Teamwork

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I want to raise an important issue that’s been crowded out by the headlines.

Many people are upset about the whole idea of affirmative action or otherwise taking specific note of the needs of Black folk. For many, that seems completely new, like we never did that for anybody before. When I was a kid, the two parties in New York carefully balanced their tickets with Protestants, Catholics and Jews for statewide offices. To many, that seemed OK because everybody involved was “White” and only Blacks noticed their absence.  Few remember now that people had been referring to Jews, Italians and Irish as races, and Southern Europeans and semitic peoples were not the least shamed by their swarthy skin. The world changes – now everybody but Blacks are white and the Blacks are the new kids on the block.

Norman Rockwell did the famous Four Freedoms posters for American war bonds in World War II, and the iconic covers for the Saturday Evening Post, a national magazine, including the sweet picture of the doctor putting his stethoscope on a little girl’s doll. Rockwell also painted Moving Day, depicting the arrival of a moving truck with Black children and their baseball equipment opposite a group of similarly equipped white children, the two groups standing there not knowing what to say. “Play Ball” was the obvious answer.

Sports used to be about learning teamwork. We learned to cooperate, help each other for the sake of the team, and we did it together with kids of all backgrounds. I’ll never forget taking a cab with some friends to a demonstration in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City against the war in Vietnam. The cab driver was pretty obviously unhappy with us – he realized the four of us were carrying candles to light at a well-publicized demonstration. I remember turning the conversation to the Mets. The Mets had never made it out of last place, but this year, 1969, they were fighting for the championship. Mayor John Lindsay, was literally campaigning for re-election from the Met dugout. It seemed like the whole world was for the Mets – at least in New York City. The change on our taxi driver’s face was obvious – how could such nice Mets fans be against the war!

Some of you may remember Pee Wee Reese, the long time Brooklyn Dodger shortstop and captain. In 1947, when the Dodgers brought Jackie Robinson up as the first Black major league ballplayer of the twentieth Century, some Dodgers groused about having to play with a Black man. Reese got up at a team meeting and told his teammates they weren’t going to win in spite of Jackie – they were going to win because of Jackie. In fact, the Dodgers became the dominant team in the National League for the rest of Jackie’s career. As Jackie aged and skills declined, a Dodger manager benched him, but the team played poorly. It fell to Reese to tell their manager his teammates wanted Jackie on the field. Jackie was restored to the lineup and the Dodgers won the pennant again.

Sports matters and teamwork matters, and it matters to America. We cannot make a greater America by fighting and killing each other, by wasting our energies kicking each other off the team of America the way that white supremacists want us to do. We can only destroy the country we love.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on April 19, 2022.

Images of America

When the Metropolitan Opera came on with Madame Butterfly recently, I began to puzzle about why the opera is so strongly anti-American. In Butterfly, an American naval lieutenant trifles with the heart of a young Japanese woman ending with her ritual suicide, leaving their baby to him and his new American wife.

It turns out that the story originated with a French officer about his own experiences but Puccini, who wrote the opera, saw a rewritten version, the version that became the basis of the magnificent and tragic love story he was to immortalize in music.

My students never like to be confronted with dates but dates are telling. The original version of Madame Butterfly was finished and performed in 1904. That was shortly after the end of what we call the Spanish-American war, the war that left us with Puerto Rico and, until we gave them independence, the Philippines.

America has come to think of itself as Franklin Delano Roosevelt left it, decent and triumphant in the cause of freedom and democracy. The symbols of our battle were drawn by Norman Rockwell – freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and fear. It was a war for self-preservation – we had been attacked at Pearl Harbor. It was also a moral crusade, for democracy, freedom and the welfare of mankind. Soon after the war, President Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall sprang to the aid of refugees and impoverished people all over Europe with aid and redevelopment. America was a beacon of hope and decency for the world.

But more recently our military involvement in the Middle East and Asia has forced us to look back at our behavior, particularly in the Philippines. After World War II, some Philippinos told me they often thought of the U.S. like the cavalry in a western movie, massed on a ridge ready to save them from disaster. That may be a fair portrayal of our role there in World War II. But our part in the Spanish-American War is much less fondly remembered, in this country as well as abroad. American troops there pioneered methods of torture that we used later in Iraq. America’s great humorist, Mark Twain, wrote a searing short story about our part in the Spanish-American war – and, understanding how hard it would be for Americans to face that reality, dictated that it could not be published in his lifetime. During the war in Vietnam, we drove over to Mark Twain’s home town in Missouri and found that his War Prayer was his best selling work in the book store, but in the Mark Twain museum, The War Prayer was not to be found – it was still too upsetting for the townspeople.

The Founders of our country liked to refer to what they called the “genius of the people.” But the American people have stood for very different things at different times. Maybe it’s just that different people had more power or maybe it’s that the same people are driven by different motives. The Founders had a different thought – there’s evil in all of us.

But the wages of moral behavior are significant. The America that came off World War II leading the defense and reconstruction of the free world is not automatically the America that is closing itself off from the destinies of everyone we choose not to care about. And the international repercussions will be significant.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 6, 2018.