Immigrant in Paradise: Columbus and ‘Making’ America

 Begin by imagining a scene—of Christopher Columbus on his third voyage. The year is 1498. It is six years since The Admiral of the Ocean Sea ran into the islands of the Caribbean, returned in triumph to dazzle Spain and Europe with tales of his “Indies,” and attempted a second voyage to colonize them, with disastrous results for both himself and the indigenous peoples. He has neither found the gold he was sure he would find there, nor have his Indios turned out as he first thought these “natural Christians” would: they have proved quite willing to defend themselves, and quite unwilling to be enslaved, or even work. Since the Spaniards who have shipped out to settle Española (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti) have refused to work either, and show nothing but contempt and loathing for the place, Columbus and his brother Bartolomeo have resorted to draconian measures to try to pacify the island (with all the horror and murder that entailed) and obtain the payoff the Admiral has continually promised, but not found.

            Now this, the third voyage, is designed to take the search farther south—to find the passage to India Columbus is sure exists, and to find the wealth he is even surer dwells in the South: the land and/or islands of the antipodes where everything runs counter to the quotidian world of Europe, where headless men walk upside down, and Amazons rule, and gold is not scarce but plentiful as grass. His hope is that this will be a third voyage in every sense of that magical, trinitarian number.

            Imagine him where he is, then: having successfully crossed the Atlantic Ocean for the third time, he has sighted Trinidad, the island off the coast of Venezuela, and named it after the holy Trinity. He has navigated the strait between Trinidad and what he takes to be yet another large island but is really the huge South American continent, to enter what appears to be more ocean but is really an enclosed gulf, the Gulf of Paria, formed by Trinidad and the continent. He has sailed north in this Gulf forty miles or so to another narrow exit from this strange sea, a sea where salty ocean water mixes with what seems a miraculous quantity of fresh water. He doesn’t attempt to brave this exit yet, though. He decides to go south, coasting southwest in this tropical, balmy wonderland, as gorgeous a place as he has ever seen or even dreamed of, with palm trees and exotic fruit and natives dressed strangely, and strangely light-skinned—lighter-skinned are these southern Indios, he says, than those in Española; lighter-skinned, too, than the natives of Africa who live at the same parallel, where the searing African heat contrasts remarkably with the balmy climate here. He heads southwest to search out a western exit, the strait that he is sure will take him around what must be a southern island off Asia, and to fabulous India and the lands to its south where he is sure there exists, again parallel with Africa, wealth undreamed of.

            The Admiral is not without anxiety about all this. He is carrying three shiploads of supplies for his brother, desperate for them on Española. He is worried about this strange fresh-water sea he’s in—a sea he has now christened the Golfo de la Ballena—the gulf of the whale. And the name, as Columbus’s names always are, is prophetic, mythic. He is Jonah in the belly of the whale, Columbus is now, and he knows it. He has entered it via a dangerous strait—he names it the Boca de la Sierpe, the mouth of the serpent—which, shortly after it is entered, has struck him with a tidal wave so violent and terrifying that years later he could still, he wrote, “feel that fear in my body lest the ship be swamped when she came beneath it.” And while he has found a northern exit, it too smells dangerous because it marks a meeting of two conflicting waters—the ocean trying to enter and the fresh water trying to exit—and so he again mythically names this one the Boca del Dragon: the mouth of the Dragon.

            So imagine him now, a European breasting an unknown continent in a puzzling fresh-water sea, caught between the mouths of, on one hand, a serpent and on the other, a dragon, with a seafloor he can see is constantly shoaling—forming dangerous sandbars that can trap him, run him aground, maroon him forever in the belly of the whale. In truth, it is hard for us to imagine now, what it must feel like to be under sail in sight of land whose location and extent and nature one has not the slightest notion of. No charts. No familiar landmarks at all. Nothing. The sense must be one of total disorientation; dread.

