Saturday, September 29, 2018

A Few Words About A Subject That's All Wright

Well, if you've paid attention to television or social media over the past week, you know that our country is in a badly divided place right now.  I've commented on that over and over again, in different ways, from different reference points when it comes to specific stories and issues.  And G-d knows there's plenty of material for me to work with, if I wanted to do that today.

But, frankly, I'm not feelin' it.  Right now, I'm so sick of the negativity that seems to hang over everyone's lives that I'm desperate to talk about something positive.  Almost anything, in fact.

And, since it's not only the end of the month, but also the end of the baseball season, there's a very convenient way to do that.

I'm going to talk about David Wright.

If you're not a baseball fan, or a New Yorker, you probably don't know who Wright is.  For most of the past 15 years, he has been the New York Mets' regular third baseman, on a team that, prior to his arrival, was notorious for not having a regular third baseman.

Wright grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, the home of the minor-league (AAA) Norfolk Tides.  At the time, the Tides were the top minor-league affiliate of the Mets, the last stop before the big leagues.  As a consequence, Wright grew up a Mets fan, even though they were not the closest major-league franchise to his home.  A gifted athlete, Wright was ultimately drafted by the Mets, and got to play before his hometown family and friends on his way to the major leagues.

When he was called up from Norfolk in the summer of 2004, Wright made an instant impression in a town where making any kind of impression at all is, to put it mildly, a challenge.  Not only for his all-around ability in playing third base, both offensively and defensively, but also for the way he conducted himself as a person, whether with fans, fellow players, the media, and anyone else my failing memory has left off of that list.

No tabloid scandals.  No stiffing fans asking for an autograph.  Always accessible to the press, and always willing to cooperate with their demands (of which, in New York, there are a lot).  No bragging about being indispensable, even though, in just a few short years with the team, he pretty much made him so.

Perhaps, in our badly divided state as a nation, it is most poignantly summed up by this simple fact: a white man from the South, Wright's best friend on the team was (and still is) Jose Reyes, from Villa Gonzalez in the Dominican Republic.   A shortstop, Reyes played next to Wright for their best years, and formed a friendship that will always link them in the minds and hearts of Mets fans.

Wright, of course, is only human, so I'm sure that, somewhere inside of him, he has faults.  But nothing that damaged the allegiances of his family, his friends, his fellow-players, and most of all his fans.  That's an incredible accomplishment.

Unfortunately, fate, or whatever prime mover you believe in, through a spanner into the works of what should have been a Hall of Fame career.  It did so in the form of spinal stenosis, a medical diagnosis that Wright received a few years ago.

I'm not a medical professional, so I'm going to refer you to this.  Basically, spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the space occupied in the spine by the spinal cord.  This puts intense pressure on the cord producing equally intense pain.  There is limited treatment for it in the form of surgery, but that treatment is palliative in nature rather than curative.  Living a normal life with spinal stenosis is difficult at best; maintaining a career as a major-league player is impossible.  Just ask Don Mattingly, the former New York Yankees first baseman, whose career ended prematurely as a consequence of spinal stenosis.

As is Wright's, now.  Today will be his last game as an active player  Fittingly, it will be in front of Mets fans at home, with family members present, and with Reyes next to him at shortstop.  He will have five innings, and two at-bats, and call it a career.  There will be a ceremony honoring him at the end of the game, and a presser, and, in the days to come, perhaps other related events as well.  But, from a games-and-stats standpoint, today will be it.

It's difficult for me as a fan to avoid feeling not only a sense of loss, but also a sense of injustice, about this far-too-soon termination of the baseball career of the best player to wear only a Mets uniform.  Had he been blessed with more health and more time, there is little doubt that he would have had the numbers to make an easy and early entrance into Cooperstown.  He might have had a chance to win a World Series, rather than just play in one.  None of that is meant to be.  And many, many people in that position would be tempted to ignore their good fortune in favor of cursing their ultimate fate.

I'm happy to say, however, that David Wright is not one of those people.

For the past two years, Wright has been on the disabled list, working as hard as possible to get back to the point at which he could play.  The expectations from everyone but Wright were anything but high.  Including those of people who cared about him the most.  And including the medical professionals who consulted with Wright and the Mets. 

Wright didn't care.  He had to let his body tell him when it was time to call it a baseball day.  He worked for a very long time to get that answer.  He worked past the point at which most people would have called it a pleasure to give up.  And, in the end, his body gave him the answer he didn't want to receive.  But he heeded it.  And, with the cooperation of everyone in the Mets' organization, he is being given a last opportunity again to do the one thing he wanted to do:  to play.

