Friends of Padre Steve’s World
This afternoon I will be attending an exhibition game between the Baltimore Orioles and their Triple A minor league affiliate the Norfolk Tides at Norfolk’s Harbor Park. The Tides won’t open their season until April 6th and while this is not the home opener it is for people like me a harbinger of goodness, as the late Commissioner of Baseball and President of Yale University A. Bartlett Giamatti said; “There’s nothing bad that accrues from baseball.”
Baseball is a game where the game itself is sacrosanct and is more important than any commissioner, team owner, manager, player or group of investors. In a way it is much like how our nation’s founders and many of our greatest political leaders, President’s, Justices of the Supreme Court, Senators and Congressmen, military leaders, civil rights leaders, and academics viewed the United States, its Constitution, and the very proposition upon which it was founded, the proposition that “all men are created equal.”
Fay Vincent who succeeded Giamatti after the Giamatti’s sudden death in 1989 noted:
“As all of us are aware, and no one more than I, Bart had a singular skill as a public speaker. He spoke well because he thought so well. But I point out to you that the most often quoted remark of Bart’s brief tenure as Commissioner is a very simple declarative sentence. That sentence is the cornerstone on which I will build my own administration. Bart said very simply, ‘No one is bigger than the game.’ I repeat today what Bart said in August, no one – no player, no executive, no owner, no Commissioner, no umpire is bigger than the game.”
Today the United States has a President who truly believes that he is bigger and more important that all of our public norms and who has no respect for the Constitution or our form of government.
Alexander Hamilton wrote:
“If it were to be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws – the first growing out of the last . . . . A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government.”
The late conservative political commentator Micheal Novak once wrote about baseball connecting it with the heart and soul of the American political system. What he wrote is important for we who live in this day and age to understand, and which all too tragically President Trump does not. Novak said:
“Baseball is as close a liturgical enactment of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant myth as the nation has. It is a cerebral game, designed as geometrically as the city of Washington itself, born out of the Enlightenment and the philosophies so beloved of Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton. It is to games what the Federalist Papers are to books; orderly, reasoned, judiciously balanced, incorporating segments of violence and collision in a larger plan of rationality, absolutely dependent on an interiorization of public rules.”
The American political system, like baseball is, to use the words of Novak, “absolutely dependent on an interiorization of public rules.” This is something that our founders understood as have the vast majority of America Presidents and other political statesman regardless of their political party or whether or not they were a conservative or liberal. The fact is, that the interiorization of public rules, or rather, how we incorporate public rules, norms of behavior, traditions, customs, and the unwritten yet imperative rules of our social contract into our lives and behavior.
Neither President Trump or his most loyal supporters can fathom the meaning Novak’s words. The President flagrantly flaunts every norm of our American social and political contract that have existed since the days of the Continental Congress and is cheered and even given theological cover by his supporters.
That is why documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States, the Gettysburg Address, and the Four Freedoms are so important. None have the power of law, but all are essential to the functioning of the American political system. The American system is not a business contract, nor is it an Ayn Randish descent into a maelstrom of hyper-individualistic social Darwinism. Instead it is about the enlightenment, it is about reason, it is about freedom and responsibility. It is about obeying unwritten rules, rules that are placed upon our hearts.
Last year the President has continued his assault on that social and political contract drawn up by our founders. At the commissioning of the USS Gerald Ford he urged active duty military personnel to lobby their congressional representatives for his agenda. A few days later he turned a Boy Scout Jamboree into a political rally. He did a similar thing when he addressed the CIA at the beginning of his Presidency. But these are not new and they have continued, less than two weeks ago the President addressed Marines in San Diego and to their cheering delight he castigated the press and called them “enemies.” It was a direct assault on the First Amendment and the Marines cheered him. I wondered what the hell was going on.
Since his campaign began the President has done everything that he can in order to subvert the American political system, and his words and actions show that he has no respect for the Constitution or laws for the land. If only there was someone who could call him out, as Bill Veeck said: “Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off.”
I do not say this with any malice, nor do I say it for any gain. I only say it because the President has stepped so far out from the norms of the American political system that it is impossible to say what he will do next. Our system of government is resilient but at the same time fragile. Unless the GOP majorities in Congress stand up to him our system will not survive in the way that our founders intended. Sadly, I have little hope that they will do so now. For years most of them have fanned the flames of anti-government and anti-Federalist passions so vehemently that there is no room in their hearts for the very thing that holds our system together; the interiorization of public rules, norms, traditions, and behaviors; that is, the interiorization of liberty. The President show no evidence that he understands any of this.
Judge Learned Hand who has been called the greatest American jurist to have never served on the Supreme Court wrote:
“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”
That is why I think that baseball serves to enlighten us to bigger things and why I welcome it with an open heart.
So anyway, until tomorrow,
Peace,
Padre Steve+
The Inglorius Padre Steve's World 