            For Columbus, the moment is even more dizzying, for he had the habit, when at sea in a new place, of staying awake almost constantly, for weeks at a time. On this voyage, his absolute fascination with the North Star has kept him even more wide-eyed and wild-eyed than usual. By sighting on Polaris at nightfall, at midnight, and at dawn, a 15^th century mariner could derive some sense of his latitude. Longitude was a matter for instinct alone, but latitude Columbus could determine by the reading at nightfall. It was in this way that he had concluded he was at about the latitude of Sierra Leone in Africa, near the equator. The trouble was, he was also finding a huge disparity between the reading of his star at nightfall and at dawn—some ten degrees—which meant to him something very strange indeed. It meant he had entered a new zone. A special zone, a literally higher zone, though he wouldn’t make sense of it until later. What rolled over him now was that everything was strange: he was in a temperate place—like Andalusia in May—when he should’ve been burning up at the equator. He had seen people who were lighter-skinned rather than darker than those natives he’d seen twice before on Hispaniola. And all was surpassingly beautiful. And puzzling. Enchanting, and dangerous.

            Then he got the news from a ship he had sent to reconnoiter: the exit at the bottom of the gulf (the South American continent itself), which he was sure was the strait to India, turned out to be, appeared to be—a river! Several river mouths. Huge. Unprecedented in their hugeness. A monstrous flow of fresh water was entering the Whale Gulf, so it had to be a river (it was in fact the Orinoco, part of the Amazon). But at first the Admiral refused to believe it. So much water was unheard of, not even the Nile or the Ganges produced such volume. And Columbus was insightful enough as a geographer to realize what it meant: such a huge river would require not a mere island, but the drainage from a huge land mass, a whole continent. Or a miracle.

            Confusion. It was all so confusing and he was so exhausted and pressed for time. And then there were the natives. His men had gone ashore. The natives welcomed them in their ‘naturally Christian’, beautiful way. Fed them, feasted them, made love with them, gave them chicha—the maize liquor of the Indians; in short, treated them like gods and begged them to stay. Promised that there was much gold over the hills (though frustratingly, the metal they actually possessed was a mixture of gold and copper—guanin they called it—and useless from Columbus’s point of view.) Showed them pearls, enormous quantities of pearls which, the natives indicated, could be had by the bushel on the ocean side.

            Pearls. The pearl of great price. He had found it, had Columbus. It was not exactly what he had been hoping for, praying for. It was not the strait or the gold (though in fact there would later turn out to be Andean gold and silver in quantities that even Columbus would have found miraculous). But it was something. And that something, all these various somethings breaking over him like that monstrous tidal wave, breaks him.

            Or rather, something in Columbus breaks here. Something breaks. The tension of not knowing, of not finding what the monarchs have been pressuring him so hard to find, and of now being lost, trapped in dangerous shoaling waters that make no sense, land that makes no sense, climate that makes no sense, his hopes once again dashed, his beliefs once again hard up against intractable, damnable facts—something breaks. He cannot muscle the new world here as he has elsewhere, as he had on the second voyage when he had forced his crew to swear that Cuba was not an island as everything indicated, but a mainland. No, he cannot. And so the new world breaks in upon him, and he knows, though he will to the end of his days deny it, that this new world is, in fact, a new world. Another orb entirely, an otro mundo, he calls it in his letter to the Spanish monarchs, and it is paradisal. In fact, this is as close as Columbus ever gets to a real, an authentic paradise, which in some part of himself he knows. Knows he has come to the end, has completed his quest, completed himself, and should simply stay. He should stay here in paradise. Be in paradise. Give in to the immobility, which to him is paralysis, of Paradise.

            And yet. He does not. That also breaks. He does not stay because he cannot; he has to get moving again, he knows, or die, the whole Indies project will die. So he orders his men to return to the ship, leave the women (save for four Indians he orders seized as “specimens”), leave the chicha, leave the heavenly feel of being treated as gods, and be ready to sail at midnight. And he does. He sails north to the Boca del Dragon, stalls terrified by the clash of waters and winds unable to go back or forward or move at all—until somehow, at the most perilous, paralyzed moment, when all three ships are about to be cast upon the rocks by the currents, feels himself miraculously popped out of the strait, out of the belly of the whale through the mouth of the dragon he is popped like a baby birthed from the womb, “without a scratch.”

            For when God wishes that one or many should live, Las Casas later paraphrases the Admiral, water becomes their medicine [instead of their poison.]

