Verdun, Rigor, and Baseball

A Synthetic Meditation on Baseball, Racism, Closed Systems, and Spiritual Rigor Mortis

I began looking more closely at my old baseball cards to find out if black players after Jackie Robinson were consistently short-changed in seeking fair rewards for their abilities. They were. I might now uncork a sanctimonious diatribe against those of my own skin color who are not as enlightened as I—the favorite liberal pastime of scourging yourself and your entire community for a collective sin which (you make sure to imply repeatedly) you personally have never committed. I don’t like such generous hypocrisy. What would be the good, in any case, of apologizing for abuses half a century old, whose victims are either no longer among us or else have created new lives in the meantime? Would Bill White get to be shuttled back in a time machine for the few thousand at-bats of which he was robbed? Would Floyd Robinson, or Wes Covington? Can they be placed on a Hall of Fame ballot for what they might well have done but never had the chance to do? Can Vada Pinson, even—who probably should be in Cooperstown, probably would be if the forces against which he struggled were as well publicized as they have become in Orlando Cepeda’s case… can Vada Pinson, I ask, even be resurrected from the huge bone pile of “also ran’s” whom the Veterans’ Committee has long forgotten?

If this book does anything of the sort, I should be more than delighted. As for the broader social outrage of segregation, I do not have it within me to masquerade as my grandfather’s ghost and repent of a crime which someone of my generation can grasp neither with real profundity nor in full context. Who can calculate the tragedy of a ten-year-old artistic genius sent to work in a field or a factory for the rest of his life? Which of us can appreciate the pressure of familial and local attitudes in an age when single parents are often the norm and when households move to another neighborhood every five years? I could express my deepest regrets—and I do—but not my artificial contrition on behalf of those I never knew to those I can never know. Such treaties are hammered out in heaven and in hell, not on keyboards like mine.

I suspect, besides, that most people of darker skin recognize the white-man-in-sack-cloth for the self-indulgent poseur that he is. All sin, in fact, is personal—intensely personal: none is collective. This is the most basic of moral truths. The soldier who machine-guns a bunch of civilians on his officer’s order is guilty of murder: personally guilty, because his finger pulled the trigger. The proud car-owner who takes unnecessary joy-rides around town just to show off his sporty possession is guilty of wanton pollution (not to mention silly vanity). On the other hand, no soldier is guilty of a massacre just because he happened to be in uniform on that dreadful day; and the man who simply drives himself to work need not tear his hair about participating in a wicked Western practice which is poisoning the air. As long as the soldier shares his food with a street urchin, and as long as the driver resourcefully strives to minimize his driving, they’re doing their bit. You need soldiers if you don’t want other soldiers kicking your door in: the world can be an ugly place, and the human heart a tangle of vipers. You have to pay your bills, and few of us can walk to work in our sprawling urban society. I tried when I was younger: it didn’t last very long. We do what we can. Each of us does what he can.

Enough of this non-apology. Frankly, as I have written more than once, I received the distinct impression in putting this book together that the men most victimized by the circumstances it describes are least interested in dredging the whole thing up again after all these years. I have noticed, as well, that many white people are as sensitive to being charged with racism as a recent bruise is to a soft touch. They don’t want to hear about it any more. They’ve heard about it all their lives, even though most of them have tried to live in a manner directly opposed to the past’s bigotry. They would never deny a black person a fair crack at a job—and they grow restless and fidgety when the suggestion is floated that the past’s vices are not entirely buried. They grow impatient, even… and even angry.

This often makes the Caucasian-on-the-streets deaf to genuine cries of victimization raised by genuine sufferers of prejudice. If you beat a bruise long enough, it becomes a callus.1 On extraordinary occasions such as the immersion of New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina’s waters, middle-class white Americans may be forced by the ubiquity of anguishing images to acknowledge misery’s reality. At such times, they are apt to pour out a torrential flow of cash so as to sleep a little easier. This is their response to misery in general, and not just to racism specifically, since most Americans, in a profound paradox, keenly register both the guilt of excessive comfort and the unease of extreme risk. They (and I might as well say we) lead lives that are at once materially luxurious (plush minivans, video games, air-conditioning, the Internet) and beset by insecurity (lay-offs, career changes, rising taxes and insurance rates, powerlessness to influence government at any level). Generous cash gifts in times of tragedy are like rubbing a rabbit’s foot, or sacrificing the best heifer to the unknown gods of fortune. They show that one is aware of one’s own exposure, and hence—perhaps—they avert the evil eye. Procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis, era, domo: “Goddess, may all thy fury stay far from my house!”

But black kids without fathers are still waiting, just on the other side of town, for someone to show them how to throw a baseball. White kids, too—but probably, in most towns, more black kids than white. They don’t really need the money: they need good neighbors. The readily bandied charge of racism, it seems to me, makes everything too easy—and also too hard. Pay a few bucks and send your accuser on his way. (Anyone who has ever been to a country where beggars roam the streets knows this complex feeling of guilt and resentment: “Okay, that’s all I’ve got—just go away!”) Our children don’t need handouts and buy-offs—our neighbors’ children don’t need our checks, and our own don’t need video games to keep them out of our hair. They need our attention. We need our attention: the state of our souls needs attending to.

So at last I’ve come to it: the life of the spirit. As I look back over all I have studied and written about struggling black ballplayers, I see nothing so clearly as a classic case of the human spirit being crushed within a system. Racism was part of the system back then, yes; but the system created racial prejudice every bit as much as prejudice created the system. More so, I believe: for bigotry was not nearly well organized enough to launch a vast conspiracy throughout the whole baseball establishment. On the contrary, it is the essential nature of systems to become suspicious of intruders. In this case, the intruders happened to have skin of a different color. Yet even when insiders were able to overcome with reasonable effectiveness their mistrust of dark skin, they remained leery of the “alien style”. They didn’t like new arrivals from the Negro Leagues importing a more flamboyant kind of play—a more original kind of play, consisting of unusual hitting techniques, audacious base-running, and a lot of other things which they decided were “clownish” or “childish”. They seemed to be deeply convinced that their new black players just didn’t get it, and probably couldn’t get it. The game was sober and… well, systematic, like besieging a city. You blasted away with heavy artillery and neutralized counter-attacking sorties by falling back on prefabricated defensive strongholds. (That this sketch also evokes a football game is no accident: football is the system-adoring society’s diversion of choice—about which, more anon.) Blacks couldn’t understand the middle-infield positions (the reasoning went), and they certainly couldn’t lead an entire team from the dugout as managers—a type of prejudice which I have not much discussed, but whose reality is self-evident. They could get the “heavy artillery” part right, and they could run fast… but their wild antics were otherwise more suggestive of an unruly child than of a responsible adult. Stealing home, indeed!

What I’m about to say is rather complicated, and I despair of getting it all out in a coherent manner. It has to do with what might be called “primary racism” and “secondary racism”. The most elemental racist baldly and stupidly dislikes or dreads someone for his or her skin’s color (primary variety). Such blunt prejudice may be contrasted with the secondary racist’s discomfort around people of a physical appearance visibly different from his group’s because those animals are suddenly working what has always been his side of the street. The secondary racist, to be sure, still notices the tint of the epidermis and the profile of the nose. He won’t dispute, however, that someone with such a complexion or such a nose might be handsome or beautiful—he just doesn’t welcome the competition which has accompanied these exotic features into a once-sealed community.

Even within secondary racism (which I would guess is far the more abundant kind), there is the keen hostility of those who directly stand to lose their jobs to the newcomers… and then there is the passive but enduring suspicion of well-heeled, heavily invested traditionalists who don’t want to rock a profitable, comfortable boat. These latter, of course, are the ones most involved in shaping and sustaining the system. In all the accounts authored by black ballplayers which have passed under my eye, the fat-cat decision-maker is the villain hardest to forgive. The sweat-soaked rednecks afraid of being sent to the soup kitchen are relatively easy to understand and overlook. In many ways, their angst about mere survival sounds a very sympathetic note to the black teammates they shun.

The heart of racism as a social and economic impediment, then, nestles among the second species of the second variety: the successful lord-of-the-manor who doesn’t want to jeopardize profits by discarding a tried-and-true formula. In baseball terms, we’re talking about owners and general managers. Managers, too, had much more power over their players’ careers in the fifties than they do now;2 and though a manager of those days, as a former player himself (more often than not), might well have harbored a grudge against black “intruders” over having once competed with him for a job, he might also have been a sincere “conservative”. Perhaps he really believed that the techniques of the Negro Leagues would end up losing his team games. After all, he himself was most certainly produced by a different, somewhat rival system. The more genuine this commitment to old techniques, the less severe the racism from a purely visceral standpoint—which is ironic, because systematic rigor screened far more blacks from success in baseball, I have concluded, than hatred of dark skin ever did.

Let me try to illustrate my intent by having recourse to a world I know far better than the clubhouses and front offices of baseball: academe. For the past half-century or so—throughout my adult life, at any rate—the Ivory Tower has turned very competitive and cliquish in a very topsy-turvy fashion. The Old Guard of the fifties had been set in its ways. It had honored time-worn theories and had taught about and from the same old texts. (This was certainly so in the humanities: the sciences were usually more creative.) The New Guard which ushered in my generation during the late sixties and imparted its free-floating values to the rest of the century would have nothing to do with a literary canon of “classic” works. The books you were “supposed” to read merely reflected which group was holding the reins of power and deviously trying to manipulate you through propaganda. Professors started teaching movies, TV shows, comic books, and even graffiti as “texts” instead of Dante and Shakespeare. They started grinding out tomes and tomes of indecipherable gibberish to explain their rebellion—and also, when rarely cornered by some high-placed reactionary or other, to explain that no explanation was really possible since all meaning is undergirded by prejudice, leaving only honest gibberish (like theirs) and disguised gibberish (like the classics) to compete for people’s attention. The new professors wore their shoes without socks, preserved their hair from combs, refused to give exams, slept openly with their students, and assigned easy A’s to anyone who parroted their flaccid ideas (preserving plenty of D’s and F’s, naturally, for those who didn’t). How well I remember it all!