I'll end this by letting him have the last say.  It tells you why, whether or not you're a baseball fan, you should appreciate what makes him special, and why you should pray for more people like him.
When it’s all said and done, I want to be able to say I got the most out of my potential. I don’t want to look back, however many years from now, and say, ‘I wonder if I would have worked a little harder. I wonder if I would have done this or done that, how things would have turned out.’ I want to, when it’s all said and done, be able to put my head on my pillow and say, ‘I did everything I could do — good or bad.’

Saturday, September 22, 2018

Overcoming My Kavanaugh-Related Despair

I have a personal confession to make.

I sat down tonight to update my blog, with no shortage of topics about which to write.  My mind started to sort though them.  I reviewed my Diigo library of news articles I saved toward that end.  The nightmare that is the confirmation process of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has been unfolding at breakneck speed over the past month.  Discussing that process, and what it has revealed about our country at this point in history, is easily worth a month's worth of blog posts all by itself.

And then I came face-to-face with it.  Despair.  The same sense of hopelessness that I felt in the days immediately after the election two years ago.

It puzzled me for a while.  There are a number of reasons to not let despair wrap itself around me.  After all, the midterms are less than a month-and-a-half away, and things look very promising for the Democrats.  They will probably take back the House, they may take back the Senate (although that's a bit iffier), and they will undoubtedly make significant gains in state office-holders.  There is, of course, the current inexplicable madness here in Maryland, where Larry Hogan, routinely saved from his worst mistakes by a Democratic supermajority in the General Assembly, has a 22-point (that is not a typo) lead over Ben Jealous in the gubernatorial race.

But even that is not the principle source of my despair.  Hogan's lead is principally the product of local print and broadcast media that are scared of looking too liberal, and a voting base too tuned in to its own short-term pleasures to really dig into the issues, the positions of the candidates, and the potential consequences that four years of either man may bring.  I'm fairly confident that, if we end up with four more years of Hogan, his perception of a mandate will end up leading to mistakes that not even a legislature can easily fix, and that will remind voters that Maryland has done well as a blue state for decades for a reason--namely, being a blue state.

So, why is this blue voter/blogger feeling so blue?

I think it comes, as much as anything, from what the Kavanaugh confirmation process has revealed about the extent to which one of our two major political parties (guess which one) given a choice between democratic (small d) processes and conservative outcomes, chooses conservative outcomes every time.  In other words, it has absolutely no faith in its ability to openly, freely persuade voters that its ideas are worth adopting.  Its only faith, in fact, is not even in the ideas to which it gives lip service in its campaigns, is in maintaining institutional control of the levers of power.

I began to think about this very recently, after I read a Twitter post by Bruce Bartlett going back to the fiasco of Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the seat on the Supreme Court now held by Neil Gorsuch.  That Gorsuch is on the Court instead of Garland was, of course, the by-product of a campaign overseen by Mitch McCONnell over the course of 2016, one in which McCONnell invented the "Biden rule" that Presidents could not make nominations to the Court during an election year, when the voters (contrary to the Constitution) should be allowed to "weigh in" on the process.

At any rate, Bartlett's point was as simple as it was completely accurate.  Then as now, McCONnell was the Senate majority leader, and had the votes to simply give Garland, out of respect for the Constitution and the traditions of the Senate, a normal confirmation process strung out over the better part of the year, terminating in a vote where he would find a way to whip his entire caucus into rejecting the nomination.  At that point, he could easily say that it was too late to consider someone else, and that would be that.  McCONnell, in other words, controlled the process in any event; it would have been easy for him to manipulate it in a way that preserved the illusion of tradition and fairness without being too-cute-by-half about it.

So, why didn't he do it this way?

I think that there is only one possible answer.  Mitch McCONnell knew that preserving even the illusion of the process was not enough to intimidate opposition from the Democrats.  To do that, he had to deliberately sabotage democracy itself.  He had to game the system to such an extent that the Democrats would have to either go outside of it to advance their goals, or be aided by some sort of deux ex machina set of circumstances.  He was prepared to deal with the former by questioning the patriotism of the opposition, and the latter by the fact that his party's funders have the financial resources to muscle the Republicans' way though anything.

The Kavanaugh nightmare has revealed not only his preparation, but that of his caucus and his contributors, for dealing with both possibilities.  The restrictions on access to Kavanaugh's records, as well as on  the questions that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee could ask him, led to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey's decision to disclose some of the documents that Republicans were hiding.  Booker's decision, as he acknowledged, put him at risk for expulsion from the Senate, and Republicans wasted no time in floating that possibility out to the press.