            Thus reborn, the Admiral exults in the movement of sail and wind, of being on the move, always happier Columbus was to be on the ocean and so in motion right past the pearls he directs all three ships as if afraid to stop, hoping he can retrieve them on another trip but never doing so at all. Others harvested his precious pearls, and the non-sailor Vespucci, the very next year, embarked on the voyage that had his name affixed to the entire landmass Columbus had found. But nevermind, without a pause, he heads securely north in what will become his greatest feat of dead reckoning ever, hitting from a strange longitude the island of Española within a few miles of where he has aimed himself.

            Which wasn’t even the most important thing. More important is what happens on the way.  Moving, he is at last moving. And looking back to where he has been. And looking back, he is writing about it in his journal, and meditating on the strangeness he has just witnessed—the North Star variations, and the temperate climate, and the paradisal place its people called ‘Paria,’ ‘Paria’—Paraiso—that’s it! Where he has just been is, it must have been: Paradise. The Earthly Paradise. For do not all the holy books say the Earthly Paradise stands at the farthest point in the East, that it is temperate, that there is a huge outpouring of waters which makes it the source of all the great rivers? They do. Which must be where that huge volume of fresh water was coming from, the heights of Paradise, and that’s where I was, writes Columbus looking backwards. I have been near Paradise. The more I reason on the subject, the more satisfied I become that the terrestrial paradise is situated on the spot I have described.

            Now. Most commentators have found this material embarrassing. Columbus really lost it here, they say. These mad ravings after losing all that sleep must be an aberration in an otherwise great mind, a prototype Renaissance mind that at this moment reverted to naïve medievalism. But in a real sense, a mythopoetic sense, they are wrong. This is the essential Columbus. The rational, that is, rationalizing Columbus. Who cannot simply be, but must think, must do, must make something. For the point is this. Columbus was, in fact, in a kind of paradise. The most paradisal place he had ever been, or ever would be. Or perhaps anyone ever will be: in a world fresh, new, unfettered, unfiltered, unspoiled. He was there. He was invited to stay. He wanted to stay (and his men certainly did). But he did not stay. He could not. Could not just be. Which is what one does in Paradise. Be in and of one’s place.

            Rather, Columbus had to get moving. He had to move and do something. Make something. He had to make Paradise in his mind. He had to look back, mentally, and decide, ‘that’s what it was, I have been in Paradise.’ Unable to simply be where he was, he had to get away, and then look back and mentally create it, recreate it, write about it. Make an artifact of it. And, in fact, his artifact endures because his evocation of the new world as paradise, as the site of the Earthly Paradise, is the first move in the long western myth we are all still living—that Paradise is in fact possible here on earth. Do-able. Utopia, all our modern utopias stem from Columbus. And the attempt to make utopias on earth, including socialism, communism, and the American experiment itself (including all its various utopias, like Brook Farm) all stem from this moment. Which is how all the centennials have presented Columbus: as engenderer of the American myth, the paradise-on-earth-can-be-made-by-man myth—to be created first with mental, imaginative moves, then with politico-cultural moves, and more recently with the scientific, technological moves that define our present.

            Which is also to say that, Vespucci notwithstanding, it is Columbus who ‘makes’ America, Columbus who, thereby, creates every Italian immigrant. Consider: In the Italian villages from which most migrants came, a person, no matter how poor or disenfranchised he might be—and most were dirt poor and totally disenfranchised—still had a place. A place to be. As a human, as a Christian, everyone had a being, an identity in place and of place that went back centuries. Of the soil of which they were made. Of the local stone of which their homes were made. Of the village of which their families were made. And knowing this in their bones allowed them to have an identity, a being, regardless of what they did or did not do. Regardless of earthly achievement or possessions, in other words.

            When they arrived in America, all that changed, and identity was lost. For them, as for all Europeans, America was the place of no place; the place not of being, but of doing. You are what you do, what you accomplish. It was not enough to simply be a human living, being in place. One had to “make America.” This is the expression the Italian immigrants coined, fare l’America, and it is a beautiful and multi-leveled expression. It means to “make it” economically, yes, to make money, which is the sign in America always that one has ‘done something.’ But it also means to make America itself, remake it, make its roads, yes, which is to make its culture, its society, its government, its way of being a paradise. Remake it, retake it out of the wilderness to remake it on the ideal model. Flatten it. Make roads as grids that cut straight through the natural landscape, not circling villages on hilltops according to the natural terrain, as in their native Italy, but flattening the whole thing, including its native people. And in the process, making, remaking oneself, flattening oneself and one’s gestural, expressional self as well as remaking oneself as a flat-out and flattened-out mover, maker, do-er, shaker.