You wouldn’t think that a bevy of anarchists like this would found a new system on the grave of the one it had just so ostentatiously subverted. You might not even think (if you are a naïve soul) that a collection of such devout social liberals would be capable of replicating a Klansman’s behavior. Yet it all came to pass. By the time I entered the job market as a professor, anti-systemic thinking had been rigidly systematized. With so much of my course work and scholarly writing directed toward Homer, Virgil, Kant, and various other dead white guys, I need not have applied for most openings. When I did somehow manage to wrangle an appointment in an English department (usually because the Old Guard had just barely fought off the New Guard for the moment), I witnessed bizarre happenings. I found that the generation which had no use for socks craved feverishly—enough to lie, to steal, and maybe to kill—the kind of achievement demarcated by promotion and tenure. I observed that women, especially, having been brainwashed by sixties cant that they were worth nothing without a successful career, would not be denied success. Some of them, when we would form “search committees” to fill new positions, didn’t even want to hire another woman because they saw in their exclusive claim to minority status an inside track to the top. I’m sure no black player ever wanted to be the only black on his team; but I wouldn’t be surprised, based upon what I’ve learned of the human heart, to discover that some minority employees enjoy being “one of the few” because the company will almost necessarily advance them if it wishes to avoid embarrassment.3

All these starry-eyed revolutionaries, meanwhile, were busily shifting the theoretical jargon of their unfathomable publications every year or two so as to make their game less comprehensible to outsiders who wanted in—that is, so as to limit the number of people who could compete for their jobs. The young bucks were becoming old boys. Many feminists even insisted that a writer should be precluded from acceptance by any of their hermetic reviews if she turned out to be a “he”. I’ve no doubt that some of these “old girls” genuinely detested men; but I think it likely that the majority simply wanted, once again, to narrow the field of competitors. Like an aging second baseman with a bad knee, they didn’t need a sudden flood of talent from a totally new quarter. On the contrary, they needed to throw up sandbags wherever possible.

So much for ideologues and “idealists”. The very same kind of behavior, I hasten to add, was fully evident on the most “conservative” campuses ever to have their ivory thresholds darkened by my shadow. I saw it in how I was treated, and I saw it in how others were treated: the reigning emotions were fear of being ousted (on the part of junior professors with no real security) and fear of innovation (on the part of senior scholars who had clambered to the top by honoring certain “values”, such as teaching only British works rather than admitting a French novel into the mix).

When you’re young, you always consider that you have been hired fair and square to do the job specified by your interview and your contract. (In fact, this is seldom true: you’re hired because one campus coterie or another sees you as a potential ally in some political tussle.) Being conscientious, you dedicate yourself to doing the best job possible. You produce extra work for yourself by assigning—and grading with ample notations—essays which challenge the students at a high intellectual level. You bring works into courses which the weary anthologies have overlooked (and no anthology grows wearier faster than the anything-goes generation’s, wherein stories and poems appear just because their authors were not white males). You refuse to curtail necessary lectures and meaningful discussions for the sake of videos and ignorance-sharing rap sessions. In a word, you teach. You do your damn job.

And how is your success received by your compatriots? Well, let me underscore the parallel with baseball as I answer. Some colleagues are merely lazy, and the precedent set by your labor-intensive assignments makes them nervous. These were the “wits” who teased their new black teammates to the point of harassment and spread stories about them behind their backs. Such rivalry does little observable damage to a well-motivated worker, but it can grow quite demoralizing after a while.

Some colleagues are more malign. Aware that no administration likes to tenure a large percentage of its faculty, they recognize you as a life-or-death challenge and apply themselves to undercutting you subtly. I suppose the baseball equivalent would be a player of real talent who was nonetheless insecure about his position on the team when the first blacks arrived. He didn’t run off at the mouth loosely: he just shook his head without a word—but being certain that the manager saw him—when Jackie or Willie ended a rally by being caught in an attempted steal. When Billy homered, he pumped his fist with the rest of the team; but he also sidled up to the skipper, pretending to go for a drink of water, and muttered behind his smile, “Too bad he couldn’t have done that when we had runners on base.”

Some of your Ivory Tower “team”—especially the more powerful—are vain, and begrudge you your long hours of paper-grading at home because you are less available to grin and fawn at their innumerable endless soirées. These, of course, correspond to the coaches and managers who like to “hold court” after the game over a round of beers. They egg on those of their black players who are more easily finessed to drink a few too many a little too often. Those who see through them are branded as “not team players”: talented, yes—but obviously not happy here in Bean Town , and maybe better off being traded. Better off for everyone—as if a trade would be a favor to them. I heard that from a superior once: “I have a feeling you’d be happier somewhere else.”

A few number-crunching cynics in the front office (and academe has large front offices) may or may not understand your professional ardor as sincere: they see only the gripes on student evaluations about being bored and having to work too hard. They begin to fret over retention issues. In the baseball front office, executives would carefully mull over the number of black citizens attending games now that “one of their own” was wearing the uniform, and counterpoise to this gratifying figure the distressing outbreaks of violence and foul language among Caucasian fans. It’s a crying shame that certain members of the lower class have to be so crude and retrograde, but… “But baseball is a family event. We want our fans to know that they can bring their kids to the ballpark. Too many of these incidents spells big trouble. We have to think of the women and children.”

I reiterate that I am not trying to reduce the anguish of racial segregation to just one more example of workplace bullying. I am proposing an analogy, not an equivalence. The plight of black players in the later fifties and early sixties resembled that of other people caught within a vast system’s cogs in two respects. First (as I have said above), all such cases involve numerous insiders perceiving a handful of outsiders as a threat—a threat to compete for and take away jealously guarded employment, and also a threat to drag complacent employers through a disruptive and unpredictable series of changes. In isolating the threat and holding it at bay, the status quo may seize upon any irrelevant detail which seems to characterize all the outsiders superficially. This detail may be skin color, or gender, or age, or language, or place of origin (and I might note that an aspiring professor from the northeast or the West coast is much more likely to find work in academe than a professor from Alabama or Oklahoma, all other factors being equal). To be sure, after the harassed outsider leaves the workplace to take a walk in the park or eat at a restaurant, he will probably not continue to face suspicion and rejection as a black player would have done in 1954 after showering and heading off into the streets of Cincinnati or St. Louis . In the previous section, I was not analogizing the entire social phenomenon of racism, but only the part of it which intrudes into baseball.

The second way in which baseball’s cold embrace of black players resembles the inertia of a huge system exposed to change is that specific adjustments almost always fail to have a significant long-term impact. If the boss circulates a memo demanding that all nude photos and Playboy calendars be removed from the office, then the photos and calendars will come down. If the workplace environment is profoundly crude, however, the same old atmosphere will cling in low-lying pockets. Salacious jokes around the coffee machine will be theatrically broken off when someone sees Julie, although Julie’s appearance within earshot was the cue to begin the jokes. Julie will sit down at her desk and find a porn site running on her computer, though—of course—no bystander will admit to having seen any tampering. If the old boys can rattle Julie enough, she may even fly into a rage or break into tears; and then the case can be made that she was unhinged from the start. If, on the other hand, Julie files a lawsuit, then the boss may actually suspend or fire some trouble-makers as he fumes over paying the settlement. Yet the next time he has a choice between hiring a male or a female, enlightened though he is, he will remember that fat settlement; and, unless required by some quota system, he will avoid inviting the trouble-makers to make trouble.

Quota systems: have they ever worked? You might say that the pressure to bring two blacks up to the big team by 1960 (and it was always two or four: somebody had to room with the guy on road trips) constituted a de facto quota for Major League baseball. It worked, yes… and then again, it didn’t. I have argued (as have others) that certain particularly recalcitrant organizations added black players who were not the best qualified of their race to receive the promotion, precisely so that integration might be discredited. Even when the new players were top-notch, they could be handled so as to undermine their effectiveness. They could be benched most of the week, so that their one start or their two pinch-hit appearances would find them as stiff as the boards they usually sat on. They could be played out of position, or moved to relatively unimportant positions which dozens of other qualified players stood ready to fill. In the event of success, their disposal in a trade could be fully justified—with plenty of farewell praise for public consumption—as necessary to get four or five younger players (and one of these might well be black, just to put up a good front). In a bitterly cruel irony, quotas addressing such superficial attributes as skin color or gender sometimes diminish the individual minority member’s chances of success. The establishment can always point to its satisfactory ratios, diverting attention from how each human being composing the ratio has been treated personally.

The human spirit is as resourceful as it is perverse. Tolstoy said it about Napoleon and the Grande Armée: as long as the French wanted to follow their emperor, they made him a legendary conqueror. When they got tired of following him, neither his orders nor his pleas could keep them from turning back. People will find a way to do what they’re inclined to do. Those inclined to be bigots will find a way to slight their targets.

Yet my major theme in this concluding chapter is that people are inclined, above all else, to trudge around in the circle which they have already worn. The spirit is inclined to go to sleep—to turn away from its higher destiny and embrace a lethal comfort. Writing about a different war from Napoleon’s, Arnold Zweig made one of his characters observe, “As water inevitably gathers at the deepest point, so the human spirit will collectively find the shallowest place where it can rest undisturbed.”4 Zweig was a veteran of World War I, and his novel sees the fighting through German eyes. Abject obedience to a system was perpetually tossing young men into the trenches like logs into a sawmill. Systems-within-the-system kept cropping up along the Maginot Line’s moldy trenches and shell-blasted villages: lieutenants intent upon feathering their own financial nest, soldiers intent upon avoiding the front line’s risks, liaison officers intent upon telling the high command what it wanted to hear. Overtly criminal acts arose unquestioned from these strange sodalities in modest extension of the reigning logic. A group of officers in Zweig’s novel actually posts a young NCO where he is certain to be killed so that he will not blow the whistle on their cozy profiteering racket.