But then, there was the discovery that Kavanaugh might well be another Clarence Thomas, a man with a history of sexual abuse that he and his supporters were working to cover up.  Even then, it appeared that the Republicans were prepared to counter this news; within hours of it surfacing, the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, produced a letter signed by no fewer than 65 women attesting to Kavanaugh's character.  The existence of this letter, combined with Kavanaugh's denials of the allegations against him, raise the possibility that Kavanaugh is willing to commit perjury to reach the Supreme Court, and that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were willing to suborn it to help him do so.  (This wasn't the first time that Kavanaugh had been exposed as a perjurer in the process, moreover.)

Then, however, things began to spin a little out of control into deux ex machina territory.

Kavanaugh's accuser, originally anonymous, came forward to say that she would be willing to testify before the committee.  Corroboration of her story slowly began to emerge.  And one of Kavanaugh's supporters worked with a public relations firm to float and promote a ridiculous story that the accuser might have confused Kavanaugh with someone else who arguably looked like him.

One might be tempted to think that Senate Republicans would decide to call it a day on Kavanaugh's nomination and move on to the task of getting re-elected in a few weeks.  But remember what I said about McCONnell:  he believes the system has been so gamed in favor of his party that he can do anything.  And with that in mind, consider the following recent quote from the majority leader.
You’re all following the current Supreme Court fight, and you will watch it unfold in the course of the next week.  President Trump has nominated a stunningly successful individual. You’ve watched the fight, you’ve watched the tactics, but here’s what I want to tell you: In the very near future, judge Kavanaugh will be on the United States Supreme Court.  So my friends, keep the faith, don’t get rattled by all of this ― we’re gonna plow right through it and do our job.
I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether "gonna plow right through it and do our job" is how one would characterize one's response to a situation in which sexual abuse has emerged as a major factor.  I think it's enough to say that the quote reveals what he believes his "job" to be.  Not to defend the Constitution.  Not to submit his politics to an open political process.  Not to respect his opponents and their rights to participate in that process.  No, not even to respect the concerns and injuries of a citizen who has come forward to tell her painful story and look past her own pain to protect the country from giving a monster a lifetime chance to re-shape the laws of our country.

Mitch McCONnell sees his job as protecting Mitch McCONnell  First, foremost, and last.  The same is true of nearly every Republican in Congress.  And it is especially true of the Republican who has the misfortune to occupy the White House.

And that is the source of my despair.  That, and the knowledge that enough of my fellow countrymen and women support these Republicans to the point at which I am beginning to believe that civil unrest, and perhaps even civil war, might be the only door that leads out of our current national misery.

But, if history teaches us anything, there is always a door.

And, even if I do not live to see it, or walk through it, I'll do everything I can to help others find it and use it.  As long as I can breathe, and type, that's my promise.

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Larry Hogan: A Kinder, Gentler Version Of T****

I am a native of Baltimore, and have lived in Maryland most of my life.  Politically, I have watched it evolve from middle-of-the-role Republicanism, when it gave its electoral votes to Richard Nixon three times, to middle-of-the-road Democratic politics in the wake of Nixon's self-immolation by way of Watergate, as well as the self-immolation of his Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, a former Maryland governor whose corrupt past caught up with him in time to give us Gerald Ford as his replacement (and later Nixon's).

Middle-of-the-road, in fact, is more or less the normal state of politics here in the Old Line (or Free) State.  That status, as well as the two nicknames, reflect Maryland's geographic position among the original 13 colonies and the issue that divided them as well as the rest of the expanding nation, even to today:  race.  

Its northern border, part of the Mason-Dixon line (named for the two surveyors who created it to resolve a border dispute among four states) is now political shorthand for the divide within the nation over this issue.  Maryland, in fact, was a state with slaves and slaveholders, kept in the Union at gunpoint by Lincoln in a battle that gave the state its official song, "Maryland My Maryland" (its original anti-Union lyrics long since politically corrected by our General Assembly).  The zoning of Baltimore, the state's largest city, was designed to enforce the legal segregation of the races its white residents wanted.  That zoning still strangles the development of the city.  And yet, the proximity of Baltimore to other large, Northeastern cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston brought a degree of liberal thinking and cosmopolitan social life to Maryland.