            And for all this, the pattern laid down by Columbus was the ur-process. Columbus in Paria could not simply be; could not simply be in Paradise, be in his place. He had to flee, move on, and then make paradise, think it, construct it as a mental artifact that would have great resonance in the world he was desperate to move up in, the world of great accomplishments by great men whose names, like those of the great Romans even then being resuscitated by the Italian Renaissance, were remembered. And that is precisely what he did. Once out of Paria and away, he looked back on the information he had, and made sense of it by consulting his books and ‘realizing’ that the place he had been, higher than normal as the North Star proved, was close to heaven because the earth must have a bulge right there, and the bulge, the pear shape, the nipple on the breast of the globe (all his images of mothers are significant), was the site of the Earthly Paradise and he, Columbus, had been approaching it by a gradual ascent. Had found it. And written about it. He wrote about it in his letter to the Spanish Queen:

..but this western half of the world, I maintain, is like the half of a very round pear, having a raised projection for the stalk, as I have already described, or like a woman’s nipple on a round ball…I do not suppose that the earthly paradise is in the form of a rugged mountain, as the descriptions of it have made it appear, but that it is on the summit of the spot, which I have described as being in the form of the stalk of a pear; the approach to it from a distance must be by a constant and gradual ascent… (Four Voyages to the New World: pp. 131, 137)

And writing about it, in his view, made it so.

            He could not, in sum, be at home in Paria, in Paradise. He could be only the idea of it, the conjuring it and writing about it looking back.

            This is the tragedy of us all, particularly us Americans. We cannot simply be. Cannot simply be in place, because the paradise which is being-in-place is not available in America—the place of no place, as the name itself suggests. Named for Amerigo Vespucci, the word “america,” as analyzed by Djelal Kadir in Columbus and the Ends of the Earth, parses into several roots from Greek—the negative “a,” plus the root, “meri”, plus the genitive ending for earth, “ge” (from Amerigo)—all of which scans as “no-place-earth.” America: no-place land. And if we look closely at America and the settlement of the North American landscape by European immigrants, we see that, in fact, America has always been interpreted by Europeans, acted upon by Europeans as empty, as lacking, as a land of no-place. As U-topia, which itself scans as no-place. And what this suggests is that Americans from the beginning have never been interested in the place as place. As land. As land having meaning and history and depth, as it did to its indigenous peoples. No, the land and its peoples have interested Americans mainly as obstructions blocking movement across and through it to take from it and them whatever could be taken as fast as it could be taken and sold. Land and people as commodities.

            In this, as in all things, Columbus in Paria is the progenitor. For if he had indeed found Paradise, if he had been, if not there, at least within striking distance, why did he not stay? Why could he not stay? Peter Mason, in Deconstructing America, offers a clue: “the siren-like hold which the natural world of America exerts on Columbus can be shaken off only by the process of disenchantment, by which Columbus transforms the wealth of natural beauty into a commodity” (p. 170). The enchantment of Paradise requires a disenchantment. Otherwise, we fear, we fall back or regress into paralysis, into nothingness, into the annihilation of all boundaries, all oppositions. And one way to disenchant ourselves from all this is to ‘transform the wealth of natural beauty into a commodity.’ We destroy the natural topography to mine the earth, we flatten the natural topography to grid it and industrialize it for agriculture, we poison the soil and its variety with a pervasive monoculture, and then we destroy once-bountiful agricultural land to fashion endless, invariant, vacant suburbs.

            Making America, in this sense, is making America empty; void of all that makes for place, makes for a place worth living in, makes it a Geography of Nowhere, as James Kunstler puts it. So while Columbus’ journey is, indeed, our enduring myth—that is, that Paradise is actually an achievable thing, here on earth—the irony is that that achievement ultimately, and disastrously becomes the achievement of no-place. Or perhaps this is not ironic at all; perhaps it was implicit in the journey, in the language of that journey from the beginning. Paradise, unlike Utopia, is not something we do or make. It is not no-place. Paradise is precisely place, originally a garden. A place that makes us, keeps us in place, provides us with who we are, maintains us as we are. And it is Columbus who shows us just how perilous-seeming the reality of that can be, and how urgent appears the need to flee from it.