As in little things, so in big things. The Great War was undoubtedly a major catalyst of the West’s invincible demoralization throughout the twentieth century. Cynicism, absurdism, nihilism… death camps, ethnic cleansing, mutually assured destruction… it all really got under way when the well-oiled socio-political machine at the turn of the century demanded to be fed with millions of human lives and limbs. In Zweig’s account, a “closet” Marxist within the ranks reflects upon the situation’s homicidal efficiency at handling what José Ortega y Gasset would one day call the “rebellion of the masses”—and the assessment, let us admit, is not devoid of accuracy:

In order to hold the masses in check, the very coalescence of these masses became serviceable. Every year in Germany and neighboring nations, hundreds of thousands of unemployed men were drilled in combat gear, practicing the lessons taught in schools whereby they turned their back upon their own interest and were ready to shoot themselves in the person of other workers. In peacetime, this would remain a mere possibility: in wartime it became a grim, shocking reality.5

So well, indeed, did World War I confirm the Marxist scenario of a privileged class eliminating its roused proletarian rabble that the popularity of communism spread through Europe like wildfire in the twenties. The Marxist’s answer to a corrupt system is yet another system, already rigid and exclusive before it leaves the drawing board; and the Bolshevik zealots who carried the new system forward were very clear about the fate of recalcitrant hold-outs. Culturally traditionalist elements, facing literal extermination by blood bath, felt compelled to strike an unholy alliance with fascism… which created enough adversarial friction for another world war, which further disgusted survivors with whatever cultural relics had survived the onslaught of tanks, bombs, and missiles… and Cold War Western Europe proceeded to melt down into its present toxic brew of incoherence and nullity.

Insane. How could it all have happened? To this day, European intellectuals remain in shell-shock. Some of them are actually Bourbonists, hoping that the restoration of the monarchy will turn the clock back, make the nightmare go away, and burrow warmly into a paternal system which would spare puny individuals the trauma of decision-making. My purpose here is not to sort through any culture’s past choices or to argue for or against the human right or obligation to make choices. I seek to underscore, rather, the present ineptitude for choosing in which a rigorous adherence to system has left the cradle of human freedom, the birthplace of constitutional republics and of individual conscience. The controls have frozen, and no corrective procedure is advised by the repair manual.

French novelist Jules Romains, in writing a classic account of the Battle of Verdun, stresses Europe ’s incapacity simply to conceptualize events as The Great War raged. Most of his expressions could just as well be applied to the rest of Europe ’s twentieth century:

The indeterminate, the unknown, and the accidental were thus nestled into either end of the event: into the end where a worldwide convulsion was taking place, and into that where tiny, pitiful men were fighting in the smoke. On the scale of the astronomical and of the molecular. Nobody knew to any great extent the minute degree to which ghastly acts composed the war; there were plenty of witnesses, but all so embroiled in what was happening that they could scarcely draw back and see it—and, in any case, the impression they received from twenty paces was dulled like a lantern in a fog. Nobody, on the other hand, knew that the event could assume the gigantic face—like that of a planet on fire—which it would present to the Night of Ages, that Night of Ages which includes not only the past, but is also the eternal envelope of a medium wherein history floats like a meteor.6

One of the French officers whose activities Romains tracks briefly lulls himself to sleep each night with “realistic” fantasies—scenarios distinctly different, that is, from the hell he lives daily, and yet still just hellish enough to justify his hoping in them. He imagines himself, for instance, liberated from the trenches with his company to wander among the mountain forests. His men would establish some loose base of operations—a barn, say—where they could receive orders; but they would otherwise be free to forage for themselves. They would become what we now call guerilla fighters. This is the extent of one bright young man’s ability to foresee a future beyond the system’s bounds: a salutary near-anarchy resulting from the practical impossibility of keeping the troops stocked in food and clothes.

I contend that “the indeterminate, the unknown, and the accidental” are precisely what any successful system must accommodate—by not trusting itself fully, by remaining open to minority (even “crackpot”) opinion, by constantly reconstructing its orderly conclusions to suit a less orderly world. The Great War was fought with tactics that dated back to the days of cavalry charges and cannon balls. The geometric progression in destructive power which modern weaponry had described failed to occasion a radical review of strategy. Among the civilian population, too, attitudes which had always been stirred before by national struggle cheered on the effort without remotely divining an imminent cultural catastrophe. “Nobody knew….” The actors had rehearsed lines for the wrong play, and nobody—no leading figure—could tap sufficient spontaneity to improvise effectively from various fragments of experience.

An entire generation of young men was lost in the Great War—the “absent” to whom Edwin Muir addressed the poem which gave me this book’s title. Because treaties had been signed, national pride staked, hands shaken, and honor pledged, two thousand years of civilization based on energetic, creative sacrifice and belief in every person’s sacred spark dissolved in smoldering ruins. Europe ’s leaders played at the “game” of honor without duly considering whether their ends were honorable. The old boys incited their children—others’ children, and often their own—to volunteer for the slaughterhouse because “death for the fatherland is sweet and fitting.”7

If men will thus fling their own sons into the fiery furnace in an obsession with making the system go, what hope is there that a mere game—a true game, a joyful pastime—will liberate itself from systematic rigor to increase the quality of play or to allow more players on the field?

Dr. Thomas Bertonneau recently reflected in these pages NASA’s change-resistant, “circle the wagons”.8 He concluded his thoughts by directing them to the etiolated bureaucracies which run our public schools. Another person might note how reminiscent is such inflexibility, devoted first and last to preserving the system rather than accomplishing what the system was created to do, of certain church hierarchies confronted with such devastating scandals as clergy-related child-abuse. Any long-running, many-branched human organization is likely to illustrate the same phenomenon. (If it doesn’t, there’s something new under the sun.) This institutional hardening of the arteries is one of the most frustrating aspects of human society. Once in a while, starry-eyed reformers attempt to rectify flaws by creating a board or committee to review existing boards and committees. The review board, in turn, generates a protocol which soon grows rigid… and then we savor the unpleasant irony of an anti-bureaucracy wrapping itself in red tape rather than making things honest and open.

Again, one has to wonder how a silly little game of hitting a round ball with a round bat—a very difficult silly little game, where success is often measured in small fractions—can hope to overcome the stifling effects of dogmatism if the destiny of civilizations and the advance of pure knowledge cannot crawl out from under the “old boy” shadow. Everything we think, do, and are seems to be blunted, as if by a narcotic drug, somewhere along the orderly corridors of the systems which have led us this far.

But maybe this is looking at the problem upside-down. Maybe a mere game is exactly the place where we should discover how to keep from becoming enthralled to our well-functioning organizations the way a bricklayer absorbed in his work might accidentally wall himself into a tomb. For that matter, baseball may be the one game above all others which punishes inflexible thinking. Ballplayers adjust, or they perish. A pitcher who hurls bullets but has no change-up will eventually be pounded. A hitter who can catch up to the league’s best fastballs but can’t wait on a change-up will eventually never see a fastball in the strike zone. Such remarks as these are platitudes to baseball people. In fact, one of the main qualities scouts look for in young talent is a certain humility—an ability to listen to and profit from suggestions. The game is humbling by nature: failure is always sitting on your shoulder.

So why don’t more teams value the dynamism of creativity? I use the present tense, because, to this day, the dazzling style of play which Jackie Robinson brought to the Major Leagues is highly suspect in many organizations. For some reason, coaches and managers often refuse to accept that the same inflexibility so toxic to an individual can be just as lethal to an entire line-up. Teams like the Texas Rangers seem to believe that socking home runs is the prescription for victory, even though they complete season after season in the second division. As I sit writing these words (at the end of the 2005 season), the Rangers have just set an all-time record for the most solo homers by a ball club in a year. Not surprisingly, they have also failed to finish above .500, and they have barely managed to stay out of the Western Division cellar. The number of sacrifice bunts successfully executed by the Ranger offense was dead last in all of baseball: nine, another all-time record for inflexibility.

Is it an accident that the Rangers ended the 2005 season carrying just one African-American player on the roster (Gary Mathews, Jr.)? One-dimensional slugging preoccupies the front office even as the pitching staff is routinely reviled for failing to hold the other side down. Within recent years, the franchise has had on board such promising hurlers as Kevin Brown, Rick Helling, Aaron Sele, John Thompson, Darrin Foster, and Brian Driese. Trade bait, every one—and almost always for another slugger. In the 2005 season, it was deemed necessary to acquire Phil Nevin. In past seasons, the answer to fans’ prayers was to be Alex Rodriguez. Before him, it was José Canseco.

Why don’t the Rangers get it? Maybe it’s the name. Historically, the Rangers were created by the young state of Texas as what we would call a para-military organization charged with applying irresistible force speedily to settlements under attack by Comanche hostiles. After Reconstruction, the Rangers turned their energies to chasing down bandidos in the Nueces strip—an objective which they interpreted rather liberally, sometimes resettling local Mexican ranchers on the far side of the River Styx. Nowadays (having successfully fought an initiative to abolish them in the seventies), Texas Rangers cruise interstate highways in search of particularly heinous crimes to ponder. It has never been entirely clear to me how their current function differs from a state trooper’s—or why it ought to differ.

