Lewis Lapham: Privileged Progressive.
Best known for his ponderous baseball essays that appear in the magazine several times a year, which are unbearable for his elevation of a simple game to the same plateau as the Battle of Bull Run, Roger Angell's reminiscences of growing up in New York City are superb. However, in the June 30 issue, Angell's brief "Comment" about Sammy Sosa's corked-bat incident somehow managed to combine the best and worst of his prose.
Angell enjoyed the controversy immensely, for the fun of it, not because he wishes the Cubs' slugger any harm. Digest the following passage on an empty stomach: "[W]ho among us does not want this delicious malfeasance back again, at the breakfast table and in our imaginings, with its richly chewable mixture of speculation, cynicism, precedent, physics, and laughter... [Baseball's] recurring history of on-the-field chicanery has always held a raffish and comical charm. It's operetta."
Most baseball beat reporters and columnists are short on style and wit, but when a superior journalist like Angell describes the Sosa hubbub as "richly chewable," it does give a reader a new respect for just-the-facts-ma'am accounts of games. And the veteran baseball writer's consistent hyperbole about the national pastime?Alfonso Soriano is the most exciting player today but he's not a Greek god?is even more vexing when the ordinary events during a 162-game season can make a fan go nutty.
Just last weekend, as the Yanks cruised to a sweep of the woeful Mets, I came to the conclusion that Boston's manager, Grady Little, ought to be fired. After the Sox creamed the Marlins 25-8 on Friday night at Fenway Park, septuagenarian manager Jack McKeon complained bitterly that the home team was piling on their run total with aggressive base running. "I didn't realize the pitching was that bad here in Boston that you had to tag up on short flies in the seventh inning with a 16-run lead," the frustrated Florida leader asked after the game. In a word, yes. Besides, since when is baseball a courteous game of croquet?
Little met with McKeon before Saturday's contest to smooth things over. He told a Boston Globe reporter: "There's a right and wrong way to play the game. I feel we didn't play the game the right way totally." This is one of the reasons Boston is in second place. And so, on Saturday, the Sox were winning 9-2 in the eighth inning and blew it with two outs in the ninth, as Mike Lowell hit a three-run homer off Brandon Lyon. One has to wonder if Gomer Little told his team to cool it when they had a comfortable lead.
The question is this: Would Billy Martin, Lou Piniella or Dick Williams publicly upbraid his squad for doing what they're paid for? Of course not. By all indications, Little's a wonderful fellow, but if the Sox are to compete in October, they need not only a better pitching staff but a dugout taskmaster who doesn't play footsie with his counterpart on the other side of the field.
Anyway, Angell's conclusion to the piece did strike me as thoughtful. He wrote about Sosa: "The only sadness here is the taint, the little doubt, that will always be attached to Sosa's name now, despite his sunniness and those career five hundred and six home runs [at the author's deadline]. We can forgive him, even if we question his tale of a batting-practice bat going unrecognized in the heat of the season (and an extended power outage at the plate), and late tonight perhaps forgive ourselves today's not-so-white lie, last week's unpardonable impatience with a boring old friend, and all the pot we used to smoke after the kids had gone to bed."
I may not like Roger Angell's baseball writing, but he certainly appears to be a gentleman. The twist here?at least to me?is his reference to pot smoking. Angell was born in 1920 and presumably raised children in the 40s and 50s. Does that mean he was a precocious white guy smoking weed in that era, hanging out with New York's hepcats, having ignored propaganda like the film Reefer Madness? If so, my level of respect and admiration for Angell has increased tenfold.
Loonie Lew
On the other hand, Lewis H. Lapham, editor of Harper's, appears to be?judged by his monthly essays?a sour, bitter man devoid of any semblance of character. As I've written previously, Lapham, a devout Bush-basher, is nothing more than Michael Moore with breeding and a circle of friends who make-up Manhattan's elite. If it weren't so obnoxiously hypocritical, Lapham's defense of this country's under-privileged, while he sups at private clubs and consorts with the city's power brokers, would be hilarious. Unfortunately, though one may be fooled, he doesn't engage in parody; a younger Tom Wolfe could write a short novel about Lapham alone.
His July "Notebook," a circuitous piece about the draconian non-smoking laws that have gone into effect not just in New York City, but in other parts of the country as well, is smart in many ways. However, Lapham blames the wrong people for this despicable class-based campaign of the (mostly) affluent to make smokers?Lapham's had the habit for 50 years and doesn't apologize for it?social lepers.