                                                                              

 Lawrence DiStasi

Demagogues Rising

This past Sunday, Heather Cox Richardson wrote a piece for Salon.com titled:

“It is time to get very afraid: Extremists, authoritarians now run the GOP—and no one can stop them.” Her piece, well worth reading, runs through some of the history of the rise of conservatives in the United States, beginning with William F. Buckley and continuing through the Goldwater run for the presidency in 1964, the Nixon ‘southern strategy’ to take advantage of white outrage over the Johnson-era civil rights bills, and into Ronald Reagan and the consolidation of radical-conservative thinking into what almost seems a majoritarian hold on American life. She also takes us through the Bush W. years and today’s rise of the clown car of Republican presidential hopefuls, all of whom would have been considered absolutely beyond the pale in Republican primaries of the Eisenhower era and before. Not any more. Republican presidential aspirants now try to outdo each other in the rabid radicalism of their utterings. They deny climate change, they deny that taxes are necessary, they deny that Obamacare is legal, they insist that Obama is a Muslim and a foreigner, they indulge in outright lies—Carly Fiorina insisted that she ‘saw’ a video of Planned Parenthood  people dealing in foetal body parts, and when confronted with the truth, tried to produce a fake video to compound the lie—and never even blanche when caught. They “double down” as the media loves to call it, rather than, the media I mean, holding aspirants for the highest and most powerful office in the world to account, to even a bare minimum of truth-telling. And above all, Republicans have, since the aforementioned Buckley, maintained that government is the enemy, government is unnecessary, government is what deprives red-blooded Americans of their freedom and must be “drowned in the bathtub.” This leads to idiocies such as Tea Party activists chanting “get your hands off my Medicare,” all the while directing their wrath at the very government that in fact gives them Medicare.

            Isaac Asimov is reported to have once written:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

In the situation that now faces us, it would be tempting to join Asimov in attributing the ravings now convulsing the Republican Party to sheer stupidity. Americans are stupid, they are proud of knowing nothing about politics or science or world affairs, and this is why the Republicans can make a virtual cult of ignorance, spouting the most outrageous and dangerous falsehoods, stupidities, and pretend-cures like no taxes, and get away with it.

            But that would be too easy. Americans in general are ignorant and poorly educated, yes. But even a stupid population would see through the flim-flams of someone like Donald Trump. They seem not to. Ever since he entered the Republican primary race, with his nasty, narcissistic, authoritarian insults of his rivals and everyone else, Trump has not only led the field, he has overwhelmed it. He seems to appeal to some atavistic impulse of Tea Party arch-conservatives to bring on the most hateful, boorish leader available and have him “clean house.” Get rid of government ‘insiders’ and intellectuals. Trump’s recent “tax plan,” announced this weekend, will have delighted them: it promises reduced or much-lowered tax rates for poor and lower-middle classes as a cover to disguise the fact that the upper echelons (the real ‘insiders’) are actually the ones who will make out like bandits, including massive corporations and those richest of the rich who have big estates that benefit from reduced estate taxes. Not to mention the fact that the vastly reduced revenues that will result will be taken out of critical social programs like Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and every other public program that will be starved in the way that rich Republicans have always wanted them to be starved. And of course Trump scapegoats the most disadvantaged, the immigrants coming over our borders, with his promise to build a border wall to rival the Israelis’ wall of shame keeping out Palestinians (to Republican ‘minds’, there is always enough federal money to finance walls, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, drones and every other form of welfare-for-the-rich-and-powerful their devious brains can imagine).