In baseball, too, you don’t want duplication: you don’t need heavy hitter upon heavy hitter. An 11-3 victory is just one more victory: you don’t earn extra points for piling on runs. An 11-3 loss, likewise, is just one loss—humiliating, but every team has its share of them. Where baseball’s Texas Rangers consistently fail to make up vital ground is in close games: games, that is, which require a multi-pronged attack, a flexible approach. The franchise’s 2-1 and 3-2 losses stack up, season after season… and the pitchers in these little tragedies, of course, make easy targets for a shallow fandom and a shallower press. But the cause lies just as much with the offense’s “home run derby” mentality. When you confront an adversary with good pitching, you usually don’t prevail with power. It is reasonably easy for skilled pitchers to work around free-swingers. What you need in the bottom of the ninth when down a run is not Mighty Casey, but Speedy Gonzalez: someone who knows how to draw a walk and steal a base. And then you need two guys behind him who know how to put the ball in play. The Rangers lose nail-biter after nail-biter because they don’t acquire such players, don’t coach their youth to turn into such players, and unload any such player who happens to stumble into their clubhouse.

The Willies (and a Chuck). One sometimes gets the feeling that white baseball wanted every black kid named Willie to become the next Mays—and one of them did. In the early sixties, it looked as if they all might. Kirkland (out of the Giants’ organization) actually had several second chances, despite his poor average. Tasby and Hinton were better rounded but drew little interest when they didn’t homer at Mays-like rates.

Is it mere coincidence that teams like the Texas Rangers (for there are others—just study the second division) have so few black players? Is there not for some reason a substantial connection between black players and base-stealing, gap-hitting, using the whole field, taking the extra base, and a whole range of razzle-dazzle offensive maneuvers as bewildering to the observer as shadow ball? I know that it’s politically incorrect to suggest that something like the “African physique” might be responsible for such prowess—and I certainly don’t know enough about physiology, in any case, to judge the merits of the claim (assuming that the politically correct would allow us to judge anything by merit). I suspect, however that the underlying causes of baseball à la Negro League are indeed more nurture than nature. My evidence is as follows.

I have coached both black kids and white kids, and I assert with some dismay that the white kids have far more often been rigidly instructed rather than tossed a ball and allowed to play. They have been subjected to expensive machines of the most outlandish varieties for teaching the fine arts of hitting, pitching, and fielding—but especially hitting. Black kids, sadly, tend to know the game of baseball less well by the age of ten, yet many of them take to it gleefully if not at once overwhelmed with minute instructions. Once upon a time, after a single session of tutoring my ten-year-olds in how to beat a run-down and advance to the next base, I found that my black kids wouldn’t stay put during the next game. They were so devil-may-care that my hands spent most of the evening in my hair. (Yet not a one of them was ever tagged out.) On the other hand, I had a couple of white kids—fast runners, too—who wouldn’t even take off for second on a passed ball. They were scared of failing, or perhaps horrified at the sense that they were doing something beyond the bounds of routine structure. I rather doubt that they had much fun, on that night or any other, and I should be surprised to see them playing ball five years from now.

Since black children, at least in my part of the country, tend to live in less affluent circumstances, they have less gear and equipment, fewer machines and tutors. They improvise better. In a sense, they also tend to have less supervision around the home, or to be supervised more often by siblings than parents (though supervision for affluent white kids now consists largely of enthrallment before video games). As a result, perhaps, the black child may be more apt to try something new or do something bold, while the white child is more likely to hang back and think, “Are we really allowed to do that?” I might as well say that I believe many children in my demographic bracket (the Caucasian, professional, two-parent household) to be excessively supervised, if by that may be understood rigid scheduling of free time and even recurrence to Ritalin when the child seems to rebel rather too often.

The factors I have just described are all environmental. Anyone who takes a casual drive through a predominantly white neighborhood and a predominantly black neighborhood in a small southern city will instantly see where more kids are outside riding bikes. When the kids who stay inside—the white kids—are finally released from their electronic cells, it is to fall in and drill at the ball park under the dictatorial eye of half a dozen coaches. And the drilling has its effect, all the way from the humblest Dixie League team to the exalted squadrons of millionaires who appear on TV every summer evening. The contempt for the unchoreographed move is apparent in everything from the absence of drag bunting to the easy lope toward second base on a “gapper”. Spontaneity is not encouraged, nor are those who practice it best the most rewarded. Is the slight overtly racist? No, of course not. But because black and Latino players, for environmental reasons (let us stipulate), are and have long been the masters of the unpredictable and the unrehearsed, they suffer the most neglect in a milieu which begrudges free-style performance. They suffered in the fifties and sixties, years after Jackie Robinson had supposedly broken down the color barrier; and, ironically, they suffer now, years after patent prejudice on the field (if not in the organization’s hierarchy) has been eradicated. They suffered before because they were black, but also because they constituted a threat to chess-match, station-to-station baseball. They suffer now exclusively for the latter cause, since kids in the Dominican Republic still grow up using broomsticks for bats and black kids in Memphis or Akron import their feints on the basketball court to base-running.

The phenomenon deserves to be called discrimination, but not racial discrimination: call it, rather, discrimination against the resourceful individual who redirects the flow where nobody anticipated its going.

At this point, I cannot avoid mentioning the home run again. Of all the players I used to stop and watch on TV, no matter what I was doing, the one who commanded my attention most imperiously was Tony Gwynn. I would stand and gape at his every move, even if a baby were screaming or the phone were ringing. Tim Raines and Wade Boggs were not far behind. I have realized painfully that the players who inspire that same devotion in my son are the Sheffields and the Bondses. Now, Gary and Barry are both black, and many of the game’s most exciting home-run hitters continue to be dark-skinned, just as they were in the days of Aaron and Mays… but Barry Bonds, especially, represents the game’s degeneration to me. As a youngster, Barry was the kind of “five-tool” player who would frequently stroke doubles and sometimes stretch them to triples. Now he is a somber monument to home-run obsession. He has dedicated himself, by fair means and foul, to doing one thing. His body has morphed physically, in the process. Even if Bonds truly didn’t understand just why it was doing so, he was clearly pleased with the result. He transformed himself into a mountain of muscle, a heavyweight machine which could no longer produce bunts or triples. Henry Aaron, though age thickened him as it does all of us, remained essentially lean and svelte. Not Barry: no hammer, he, but a pile-driver.

Something about the game of baseball, and about our society more generally, has nursed this monomaniacal commitment to bullying the ball out of the park. For the home run is the most systematic of hits: its results are the most predictable and controlled. Once the ball sails over the fence, it’s out of play, and the base-runner need merely trot. (Indeed, contemporary home-run hitters like Bonds have signature trots as finely tailored as Willie’s basket catch.) Organizations like home runs, and always have. They are decisive, final. They dispense with the need for on-the-spot creativity. They can be instantly entered into the ledger as assets. Far be it from me to imply that Aaron and Mays were not exciting when they clubbed a long one—but Aaron and Mays did a host of things magnificently. The status quo awarded them primarily (especially Aaron) for hitting home runs, and rewarded them very well compared to the treatment given other black players who were no more than potential base-stealers or batting champs. Hank and Willie were not forged by The System, but one aspect of their multi-faceted play particularly appealed to The System’s obsession with regularity and reliability.

Now we are allowing the system to make robots out of us in ways that are scarcely even metaphorical. We allow technology to sculpt our bodies into something no longer quit human, knowing all the while (or maybe not knowing, in a few tragic cases) that, like Achilles, we will die young in return for our day in the sun. Players use bats today which are no longer remotely capable of a .400 season, should a throwback magically appear who has the skill to achieve such a number. The damn things snap in two unless you hit the ball squarely on the oversized barrel—no one-and-two pitch has any chance of being fisted over the infield. In any case, hitters make no notable adjustment in their swing with two strikes: the third swing is one last chance to go for the downs. Even after Ichiro Suzuki comes into our midst from an entirely different culture and shatters a season-hits record which none of our home-grown talent could ever approach, we merely shrug and turn our attention back to A-Rod or David Ortiz.

And that raises a question about us who watch: the fans. As much as the organization craves the money-in-the-bank solidity of the home run, we fans seem to crave its majestic arc and foot-on-the-throat triumph even more. Why is that, I have often wondered? What role have fans played in the rigidification of baseball around the long ball?

I don’t think we spectators were always the guilty party. Naturally, fans thronged to see Mantle and Maris chase after Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record in 1961, both because of the record’s seeming impregnability throughout baseball history and because the two men seriously assailing it were on the same team. Yet Yankee games were perennially well attended, and the crowds which packed Yankee Stadium in the fall of ’61 often appeared more interested in harassing Roger than admiring the arc of his long flies. During the years of my study, I do not believe that fans were the driving force behind home-run mania. The rate of home-run hitting had risen more-or-less steadily throughout the fifties, and not just because of the influx of black sluggers. Mantle, Mathews, Mize, Musial… the letter “M” could already account for about 2000 home runs in this era without Mays’s even being added to the tally. Kluszewski reached or surpassed 40 home runs in each of the three seasons from 1953 to 1955. Roy Sievers hit a total of 81 during 1957 and 1958. Rocky Colavito walloped an even 200 homers in the five years from 1958 to 1962… and so it goes. Not since the 1930’s had so many sluggers racked up so many “taters”.

I have argued that the fifties and early sixties may have been big home-run years for whites precisely because black ballplayers were steadily trickling into the Major Leagues’ ranks. That is, I suspect that management may have fallen back conservatively on the Ruthian technique of cashing in lots of chips at once because this formed a distinct contrast with Negro League baseball. I am not insinuating that any concerted plot was hatched, and I hope none of my earlier remarks has been read as implying anything so absurd. I simply think that greater emphasis of the home run was a natural way for white baseball to circle the wagons. That Aaron and Banks and Mays and Robinson ended up beating the white establishment at its own game proves how little of the genuine conspiracy was behind this long-ball fever; for black home-run kings were not only rewarded with salaries and playing time approximate to a white slugger’s—they inspired many organizations to give marginal stars like Willie Kirkland a good taste of limelight in the hope that they, too, would start belting a shot every other game.