The editor's rant is well-placed. He writes about zealots like Michael Bloomberg: "It's no good trying to explain to such people that their exposure to secondhand smoke is likely to do them as much harm as their handling of a lead pencil or their close association with a side order of mashed potatoes... The preferred attitude toward smoking accords with the canon of political correctness that has arisen over the last twenty years in concert with the government's pretensions to imperial grandeur?the news media cleansed of strong language and imperfect hair, the authors of standardized college tests inoculated against the infection of dangerous adjectives and subversive nouns."
These words, isolated from the rest of the essay?and Lapham's previous writings?represent the common sense and defense of the Bill of Rights that's increasingly rare today. However, Lapham forgets that it's his rich, liberal buddies who have initiated this trend. He blames the government, now largely Republican, rather than examining who's responsible for the anti-smoking witch-hunt. Largely, it's people like you, Mr. Lapham.
It was Hillary Clinton who, upon entering the White House in 1993 as First Lady, banned smoking on the premises, a rule that was lifted by President Bush. The escalation of eliminating smoking has originated in "blue" states like California, New York, Massachusetts and Maryland. Social conservatives may have crazy ideas about homosexuality, prostitution and gambling, but they're not leading the drive to prohibit smoking even in the outdoors. Lapham rightfully takes Bloomberg to task for his economically idiotic increase on cigarette taxes and elimination of smoke from bars?which hurts small business owners more than those who are "allergic" to even an unlit cigarette or cigar?but fails to note that the businessman was a lifelong Democrat until he decided to run for mayor.
No Lapham snippet of wisdom is complete without a Don't-Forget-Florida jab at Bush.
And so he pompously writes: "The question speaks to the positioning of the velvet rope with which American society now divides the kingdoms of the rich from the deserts of the poor. The reconfiguration of the nation's wealth over the last twenty-odd years...has prompted the establishment of a social order not unlike the one known to the early Roman Empire?an oligarchy in place of a republic, an equestrian class that buys its rank at the prices paid for apartments on Fifth Avenue and houses at Pebble Beach, a Senate and Cabinet composed largely of opulent landlords openly contemptuous of their tenants, a president of the United States who received his office as an inheritance."
Lapham may smoke, but I don't think he'd be caught dead eating pasta at an Olive Garden or flagging down the bartender for a martini at, say, downtown's Reade Street Pub. In fact, unlike most Americans, the Harper's editor is one of the privileged few who can get past the "velvet rope" he castigates. And I don't know if Lapham is a baseball fan, but if on occasion he visits Yankee Stadium, it's certain you won't find him in the bleachers or upper deck. More likely, the alleged egalitarian would be square behind home plate, sitting in a corporate box courtesy of one of his dinner-party companions.
On a Roll
The liberal media is in a dither over George W. Bush's record-breaking pace of campaign contributions for the 2004 election. It's overkill, they bleat, another sop to the rich who support Bush's essential tax-cut program. And now that DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe, the fundraiser who was a virtual member of Bill Clinton's cabinet, is stifled by the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold campaign reform legislation, Democrats?including the numerous presidential contenders?will be further handicapped in attempting to win back the White House and Congress.
Money, of course, can't save a president (or Senate) that's unpopular with the electorate. But obviously?as Clinton demonstrated in '96 by running commercials attacking broke Bob Dole?it helps. Besides, think about this: When the Bush campaign blitzes the airwaves with perhaps $200 million before the general election, it'll be a small boon to the economy, or at least the electronic media's bottom line. I'd say that's real redistribution of wealth. It's not only Rupert Murdoch (the brilliant businessman who is ridiculously portrayed as owning half the country's newspapers and television stations) who will benefit, but all the extra employees hired to help cover the elections.
In a June 22 editorial, the post-Howell Raines New York Times whined about Bush's largesse. The paper said: "In financing a nonexistent primary?just as [the Times-endorsed] President Clinton did in 1996?Mr. Bush will have corporate executives oversee the raising of super-wad donations of $200,000. If this doesn't imply, if not buy, crass influence, then Mona Lisa was a man."
Syndicated columnist Jules Witcover is so distraught, that in a June 25 Baltimore Sun op-ed he irresponsibly raised the possibility that the Bush campaign will follow the example of Richard Nixon's '72 reelection effort. While he concludes that GOP strategist Karl Rove is too smart to emulate the Nixon dirty-tricks campaign, he's clearly rooting for an excess of Republican hubris.
Witcover writes: "The Democrats can only hope that along with a stagnant economy and continued high unemployment, the arrogance that loose money triggered in Mr. Nixon's sure-thing reelection of 1972 will re-visit another Republican incumbent president."
Which is just another example of why left-wing extremist Eric Alterman's recent book, What Liberal Media? was a complete lie.
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