            All of this might be just mildly annoying or even funny if it weren’t for the fact that events seem to be playing into Trump’s (or fate’s) hands. The 2007-8 financial collapse drove the country into an economic downturn from which it has still not fully recovered. Though the stock market has been cratering of late, it rose to unprecedented heights to make billions for the very Wall Street scam artists and banksters who brought the whole economy down in the first place. This powerfully exacerbated the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest Americans, a gap not seen since before the Great Depression. While salaries for the poor and middle classes have remained stagnant since the Reagan years, the income for those who do not work for their money but earn it through financial investments has skyrocketed. A permanent underclass has emerged with even less hope than most for carving out a decent life. And for the white male portion of the population, easily persuaded that the benefits they should have are being given to the ‘underserving’ poor and colored classes, the gravity of the labor situation is compounded by resentments against their ‘vanishing rights.’ These kinds of hopeless conditions and resentments are what prepared Germany to accept the lunacies of Adolf Hitler and his gang in 1930s Germany. That is the real danger here. When whole populations get desperate, they become ever more susceptible to the ravings of demagogues.

            One other condition seems to me to be adding to the danger. Hillary Clinton, the once-inevitable nominee for the Democratic Party, has been faltering badly. Her campaign seems unable to put any distance between the candidate and the manufactured scandal of her private email servers. Months have gone by and she is still peppered with questions at every turn about whether she violated the law. This has meant that the unlikely Bernie Sanders has been able to catch and surpass her in the latest polls: he leads in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two primary states. Now Bernie Sanders is the candidate I prefer. But he has made no secret of his attraction to socialist principles. He believes in big government, he believes in New Deal type policies to re-distribute income to benefit those who need economic help, he believes in social programs to help the poor and disadvantaged, he believes in taxing the rich so that they pay what he believes is their fair share to support the government programs he believes in. And his message seems to be resonating, at least with primary voters and a sizable portion of Democrats polled so far.

            If Sanders were to become the nominee of the Democratic Party, and Trump were to grab the Republican nomination—as he now seems likely to do—we would then have a Trump v. Sanders presidential race. Two outsiders (more or less; though Sanders has been a politician his whole adult life, he has always been an Independent). And two men who tend to say, largely unedited, what they think. But I fear that the campaign would be a disaster for the truth-teller, for the rational man, for the man who believes that everyone deserves a fair chance to thrive. Because history shows us that in the conditions that pertain in the world today, and will pertain even more in the future, the demagogue usually triumphs. The big liar triumphs. The man who pretends to know the answers—simple answers that everyone can understand—wins. Most people, especially in a crisis, want someone to tell them what to do. People want someone to tell them that their country is, and has always been, the best the world has ever known. That their country is prompted by good and noble aims. That their country always works for the good guys for the good solution on the side of the angels. And that it is only the outsiders, the marginalized Others, who are causing trouble. Hitler played this song in the 1930s in Germany and succeeded beyond what anyone might have imagined. Mussolini did the same in Italy. We are great. We come from noble Roman stock. Our nation must take its destined place at the head of Europe. We deserve our own empire. And all those who say otherwise are defeatists, losers, cowards, and pathetic intellectuals who never do anything. If not communists or terrorists.

            This is how the campaign—if it does turn out to be Sanders v. Trump—could well go. The authoritarian, the man who brags about his wealth and dismisses everyone else as stupid and incompetent because they haven’t made the money he has, will garner the headlines, will continue to fascinate the media with his sound-bite style, and make mincemeat of the more sober, rational, serious man of the people. And what I fear more is that this will be only the beginning. As Naomi Oreskes imagines it in her recent novel, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, the fate of nations under global warming conditions will favor the authoritarian governments most able to handle the crises that will result. Migrants, millions of them, will be on the move due to the ravages of floods and storms and drought and sea-level rise displacing whole populations. They will be swamping borders wherever they can, just as migrants from Syria and Afghanistan and Africa are now over-running the borders of Greece and Italy and Hungary and everywhere else in Europe. In such a situation, suggests Oreskes, democracies will be more or less paralyzed. They will need to fashion consensus, pass laws, take precious time to determine whom to accept and whom not to accept, and where to put them, and how to enforce what they decide. A nation with an authoritarian government, by contrast, will be able to act much more swiftly and decisively. A dictator will simply be able to say: ‘no more; build the fence, build the wall; allow no one to enter except the few we can use.’ And will have no qualms about using force to maintain those closed, inviolate borders.

            Hateful as it is to think it, in such a situation, it is the Donald Trumps of the world, the bloviating, narcissistic, ruthless assholes who can lie without blinking an eye and condemn whole populations as worthless, who will manage to captivate the loyalty and approval of the masses. The masses will want protection. They will want simple solutions. They will choose security over liberty every day of the week.

