Two Sentences I Never Thought I’d Write

The first sentence: “I hope the Yankees win the World Series.”

I was born in 1951 in Brooklyn, and grew up there, leaving for college in 1968.  I was a very passionate Dodgers fan, as was pretty much everyone else I knew. Several Dodger players lived in our neighborhood, including the great Gil Hodges, after whom my elementary school, formerly PS 193, is now named. The Dodgers in the ’50s were easy to love: Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, PeeWee Reese, Duke Snider . . .  a fabulous squad that made the World Series four times in the 50’s (’52, ’53, ’55, and ’56), winning their first and only title, gloriously, in the thrilling 7-game 1955 Series versus the Yankees.

I was devastated when the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn after the 1957 season. Though I was only six years old, I remember it vividly; it was the first time in my life that I understood that the world could be a cruel, cruel place. I swore never to forgive them for the betrayal, and I never have.

There’s the famous story of Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, two hard-boiled New York City news reporters hailing from Queens and Brooklyn, respectively, having drinks at a bar when they consider the question: who were the three most evil people in human history?  Each writes down his choice on a napkin out of sight of the other, and when they look at the two napkins they’re in total agreement: Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner who took the Dodgers out to the West Coast.  Exactly how I felt.

Loving the Dodgers in the ’50s meant hating, with all your heart, the Yankees. The Yankees were the implacable foe, having beaten the Dodgers in the World Series in six of their seven meetings (’41, ’47, ’49, ’52,’53, and ’56). While the Dodgers were building their formidable squad in the late ’40s/early ’50s, the Yankees were, alas, a step (or two or three) ahead of them, far and away the best team on the planet; between 1949 and 1961 they won eight World Series titles, with a awe-inspiring lineup—Mantle, Berra, Moose Skowron, Whitey Ford, Roger Maris, Tony Kubek, etc. etc.—all of whom I detested with every bone in my young body. The idea of switching allegiance to them—they were, after all, the only team left in NYC after the Giants followed the Dodgers out west in 1958—was absurd, and I can’t remember a single person from my childhood who did so.

In 1941, the Germans invaded Russia.  So, given the choice between Hitler and Stalin, who do you root for?  We chose Stalin—clearly, at the time, the lesser of two evils.  So I’m going for the Yankees; their crime—being spectacularly good for an amazingly long period of time—does not reach the depths of the Dodgers’ immorality.

Predictably enough, given that the baseball gods have rarely been kind to me, the one time I’m rooting for them, they stink, having apparently forgotten how to hit.

The second sentence (in a more serious vein): “Tens of millions of my fellow-citizens —perhaps even a majority—appear to be poised to elect, as President, a man who tried to overthrow the constitutionally-elected government of the United States.”

I cannot wrap my mind around it. As anyone who has read my postings in the past is well aware, I’m no fan of Donald Trump. For any number of reasons—the compulsive lying, the hate-infused rants, the fact that he was the first President since Herbert Hoover to have left office with a net job loss during his four years as President, the shameful kissing-up to Putin and Kim Jong Un, his tariff policy, the threats to pull out of NATO, . . .—I think he was a terrible President during his first term and would almost certainly be a terrible President the second time around.

But put all of that aside.  I get it—people have divergent views about all of those things. That’s just politics.

But I would have thought that the vast majority of Americans would view attempting to overthrow the government through unconstitutional means as a total disqualification for holding the highest office in the land, and would not countenance casting their vote for anyone who participated in such an attempt.

Do the folks pulling Trump’s lever not believe that he was a willing and active participant in the overthrow scheme, involving, as it did, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the pressure on Vice-President Pence to single-handedly overturn the election results, the “fake elector” schemes, the threatening phone calls to State election officials? Or do they view all that as not being of sufficient moment to disqualify someone from getting their vote for President—perhaps formally, via Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, or just as a matter of common sense and a sense of duty to their fellow-citizens?

Like I said, I don’t understand it. I’m hopeful that one of my readers can explain to me which of those possibilities is closer to the truth of the matter, and why, in either case, we shouldn’t be terrified about that.

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