As home-run champs, these players did more than any others of their generation to carry Jackie Robinson’s vision forward. White management was only too happy to discover that blacks could indeed play long-ball: what made it most nervous, I suspect, was that blacks might capture the Majors with bunts and steals. Caucasian players must have feared that they could not compete on such terms: Caucasian owners probably feared that they could not win on those terms.

I’m going over old ground, for clarity’s sake. I shall be adding no great revelation to say that contact hitting and steals did at last become central to the game in the latter sixties and throughout the seventies and eighties. Home-run hitters continued to serve their vital purpose, as they always have—but a couple in the heart of the order sufficed. Bert Campaneris and Billy North gave Sal Bando and Reggie Jackson runs to bat in: Pete Rose and Joe Morgan did the same for Johnny Bench and Tony Perez, as did Vince Coleman and Willie McGee for Jack Clarke. The offenses of these years were far more balanced, more difficult for an overpowering pitcher to shut down entirely. They produced fewer lopsided games, but also fewer shut-outs. These were the very years, of course, when the percentage of blacks in the game was at its highest, and also when the variety of skills which black players could bring to the game was most manifest. With Carew and Gwynn came Stargell and Dick Allen; with Coleman and Henderson came Winfield and Andre Dawson.

So what happened? Here, I believe, is where the fans came in—or the television, to be precise. Brainwashing by TV. I wouldn’t be the first one to point out that highlight reels always privilege the home run. ESPN SportsCenter’s capsulizations of ball games seem to consist of little except sluggers “going yard” and pitchers recording critical “K’s”… maybe a bench-clearing brawl tossed in once a week. To the extent that such quick takes are most of what the casual fan ever sees of any given ball game, it’s small wonder if he considers such events to be, indeed, the game’s greatest moments. Similarly, kids who grow up feeding on home-run replays in our “instant gratification” society naturally want to hit homers when they take the field at school or in Little League. We imitate what we observe: that’s how we learn.

Yet televised highlights are actually not the medium’s most influential message, in my opinion. I believe the effect of television on how we watch baseball has been far more subtle (just as the enforced passivity of TV-watching has done more to make us a violence-tolerant society than shot-’em-up cop shows). Consider the camera man’s dilemma. If you try to cover the whole field, the players become too small on the viewer’s screen to be of any interest. If you zoom in on just one or two players (and the center-field camera allows you to zoom in on three, the maximum possible), then the flow of play escapes your lens as soon as the ball is hit. Contemporary broadcasting has been incredibly resourceful about resolving the dilemma. With multiple cameras rolling all the time, the director can switch instantly to the shortstop once a ground ball is hit, then track the throw over to first. On a ball smacked into the gap, however, all we see—all we can see—is a couple of outfielders chasing the bounding dot to the wall. We only pick up the runners circling the bases when a switch is made to another camera, one of the outfielders having hurled the ball back in. Even then, we follow only the lead runner: we can’t see for the moment how far the hitter has advanced behind him.

In a real ball game, a live ball game, you see all of this going on as it goes on. Human peripheral vision is so superior to any camera’s lens that you can actually follow the ball to the base of the left-center field fence while being aware that the lead runner is going to try for home and that the hitter will make second easily. To me, a double in the gap with several runners on base is the most exciting play in the game—but it’s only so if you are sitting in the stands and watching it. Television is forced to leave far too much of the play out as it unfolds. A televised home run is an entirely different matter. You really don’t miss anything on the screen; in fact, you see the home run infinitely better than you would “in person” if, like me, you’re a little near-sighted. With the announcer’s voice rising to clue you in that this one has a chance, you follow the left fielder to the wall… and see a little white orb land five rows back. You haven’t really missed a thing on the infield, because the runners had to linger near their bases lest the left fielder make a sensational leaping grab. The camera picks them up an instant later as they plod home, then turn around to high-five the conquering hero. The same scene beheld live in the ballpark is often the least bit disappointing to me. I hear a crack of the bat, I see the outfielder sprinting back… and then, everything decelerates into a kind of slow-motion. The ball’s out of play: we just sit and watch Casey circle the bags.

Of course, I can tell that most of my fellow spectators are not in the least disappointed—not if the home team has just racked up some more runs. I look at them. A lot of the least attentive are young, a lot are female (let’s face it: more men than women like baseball), and a lot are important-seeming swells on cell phones. I doubt that most of them even knew what the count was, let alone what kind of pitch was thrown. And anyway, stands are arranged now for easy egress to concession booth and restroom: unless you have expensive tickets, you can’t see nearly as much of the fine maneuvering as you would have in Ebbets Field. But they all appear very happy, cradling corny dogs and nachos as a scoreboard reminiscent of their TV blares in center field and squadrons of clowns and go-go girls (or whatever you call them after the millennium) cavort on the dugout roof between innings. Believe it or not, these people have been so well conditioned by the television to cheer the home run that they are virtually immune to the excitement of a hit-and-run play or a double steal. They aren’t really watching: they don’t know how to watch. They’re grazing and swaying to rock music and taking toddlers to the potty and, behind it all, waiting for that crack of the bat. Was it one of our guys? Yippee!

The casual fan’s inordinate glee at watching balls sail over fences fed what I regard as the dirtiest secret in baseball since the Black Sox Scandal—and I don’t mean steroids, for this conspiracy subsumes the steroid disgrace, being its direct cause. I have read or heard nothing over the years which softens my conviction that the Major League owners engineered a perennial home-run derby throughout the latter nineties in order to recover financially from the decade’s strike-harrowed early years. In 1991, Howard Johnson led the National League comfortably with 38 home runs: only four other players had 30 or more, and three of these logged under 33. Cecil Fielder, a bulging slugger of the old school, kept putting up numbers at or around 50 in the late ’80s and early ’90s: no one else really matched him over this stretch.

Meanwhile, revenues declined as labor disputes seethed just beneath the surface. After storm clouds gathered and partially dispersed over and over for several seasons, a deluge finally poured down in August of 1994, when a deadlock between owners and players resulted in a walk-out that canceled the rest of the season, including the World Series. The public didn’t much care for either side. It perceived baseball ownership as stingy and dictatorial, while the players’ union showed staunch unwillingness to countenance the notion of salary caps accepted by every other major sport. Even when the gates finally re-opened the next spring, the man-in-the-streets was loath to spend hard-earned money enriching either one of these unsavory parties.

How to get people back into the seats? The home run, of course—the single baseball event which, although in many ways utterly unlike other baseball events, has come to be the game’s shorthand in the popular mind. Little League trophies usually feature a slugger with bat wrapped around forward shoulder, having just executed a home-run cut: the typical baseball logo often represents the same slugger in silhouette. Vox populi, vox dei—which is to say (in free translation), if the fans want it, the fans get it. We all know how McGuire and Sosa heated up—and then, taking us somewhat by surprise, that lanky Bonds kid (who suddenly didn’t look so lanky). Bespectacled men in lab coats ran tests to assure us that the juiced ball wasn’t juiced. Theories full of techno-babble were floated to explain why the late-nineties player was so much more home-run proficient than his predecessors. These guys hit the weights hard, and they generated unprecedented levels of bat speed by using short sticks with all of the meat in the barrel. (It was considered irrelevant that, once upon a time, Ernie Banks picked cotton, Reggie Jackson delivered ice with tongs, and Mickey Mantle swung a coal pick—and also that yesteryear’s power hitters typically choked up on their heavy bats. You want theories, you’ve got theories!)

Change-ups awkwardly swept at with one hand carried to the warning track—or beyond—to the amazement of us older observers, who had been conditioned to record such a swing as a “can of corn” long before an outfielder trotted in to put it away. Lifetime “gap hitters” like Brady Anderson and Luis González incredibly surmounted the 50-home-run mark, a plateau seen by all of eleven hitters throughout baseball history before 1995 and visited by ten more in the ensuing decade.

Even umpires had been coyly recruited for the charade. They squeezed the strike zone into a box about the size of a hitting tee, especially for a franchise slugger; and if a maverick pitcher were so ill-advised as to respond by brushing Mighty Mark back from the plate, the benches cleared or—at the very least—the offender was threatened with ejection.

We now know, too, that the lower levels of the front office—and most certainly the coaching staff—must have been aware that banned substances were being employed to enhance the effects of all that barbell-bouncing. Yet nobody said anything. The owners didn’t want to know, and the managers didn’t want to tell. Just tiptoe between photo ops and the daily hit parade. Fave, as the ancient Romans would have said: keep silent—favor the emerging wonder by not asking or answering any sharp-edged questions.

I’ve heard it argued lately that Rafael Palmeiro should be tried under a conspiracy statute, since he was putting a phony product before the spectator/consumer by imbibing steroids. If we should rise up and demand that players who hoodwinked us be hauled off in cuffs, why, a fortiori, should we not demand the same thing of the owners who staged the five-or-six year sham finishing out the twentieth century?

For all of the reasons I have just coursed through—at least half a dozen—the mini-era of McGuire and Sosa and Bonds is highly suspect, and it indicts fraudulence at a very high level. The single-season home-run record is now a sloppy mess. For my money, Roger Maris should be credited with owning it, and Bonds, McGuire, and Sosa should all have asterisks placed after their names. Of the nineties generation, I nominate Ken Griffey, Jr., as King of the Home Run.

Yet the last few paragraphs have, in a way, constituted a mere digression in the greater matter of our cultural problem. For baseball ownership would never have hatched The Great Home-Run Race if we fans hadn’t been home-run crazy. Television got to us, yes: it affected our ability simply to perceive the game’s fine points, and hence to appreciate them. Our pathological impatience with life is probably also implicated. Suggestions for “speeding up” baseball as preposterous as using a simple gesture from the umpire to issue an intentional walk keep crawling out of the woodwork. (Not only do a few intentional walks per year result in wild pitches: the four straight wide throws incur a substantial risk of compromising the pitcher’s accuracy, so that the next hitter is in a much more favorable position than if the umpire had merely nodded his predecessor down to first.) We want our runs quick—at one fell stroke.