            That is what I fear. And that is what we should all be worried about, as Heather Richardson writes, right now. Before it is too late. The time is very very short, but there is still time. There is time to agitate, and demonstrate, and educate, and work for candidates who are driven by more than ego and money and power and the ignorance of contempt.

            Within a very few years, there may not be.  

Lawrence DiStasi

Yogi

Yogi’s gone, alas. He departed this world on Wednesday September 23 at the ripe old age of 90. That means, for those who can’t do the math, that he was born in 1925.

            I actually remember when he came up, or more precisely, I don’t ever remember a Yankee game without him. That’s because I think it was in the mid-Forties when I started following the Yankees, which is when Yogi finally entered the lineup as the regular catcher—replacing Bill Dickey, the greatest catcher (before Yogi) ever to play the game. It was Dickey who coached Berra in the finer points of catching, one reason Berra became so great. 

            But in truth, I don’t remember much about his expertise as a catcher. What I remember was his ability to hit in the clutch. If there were men on base and the Yankees needed a run, Yogi almost always delivered. How he did it wasn’t apparent either. His swing didn’t have the fluid grace of a DiMaggio, or the obvious power of a Mantle. But he was strong, especially in the arms and wrists, and could muscle a ball into the outfield no matter how far out of the ‘sweet spot’ it was. And it often was: Berra was always known as a “bad ball” hitter, swinging away at anything that took his fancy, and managing to connect more often than not. Usually his hits were screaming line drives, he almost never struck out, and often enough he hit for the distance, usually when a home run was needed to win.

            The stats back this up: MVP in 1951, 1954, 1955; the most RBIs, 1430, of any catcher; fifteen consecutive All Star selections (1948-1962); 10 World Series championships with Series records for most games (75), at-bats (259), hits (71), doubles (10) and catcher putouts (457). As to his most famous game as a catcher, he was behind the plate calling Don Larsen’s pitches when Larsen pitched the only perfect game in World Series history. The photo of him leaping into Larsen’s arms has become an icon of the sport.

            After this glittering career, he became a manager and excelled at that too, being one of a very few to lead both American (Yankees) and National (Mets) League teams to the World Series. His managing career added to his World Series records, extending his reign to no less than 21 World Series—as player, coach or manager—the most in history. After all that, he was a shoo-in to the Hall of Fame in 1972.       

            But stats only begin to tell the story of Lawrence Peter Berra. The son of Italian immigrants to St. Louis where he grew up in the same neighborhood (known as ‘the Hill’) as fellow catcher Joe Garagiola, Berra became one of the most recognized figures in the world—with even a cartoon character, Yogi Bear, named after him. The name Yogi is supposed to have come from a baseball friend, Bobby Hofman, who said Berra resembled a Hindu holy man when he sat around with arms and legs folded waiting to bat. It fit so well it stuck. Yogi’s way with language made the name seem prophetic. Everyone on the planet now seems to know “It ain’t over till it’s over;” or “”It’s déjà vu all over again.” But what’s more remarkable is that these apparent malapropisms (Yogi quit school after 8^th grade) turn out to be deeply perceptive: the “ain’t over” comment was prophetic for the NY Mets who, virtually out of the pennant race when Yogi said it in July 1973, sprinted to win on the last day of the season. It really wasn’t over.

            Perhaps it is this, besides the greatness of his hitting, that should stick in our minds: the sharpness of Yogi’s baseball mind. Craig Biggio, a catcher for the Houston Astros says: “He’s the smartest baseball man I’ve ever been around.” Phil Garner, another Astro (Yogi worked as a coach for the Astros to end his career) added: “When it comes to baseball, he has a computer-like mind.” Not bad for a jug-eared kid from a poor immigrant family in a working-class neighborhood of St. Louis—for whom, sadly, it’s finally over.

            Except, of course, for those Yogi-isms.  Here are some of my favorites:

            When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

            Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t go to yours.

            I can’t concentrate when I’m thinking.

On why he no longer went to Ruggeri’s, a St. Louis restaurant:

            Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

And my favorite, describing a fancy house he’d just purchased:

            What a house; nothin’ but rooms.

Lawrence DiStasi