costs – against “retreat and defeat.”

None of which alters the reality that George W. Bush’s “understanding” of the lessons of 9/11 has cost more than 4,000 precious American lives against the wrong enemy in the wrong war in the wrong country, and the “dangerous world” he and his apologists keep trying to frighten us with (as if we needed their help for that) has only become more so.

Thanks, Mr. President, but we’d rather hear “lessons of September 11” from somebody who’s actually learned some.

***

Driving in to work this morning, I saw something I’d never seen, although I’m apparently behind the curve on this one.

Dangling from the back of a pickup truck on Railroad Street in Phenix City was a pair of big, shiny metallic balls.

No, not the kind Captain Queeg kept clicking together in “The Caine Mutiny.” I mean the anatomical kind. As in testicles. As in “Look at my really, really manly truck.”

And I thought those stupid decals of cartoon Calvin urinating on something were pretty much the low-water (so to speak) mark in vehicular adornment.

I checked this out on the Web (don’t even ask what I Googled to get there), and it turns out that not only have they been around a while – there’s an online company you can order them from (don’t ask me what its Web address is, either) – but politicians in several states have actually tried to get them outlawed.

Yeah, that needs to be at the top of the political agenda.

One Web posting offered this commentary . . .

“For me it poses this question: Who is worse, the pathetic mouth-breathing cretins who actually buy these things, or the terminally anal-retentive church ladies who think the law is meant to be used to punish stupidity and bad taste?”

I won’t even try to improve on that.

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From the GOP convention to a truck flaunting oversized fake male genitalia. Why was that such an easy transition?

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