I suspect, too, that the image of the knock-out blow appeals to us. Our society has grown alarmingly aggressive. We want to see someone or something get creamed in our sports nowadays. When a pitcher records a strikeout, an announcer is likely to call it a “K” (for “knock-out”), and a group of votaries at the upper deck’s rail will be sure to hang out a “K” sign. I can’t recall when I first heard the term “K” used of a strike-out, but I’m pretty sure the date was in the 1980’s. By the way, this gladiatorial mentality seems actually to have infected pitchers in some cases. Those few like Greg Maddux who know how to induce three easy ground balls on three pitches are true masters, yet they seldom elicit much public enthusiasm. We hunger and thirst for a dominant performance—which Maddux’s is; but we don’t appreciate dominance when we see it. We want to witness an open humiliation which does not require of us any grasp of the game’s subtleties.

As a result, football has become our new national pastime—or watching football, anyway. The whole set-up fits readily into our TV’s screen. The game’s purpose is to shove the ball down the other team’s throat: every single play involves multiple high-impact collisions. Though some of us may rumble around a vacant playground with our buddies on Saturday afternoon (often twisting a knee or spraining a finger) as we “psych up” for Sunday, our genuine heroes no more resemble us—or normal members of our species—than Robo-Cop looks like Officer Buckle. Whether by ingesting contraband drugs or swallowing legendary servings of steak and eggs or pumping iron like an Olympic weight-lifter, these monstrosities have transformed themselves from human beings into weapons of mass destruction. Barry Bonds would immediately vanish in one of their crowds. They are grotesque—and we love them.

The game is also supplied with frequent lacunae of activity which flatter our cultural Attention Deficit Disorder. This, after all, is why we find baseball “boring”: not because too little happens too seldom, but because something is always going on, and we just can’t keep up. Football gives us frenzied, life-threatening bursts of energy followed by lulls which allow our giddy faculties to focus on another handful of potato chips. If the players are pistons in a mighty engine, we viewers are the adolescent foot that revs the engine as we scream our throats raw—in a rather contemptible irony, it seems to me: for our sedentary guzzling and grazing actually turns us to pudgy cannon fodder even as the cadenced mayhem before us incites our irresponsible dreams of payback and autocracy.

I don’t like football. I haven’t liked it from the day when, as a bus carried our high school team to face a particularly imposing adversary, my best friend asked me in amazement, “Harris, what’s the matter with you? You look like you’re about to kill someone!” In my mind, I was doing precisely that. I was getting “mentally prepared”. But then, most Americans never actually play football with pads on. And I like the game even less, if possible, when I consider how it allows them to handle a week’s load of suppressed aggression by watching other people get pounded rather than by examining their souls and changing their lives. (Will someone explain to me, by the way, why certain denominations see an indissoluble link between football and the life of Jesus Christ?)

These days, what I hate about football most of all is that it seems to have invaded baseball. Home-run fever, the “K”, the diving catch (as opposed to getting a good first read or positioning yourself well)… the love of bench-clearing brawls, the joy of baiting umpires, the revived pastime (once popular when fans were taking an afternoon off from the sweatshop) of hurling racial slurs and blunt objects at players… I hate what’s happening to our society, and in baseball I can see it happening very clearly.

And just what is happening to our society—and what in the world does it have to do with racism? System is happening: a new kind of system with the same old suicidal effects of all systems—a system for people who don’t know the difference between freedom and irresponsibility, between individualism and narcissism. A system based upon private terminals and capsules—on free-market technology. A private automobile for every traveler, a personal computer for every shopper, a television-and-dish for every thrill-seeker….

We are all being gratified instantly these days, but we will all awaken one day (if we haven’t already) to realize that we aren’t very gratified. The higher pleasures cannot be instant. Playing an instrument, or composing music for it, takes years of apprenticeship. Designing a beautiful building requires years of designing mediocre buildings, or elegant but structurally unviable buildings. Being an All-Star hitter or pitcher requires years and years of grinding practice. In contrast, any tall kid can succeed as a wide-receiver on his high school’s football team after a little coaching, and can extend his triumph to the school’s basketball team after football season winds down. I’m sure players in these sports view success with satisfaction, just as I’m sure those of my students who design Web sites are being honest when they claim that their work is an artistic outlet. As a culture, we sincerely do not suspect what deep, rich satisfactions we have given up in order to have the instant kind: collectively, we have not yet awakened.

The worst-case scenario is that we may be growing incapable of awakening: our narcosis of quick, shallow pleasures may be luring us into a coma. Just as our athlete-heroes are looking more like invincible robots all the time, so we may be altering our nature to suit the whimsy of our machines. Have you noticed that the more labor-saving devices we create, the more we clamor for something new to save us more labor? Has it occurred to you that the more time our sophisticated gadgetry spares us, the less time we have? Our ready-made, easy-opening amusements and accessories have convinced us that the only worthy work is the elimination of work, and our lightning-quick marvels have rendered all that is not quick insufferable to us. We are in danger of incurring a fundamental moral ineptitude. A little farther along this path, and we shall not be able to think up a plan and then bring it to fruition. Halfway through the endeavor, we’ll be looking for a channel-stick.

You can throw this book out the window right now with my blessing… but I remain absolutely convinced that a new racism is linked to the electronic American. I have already argued that racist conduct occurs when people outside the reigning system can be plausibly associated with a readily observable set of superficial characteristics. This is not a new argument: historian C. Vann Woodward described racism in the South by stressing that the freed slaves were, first and foremost, economic competition for poor whites. When outsiders want in, they constitute a threat for insiders who have traditionally profited from the status quo. But how on earth can today’s minorities—any of them—be said to remain outside of our technological revolution? Poorer households can afford less hardware, to be sure; but nothing really prevents a determined kid from using the Internet at school or the public library. Once online, his color or ethnicity can hardly be given away by how he clicks the mouse.

The effect I have in mind, now as before, is far more subtle. (If these things weren’t subtle, they would have alarmed us a long time ago.) I believe that life before a monitor induces the “user” to think in stereotypes. Everything about electronic communication is eventually centripetal. By that I mean that we are all, sooner or later, force-fed the same ideas out of the same cookie-cutters. We are continually being sucked toward a central deposit of images, as if we were circling a maelstrom. The Internet has always had its libertarian defenders who assure us that the little guy—the lonely blogger, for instance—can now reach the entire world. Television, too (since the advent of cable) looks at first glance like a happy hunting ground for viewers with a rainbow of tastes. Never have so many been able to express themselves so freely.

There are two things fatally erroneous about this idyllic picture, however. The first is that any “scattering” of interests on an electronic medium is immediately followed by a “regrouping” counter-movement, just as an exploding star inevitably coalesces into smaller clouds of gas and debris. I’m a blogger myself: I think my weekly audience may run as high as two digits on occasion. The bloggers who have achieved sufficiently broad dissemination to render their “lonely voice” something more than a pebble on the ocean bottom are those who, in fact, reflect the general interests of vast movements. Their work is cited or linked to dozens or hundreds of other Web sites: that’s how they pull in readers and achieve the critical mass necessary to confer influence. As for TV, anyone who thinks that owning a dish provides access to unlimited avenues of entertainment hasn’t owned a dish. Out of several hundred channels, one is able to strain a rather lean fare of sporting events, newscasts, porn, talk shows, and Andy Griffith reruns. Producers simply cannot make money by targeting minute niche markets. They well know that people who sit in front of the tube will at last settle down to doze before the least objectionable show in the absence of anything truly pleasant or intriguing. The much-touted tendency toward the diverse ends up, sooner or later, producing rivulets which lead right back into the mainstream.

In a society dominated by such media, minorities will be stereotyped simply because they are minorities. Movies and TV shows will have “black” parts, just as they have young-and-blonde parts. The major networks have lately tried to resist the tendency by casting black females as—of all things—coroners! Apparently, the intellectual demands of the job defy the old “Amos and Andy” stereotype, the association with the legal establishment nixes the “ghetto-kid outlaw” image, and the handling of corpses belies the assumption that girls are squeamish. One of two things will happen here, though: either black females will begin to be stereotyped as personalities fit to be coroners, or else the coroner image’s distance from reality will become so apparent that the connection will be dropped. (I actually believe the former is more apt to occur, since people reared before screens have no notion of reality beyond what the screen reveals.)

Electronic life is severely reductive. It is usually timed, and has a window of only such-and-such proportions to communicate its message. It is also legion: there are so many shows and sites riding the air waves and pulsing through the wires that an offering must “type” itself to win a following. In the process, its component parts are also typed. White people are typed, too: the young, the old, parents, teenagers, “hotties” and “hunks”… the whole degrading and imbecilic panoply which parades before our children. Don’t think for a moment, either, that white kids abstain from trying to squeeze themselves into these stereotypes. Peer pressure, like the “K”, was something none of us had ever heard of before about 1980. The television has played nanny now to two generations—and counting—which consider themselves obliged to “fit in” somewhere among commonly broadcast expectations.

But minorities will always have the worst of this cookie-cutter approach to humanity, because they will always have fewer options. Their appearance will always lead them to stick out more. Black women will always (at least if current demographic trends continue) be more observable as coroners than white women, let alone white males. The stereotype, by the way, need not send an overtly contemptuous message. My son told me a year ago that he wished he were black, because black guys are rappers and star athletes. I tried to tell him that classical musician Wynton Marsalis is black, too… but the broader implications of his error are irresistible. Until he becomes old enough to think for himself, black people will be associated with a relatively narrow range of possibilities in his mind, even though he may value those possibilities. The true objective of desegregation is not for minorities to be saddled with “good” stereotypes, but for the saddle to be removed. Electronic communication has pulled the cinch a little tighter, because it must do so.