What has popularly become know as Maryland's "middle temperament" comes out of the close proximity within a geographically small state between liberal Baltimore and the more conservative counties surrounding it.  Early in the state's history, the need to function socially and economically led its politically divided residents to work hard at avoiding conflicts and finding ways to cooperate peacefully.  This pattern persisted well into the 20th century, which is why Maryland produced moderate governors of both parties such as Theodore McKeldin, a Republican, and William Donald Schaefer, a Democrat.

However, and with all due respect to the late Speaker of the House of Representatives "Tip" O'Neill, all politics in the United States are no longer local.  Almost every aspect of our life has been nationalized to varying degrees, as the functions of national government have expanded into formally localized functions such as schools, and the operation of the economy has been restructured to favor large, nation-wide enterprises over local ones.  As this has happened, Americans no longer discuss politics face-to-face.  They discuss it media portal to media portal, through an endless barrage of cameras and Web sites that thrive on conflict, or at least the appearance of it.

And so, in the 21st century, Maryland politics has begun to reflect these trends.  In this century, the state elected governors with more of a taste for combat rather than consensus:  the sharp-elbowed Robert Ehrlich and the morally earnest Martin O'Malley, who, in very different ways, wore out their welcome in a state whose middle temperament had little stomach for being pushed in one direction or another.

Enter Larry Hogan, stage right.  Very far right, in fact, but with some knowledge of how to conceal it.  A political legacy, whose father (also a Republican) voted in Congress for the impeachment of Nixon.  A supposedly self-made small-businessperson who is, in fact, worth millions of dollars by way of a commodity that practically sells itself with the right connections:  real estate.  A man with a slightly goofy, grinning public persona perfect for that cliched politician complement, a "guy you could imagine having a beer with."  A man who would seem to be a perfect fit for a state with a middle temperament.  

And a man who, to an electorate weary of conflict and accustomed to making choices based on style points, seems to be a kind of hero.  How else to explain, in a supposedly "blue" state, his 16-point lead over his Democratic opponent for re-election?

But, in fact, Hogan is the political equivalent of the guy sitting all the way at the end of the bar, complaining that the beer is watered and the pretzels are stale, and demanding to pay less and get away without leaving a tip.  A man to whom much has been given financially, who still doesn't feel that he's been given enough.  A man who expects to be seen as a hero for being sick, but who doesn't see the irony in being saved by government-back health insurance not available to every citizen under his charge.  A man who, in Oscar Wilde's words, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  But also a man who knows, perhaps by way of his real estate experience, how to wrap up nothing and sell it as something.  And so, he has positioned his likeability in such a way that it conceals the ineptitude and inherent racism of many of his policy choices.

How else to explain his decision to throw away a billion dollars in federal transportation money by cancelling the Baltimore Red Line project, which could have been the backbone of a real, city-wide commuter rail system and thereby cut through the legacy of the city's racist zoning practices?  As a former state procurement officer, I personally know that Ehrlich, for whom Hogan worked as appointments secretary, believed in capturing every dollar Maryland could get from Washington.  He would never have thrown away that money.  

And the repercussions of this decision affect the whole state, since it makes getting additional federal moneys for transportation projects less likely.  This is not just something we can ill afford; in fact, we can't afford it at all, given the current status of our infrastructure and commuting needs.  All in the name of protecting the racial status quo.  Cancelling the Red Line was not a decision that eliminated a fiscal "boondoggle"; it was a tightening of the white noose around the city's African-American residents.  Take a look.

For that matter, how else to explain his bragging about cancelling O'Malley's so-called "tax on the rain," which in fact was a tax to fund the management of rain run-off from from the kind of rampant suburban development that helped Hogan make his fortune?  He didn't eliminate the "rain tax" to help consumers; he did it because he felt it was picking his pockets, as well as the pockets of his like-minded cronies.  Now, to protect the stapled-together, overpriced townhouses multiplying their way through Howard County, his Republican cronies in that county want to "save" historic Ellicott City by tearing it down, one block at a time.  

This is their response, and Hogan's response, to the floods that have twice submerged the historic district and led to deaths on their watch, NOT to better regulate the development that led to the floods and the deaths in the first place.  After all, it's not as if historic preservation is an economic generator that could, in fact, raise revenues and help pay for some of that regulation ... oh, wait!

Larry Hogan.  Putting development over people's lives.  Putting racism over ending poverty.  Basically, a Maryland version of D****** T****.  A man with a smile on his face and a shiv in his pocket for anyone who will stop him from lining it.  Not a man with a middle temperament.  And not deserving of a second term as governor.