System. Tecum non possum vivere nec sine te, quipped the Roman wag Martial: “I can live neither with you nor without you.” It would be ridiculous to suggest that we human beings could survive at all, let alone prosper and progress, without organization. The most basic functions must be rendered somewhat routine so that we may be freed to think creatively about our higher ambitions: you can’t paint the Sistine Chapel if you’re worrying about where your next meal will come from. The objection I have lodged against organizations is precisely that they tend eventually to sabotage their healthy effects. They grow rigid to the point that observing organizational order is more important than accomplishing what that order was fashioned to do. The first time external circumstances change from a predictable range of forms and patterns, the system fails to respond sensibly, so bound and gagged is it in procedural rigor. By the early sixties, the Boston Red Sox had resisted integration and clung to habit for so long, calling up the bare minimum of black players and using them as seldom as possible, that even the expansion Los Angeles Angels were out-performing them. The Kansas City Athletics hadn’t been much more progressive (quasi-superstar Vic Power was soon unloaded), and continued to hover near the bottom along the way to losing their franchise. Systems cannot afford to stifle creativity, even though the admission of too much creativity undermines the system. The contradiction must somehow be resolved into a paradox: the healthy organization must find ways to keep changing as it remains the same.

I have never seen a system which subverts this quest for a healthy truce more effectively than electronic communication. Messages move at the speed of light and reach every plugged-in citizen: they must therefore be responsive to individual inspiration, since any plugged-in citizen may instantly fire back the most whimsical of reactions. Will we ever figure out, as a society, that the means of the response already “systematizes” it to the point where it can offer little resistance? Or we will figure this out (I should have asked) before it’s too late? The objection to speed and ease is slowness and difficulty. Speedy solutions are not thoughtful, and easy solutions do not tap our deepest resources or develop our endurance. The most responsible answer to a talk-show host’s question would be, “I don’t have enough time in this interview to respond as I should,” just as the only responsible conclusion to any important call on a cell-phone must be, “Come and see me, so that we can talk face to face—so that I can look you in the eye and know that you’re speaking with undivided attention.” The inescapable criticism of our airy media is that they are unsuited to meaningful communication. Such a criticism, of course, is out of bounds when the audience can only share in your words, to begin with, over the TV or from the other side of town. Our whole culture would have to slow down—our very communities would have to be re-structured in favor of walking and visiting—before the critic could be taken seriously.

The shallowness of our lives as we now lead them seems, then, to be irrevocable. We are doomed to be “icons” to each other. “My boyfriend”, “my teacher”, “my little sister”… I suspect fearfully that each of these nouns evokes a two-dimensional stereotype in the young people who use it. How many of them think of a boyfriend or girlfriend as a complex human being whose collaboration in a common future will require sacrifice as well as bestow satisfaction? How many of them simply see a face which dimly resembles a favorite movie star’s and a set of behaviors endlessly modeled on soap operas and “reality shows” (as those bizarre pantomimes are called where young people try to replicate TV scripts off the cuff)? And if we see the persons closest to our hearts (or who ought to be closest) as mere “script-enablers”, bandying clichés with us and responding on cue in formulaic dramas, how will we ever reach out across racial boundaries to the common humanity of distant neighbors? What exactly is a “cool black guy” to my white college students, I wonder? Is he cool because he displays the requisite cool features—earring, high-top sneakers, dreadlocks—or because he sits quiet and the least bit surly in class, importing into the white man’s refuge a slight chip on the shoulder? What if he were short, wore thick glasses, excelled at math, and asked lots of questions? Would that turn them off? Does a white lad of the same description also turn them off? Why is the white scholar a “nerd” or a “geek”, like Dexter of cartoon fame (a pre-adolescent mad scientist), while the black scholar emanates a vague odor of betrayal, as if it were his moral duty to be tall and free of myopia?

In my half-century of life, I have never found the people around me to be so captivated by unquestioned and shallow assumptions—so prejudiced. The prejudice is not usually full of spite. It more often smacks of the “black female coroner” syndrome: generous but still block-headedly rigid. What do we do about this? What can we do about it?

A contrast in employer devotion: the oft-traded Wagner had a longest stint of four years in Cleveland Mantilla warmed a Braves bench for years, then played five seasons for three clubs. Jiménezr received almost half his big-league at-bats in 1962. Ashburn’s tour of duty with the Mets punctuated a long, distinguished career with Philadelphia and the Cubs.

Note that the three players whose hands are visible have spaced them apart on the handle—Wagner very dramatically, Ashburn by about a quarter-inch. Leon and Felix hold the bottom hand loose so as to turn fast on an inside pitch, while Richie’s top hand is looser, allowing him to reach for the outside pitch: a high-power versus a high-average strategy. Such ingenious eclecticism of technique was common in the Negro Leagues, but was often scoffed at by Major League hitting “experts”. Negro League veterans often remarked that Ashburn played ball as they were taught to play it.

If the baseball establishment is indeed precisely like every other, then there’s not much hope of our seeing another Satchel Paige or Ricky Henderson or Rod Carew in the near future—players who, one and all, used different moves for different occasions, adjusted, disrupted, experimented, and (in a word) created. On the contrary, as the Age of Electronic Communication is busily programming us to think in orderly channels, files, and icons, the developing technical arms of the “sports instruction” industry are rehearsing youngsters—hardware-savvy, affluent, mostly Caucasian youngsters—to do things just thus-and-so. And as our leisure increasingly becomes given to wild fantasies on disks or websites, our “day jobs” grow ever more “goal-driven” and “results-oriented” (and the English language ever less organic). There is no responsible, healthy symbiosis between fantasy to reality: the two blur, instead, in the most cramped and petulant ways, with the computer whiz hacking into a rival company’s secret files on a lark and the porn addict setting up hidden cameras in the ladies’ restroom. Our most creative moments have the look of a compulsive pathology, as if we cannot resist becoming the stereotypical characters in some stale soap opera.

The best-educated are no less susceptible than the exploited masses. The politically correct among us scream and rave about “diversity” from their ivory tower, but their multi-cultural Arcadia is itself an assembly of stereotypes: Latinos playing Mariachi music over plates of spicy food, Chinese wielding chopsticks and water colors, Native Americans dancing in feathers and bells.... and so on, and so on. Have you seen what goes on in your child’s foreign language class? Lessons on distinctive food, lessons on distinctive holidays… “At Christmas we eat this, and we do this”… never a genuine poem or short story by a recognized author anywhere in sight. The quick fix, the stereotype, dominates even when we flatter ourselves that we are “reaching out”. Our entire culture is stifling in system. Never has a culture been so successful—and now we are paying the price of success, denied elbow room in the rapidly narrowing corridors of progress.

The essential spirit of Western civilization—the voice which spoke through Socrates and Boethius and Descartes and Kant (two of whom were executed, one of whom fled his country, and one of whom had to write almost hieroglyphically)—whispered to past generations beneath the steady drone of a Pharisaical officialdom that it wasn’t culture or system or burnt offerings which mattered, but Truth. Truth with a capital T, enduring human verities, the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative… the obligation imposed upon us by the eyes of a child—any child—in need, the feeling of sublime transcendence inspired in us—all of us—by a beautiful sunset. System has tried over and over to throttle the humane impulse of our civilization. At long last, now that our words and very thoughts have become so systematized—now that we speak in clichés drilled home by TV commercials and dream in images designed by Hollywood technicians—our ability to pursue meaning beyond system seems to have subsided. Even our religion speaks in relativist language. The example of Christ is no longer true because it unlocks the noblest, most selfless ambitions which struggle for expression in every human heart: it is true only and entirely because one finds it in our culture’s historically preferred holy book.

I know how nutty it sounds to connect electronic technology with this implosion of systematic rigor, and for that reason I want to insist upon it one more time with (I hope) greater clarity. Look at the connection this way: never before in human history has wealth been so culturally impoverishing. The new wealth of the Roman Empire financed provincial highways and aqueducts which, in some cases, remain functional today. It bankrolled the literary endeavors of Virgil and Horace. The new wealth of Renaissance Italy funded the art of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael, the poetry of Petrarch and Ariosto, the sculpture of Bernini, the music of Monteverdi, and all the rest. The new wealth of Hanoverian England financed the Royal Academy of the Sciences and set in motion (alack, the day!) the series of events which would produce satellites and cable TV.

Now what, I ask you, does new wealth do in our culture? To be sure, the Medicis and the Churchills were ostentatious on an extravagant scale: our billionaire attorneys and CEO’s didn’t invent the in-your-face, kiss-my-money palace on the hill. But the lavish leisures in which yesteryear’s wealthy invested almost possessed, of necessity, a public dimension. The plays which they commissioned were witnessed by dozens, if not thousands. The portraits for which they sat pompously, though perhaps deposited in an intimate antechamber throughout their lifetime, eventually reached public museums (the masterpieces among them, at any rate). The situation is entirely different with Sharon Jones, Bank President, or Farley Smith, Director of Acme Security Systems. She or he has a “home entertainment center” wired up in the mansion’s heart of hearths—or maybe a small theater to accommodate dozens of fair-weather friends and sycophantic minions; the big bucks, in any case, have gone into the technology—the means of transmission—and not the “entertainment”. Jones and Smith (and whatever appendages they may choose to invite) will sit before the same Monday Night (or is it now Nite?) Football game or Hollywood blockbuster as the rest of the nation does at lower definition and for lower admission. The wealth of Their Honors Jones and Smith is not rewarding better screenplay-writers or commissioning brilliant but unknown composers: it is enriching the producers and purveyors of electronic technology. The thrust of all expenditures is not toward a higher quality of art, but toward a more immanent, sensual, manipulable, convenient, and instantaneous means of delivery. In other words, it is toward what matters least, a sideshow. (Personally, I’d rather see a black-and-white Bogart-and-Bacall any day than sit through Titanic in “surround sound”.) It is toward a secondary, ancillary—even parasitic—creativity; and it absorbs sums of money whose trail of zeroes Sir Isaac Newton thought only existed in the stars.

Much of our economy—more all the time—is dedicated to creating nothing, to toying around with what was created long before we were caught in this swirling funnel of seeing quicker and closer rather than seeing more worthy sights. Active footage of James Cagney and John Wayne is already being spliced into the trivial skits of TV commercials. Soon feature-length films will star long-dead actors revived via computer—or perhaps super-beautiful humans digitally enhanced from the raw clay of mere “supermodels”. But this miracle race will utter no memorable lines, will enlighten no dark corners of the human psyche: no Euripides or Shakespeare or Chekhov will be writing the script. Culture is not being enriched by our riches; creativity is not being tapped by what we create. We are indeed trapped in a maelstrom, and we have absolutely no idea—none of us—what cloaca maxima we are likely to be spewed into once the spout finally ejects us (if we may assume, that is, that we will retain enough pieces to care by that time). We are enslaved to a system which does no more than constantly re-program itself, at exorbitant cost and with ever less sensitivity to what it was first intended to broadcast. We cannot rear our heads from the dials and buttons long enough to study—to sit and study—how Delacroix used his reds or how Turner used his rough brush strokes on a static piece of canvas. We are barbarians. Attention Deficit Disorder is just another way of describing a Visigoth.

The pauper, as the Roman philosopher Seneca once wrote, is not he who has little, but he who craves more. Poverty is becoming power in our moribund culture—the privation, I mean, of material things which we not only don’t need but which are making us weak and dull. We don’t see it yet… but those of us who will be best off will be those who have the least disposable cash. Life doesn’t require much as long as one has a roof over one’s head and three square meals a day. (Americans who do not have this much are usually not pinching their pennies enough: when you’re poor, think poor.) I repeat that we desperately need not to have most of what we presently pant and pine after. We need not to have “entertainment centers”: a book is infinitely better, if one can still be found. Canvas and oil paints are a lot cheaper than a “ DVD library” (there’s an oxymoron for you), and will consume leisure hours far more greedily with far more excitement of gray matter. James Galway, the world’s greatest flautist, learned to play on a tin whistle as a poor boy in Northern Ireland : emulate him. Buy a guitar and pick out a few tunes instead of emptying your wallet and your brain on an iPod.

But, no, we are not yet to the point where one may sing the praises of poverty and be understood as a loyal American and a faithful Christian. To argue against the acquisitive instinct—to argue, even, against “developing” that instinct to ravenous proportions (otherwise known as advertising)—is to subvert the basis of democratic capitalism. To insist that God is more palpable in deep silences and vague feelings which disdain to be satisfied by tinsel holidays is to deny the spirit as a “living” power. The political forces which worry most about babies not allowed to be born worry least about six-year-olds growing up around cell phones and computers or about adolescents being propelled into a car culture that claims a Vietnam ’s worth of fatalities every year. The maelstrom already has us turned so thoroughly inside-out that up is down and this world is the next one. And, it seems to me, we go a little bit more insane every year.

In our vast cultural debacle, we find ourselves sometimes playing a game with a ball, just to recover a little sanity. In the same way, a person who crawls safely from a plane’s wreckage might sit and stare at an uncharred daisy. Is a daisy really such an insignificant thing? Is a game with a ball? I’ll bet that one of the first free, spontaneous acts a survivor of a concentration camp might perform would be to rub his hand along the bark of a healthy green tree; and I’ll bet that one of the next would be to pick up an escaping ball and toss it to an expectant child. As long as a few trees and a few balls remain, we still have a chance. Some day, a baseball franchise may still go a little bit “nutty”, throwing out the book and throwing into its arsenal everything but the kitchen sink. (Henrik Ibsen wrote somewhere that only lunatics are sane in a crazy world.) This off-the-wall franchise, if it ever comes to exist, will win, almost of necessity; because the system has been finely tuned to defeat play by the book, so “wrong” play is sure to trip the system up completely.

This is poetry, as I said at the beginning of what has become a rather long composition. Baseball, done right, is poetry. It is the unpredictable leap in Heisenberg’s electron, the unanticipated melody in the composer’s brain, the wholly improbable emergence of a sapling from a pile of stones, the blossoming of a flower from a crack in the sidewalk. Yes, system is profitable in baseball, as in all human enterprises. Pitchers systematically analyze hitters and succeed in neutralizing them: then hitters systematically analyze pitchers and neutralize the neutralizing strategy—and so on ad infinitum. But the most successful player of all is the one who, for some reason, defies systematic analysis; and the only reason any player ever does so (for nothing, in baseball or in life, defies all analysis—even an angelic visitor would have much of x and little of y) is that the player has exploited the system’s blind side. Not “miracle wrists” or “superhuman speed”, but creativity which—for the moment, anyway—is too much for the professors and the gurus to handle… that’s what ultimately makes a great ballplayer, just as it elevates an artistic genius from the rigors of genre and “tasteful” expectation.

The greatest tragedy of racism, perhaps, is that it deprives a culture of the “alien” element necessary to vivify its own most beloved conventions. Some people don’t like what Wynton Marsalis brings to Telemann by way of jazz; the same people’s grandparents, I suppose, didn’t like what Debussy imported from jazz to classical music. But there isn’t a single example in human history of an art form which did not change with time: for to be utterly contained within forms—to satisfy expectation merely—spells death to the artistic experience. An element of surprise, of mystery—of chaos, even—must exist in the beautiful if it is to capture the beholder. So for goodness: if we sense no mystery in our pursuit of righteousness, but instead simply sit back and check off the commandments we have fulfilled, then we are as far from the good as any abject sinner.

I know now that baseball has never escaped rigidity—that it was never the irrepressible burst of creativity, perhaps the one such burst honored among us today, which I naively took it to be in my youth. But I think it has its moments; and if some bad boy keeps stirring the pot to find an advantage in competition, then… well, then maybe we may some day figure out that the more serious aspects of our lives do not have to fit the mold, either.

1 The ever sagacious Shelby Steele dissects this type of response in an article entitled “The Recoloring of Campus Life,” first published in Harper’s Magazine (February 1989) and reprinted in an anthology often used in Freshman Composition classes like mine, The Norton Reader, 11^th ed., eds. Linda Peterson and John Brereton (New York: Norton, 2004), 372-382. Professor Steele concludes, “Young whites tell themselves that they had nothing to do with the oppression of black people. They have a stronger belief in their racial innocence than any previous generation of whites, and a natural hostility toward anyone who would challenge that innocence” (381).

2 Cf. Joe Morgan’s comments in Long Balls, No Strikes: What Baseball Must Do to Keep the Good Times Rolling (New York: Random House, 1999), 76: “Filling out the lineup card gave every skipper tremendous leverage over his team [before the era of million-dollar contracts]. Unless you were a superstar, he controlled your playing time and, by extension, your compensation. You had to remain in a manager’s good graces back then. If you didn’t he could sit you down, demote you to the minors, or ship you to another team.”

3 I might note here the mysterious case of Eileen Julien, an up-and-coming scholar of African Studies who was young, brilliant, beautiful, female, and black. Professor Julien’s book African Novels and the Question of Orality (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992) was a definite tour de force. When I read it, I immediately tracked her down to her elite East Coast campus and offered my congratulations through e-mail. By way of reply, I was informed by a helpful drudge that Julien had “gotten married and moved to Africa ”. Now, I have nothing against either marriage or Africa.; but when a professor forsakes an Ivy League position for one or both of these (neither of which is irreconcilable with keeping the post: scholars go on sabbaticals and international exchange programs all the time), something’s fishy. The truth is that Julien’s book had violated politically correct orthodoxy by arguing that the lot of African women has actually improved (gasp!) because of the West’s influence. I have no real doubt that this thesis is what sent her into exile—especially since she soon returned to work on another American campus. When you challenge the anti-systemic system of the new anti-orthodox orthodoxy, it isn’t enough even to be both a woman and a black.

4 This is my rather liberal translation from Zweig’s novel, Erziehung vor Verdun (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1987), 195. The novel was first published in 1935.

5 Ibid., 24; my translation. I am not a fan of Karl Marx’s, by the way: if the murderous twentieth century accomplished nothing else, it revealed that Marx’s extremely reductive system supplies at least as many occasions to “trim away” outsiders and misfits as does a monarchy or a capitalist republic. Indeed, Ortega y Gasset has astutely remarked that progressivism stifles creative responses: “Liberal progressivism and Marxist socialism both suppose that what they envision as the ideal future will come to pass—inexorably, with the necessity of an astronomical event. Protected from their conscience by this vision, they leave history’s rudder untended, stand down from high alert, and lose all their agility and efficacy” (my translation from La Rebelión de las Masas [ Madrid : Alianza Editorial, 1990], 75).

6 My translation from Romains’ Prélude à Verdun (Paris: Flammarion, 1938), 43-44. This volume, like most in Romains’ stunning series, Les Hommes de Bonne Volonté, is actually more easy to obtain in English translation than in French. If I needed a specific example of how far European culture has degenerated, this desertion of its own great authors and thinkers would do nicely.

7 Wilfrid Owen borrowed this line from the Roman elegist Horace to mock bitterly the European Old Guard’s staunch support of the War. The poem was one of Owen’s last: he was killed one week before the Armistice.

8 See “’I, Martian’: The Autoscopy of a Science-Fiction Addict,” Praesidium 6.1-2, pp. 5-23.