Anyway this is always likely, since politics is composed, roughly speaking, of two kinds of questions: "How" questions and "why" or "what for" questions. How questions are not trivial. How to run a free and fair election. How to write a constitution. How to organize governmental services. How to generate a revenue flow to pay for them. If we screw up the "how" questions, we screw ourselves real good. Still, the "why" or "what for" questions matter even more. These are the questions about what constitutes legitimate authority, what virtues leadership should exemplify and promote, how wealth and woes are rightly distributed among people, stuff like that, which have no objective, empirical answers, but which come down to moral reasoning in the end. And that is why baseball, automobiles and pinball machines are so important.
I have this theory. It is a theory about the decline of American culture. For all of the unattractive features of American culture (though it comes down to a matter of taste what any given observer thinks these are), there are others I genuinely cherish. One is America's inclination to the future, its tendency to smile in the face of change, to expect that things are more likely to get better than to get worse. That's worth a lot over time. An old boss of mine used to say that optimism is a force-multiplier, and surely it is. But a positive disposition to change needs to be disciplined, needs to be sagacious, needs to be cultivated carefully, needs to be applied selectively and kept within judicious bounds. Otherwise, a positive trait in a mature person or society looks like irrational exuberance, hubris, heedlessness, recklessness, a failure to plan in an adolescent. Around the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, that is what happened to American culture. We allowed one of our best traits to erode into one of our worse ones. We let a general inflation of appetites and expectations carry us away.
Case in point, baseball. Baseball has evolved as a game, we all know that. If you read the wonderful baseball time-travel books by Darryl Brock, If I Ever Get Home and Two in the Field, you'll get a fine idea of the many rule changes to the game between 1869 and the establishment of the National and American Leagues thirty some years later. But the designated hitter rule, introduced by the American League in the 1973 season, was a desecration of the game. It was introduced as part of a multifacted effort to produce more runs. Along with lowering the mound, shortening the fences, making less foul territory and juicing up the ball, the idea was that nine bonafied hitters in a line-up would score more runs than eight. It did work, but oh what a horrible cost it exacted. It transformed the very concept of what a manager is. It created a specialty, just hitting, that should not exist and that violates the very multirole soul of the game, the idea that everyone has to play both offense and defense, even if they're better at one than the other. It also eliminated, from the American League, one of the most exciting phenomenon in the game--a pitcher getting an unlikely extra-base hit, even a home run. And it diminished the importance of bunting, the art of the "small game", which is one of baseball's joys for the true aficionado.
So damn the designated hitter rule, damn artificial turf and damn domed stadiums, too. But damned especially be commercial television, for enabling the free-agency market that undermines fan loyalty by disrupting team character, that makes prima donas out of nouveau riche players, that causes the World Series to be played late for the sake of maximizing advertising revenues, so that kids can't readily watch the games, and a hundred others sins against the national pastime as well. Damn television, and in time I'll get to still more reasons for so doing.
Run inflation in baseball is shameful. Instead of trying to attract fans with a lot of scoring and a lot of home runs (which, by the way, is part of the reason for the steriods scandal in baseball),the right thing to have done was to educate people as to the finer points of the game. Baseball is the most philosophically enlightened sport ever; indeed, it is infinite in both time and space. A game can go on literally forever if no side is ahead at the end of an inning. And a fair ball can roll all the way to the Andromeda galaxy and beyond and still be a fair ball. That is why, to bring the subject back to politics, I was so disappointed in George W. Bush. He was a baseball man. A man who played, understood and appreciated baseball. And yet he never applied the philosophy of baseball, never saw the lessons of its subtlety, its genius for indirection, to his sacred office. Instead he picked dime-store Evangelical self-therapy as a religion. Baseball was the right religion to have used, as Susan Sarandon's immortal baseball church of God from Bull Durham should have taught him. Oh well; that's done and behind us.
Now Condi Rice is a football fan. She doesn't particularly care for baseball. She is such a football fanatic that she once interrupted a speech meeting in her cabin on Air Force II to watch a replay of a particular play from the just-played Superbowl. (I was there, in the cabin, so I know.) That's why I never expected great things from Condi as Secretary of State. She didn't appreciate baseball. So, was I wrong?
And same with cars. Now, it happens that I own and, yes, occasionally drive a 1952 Cadillac. A Fleetwood, in fact--a four-door, two-tone deep blue with a cream top. The 60-S model for those who appreciate these things. Now, this Cadillac gets better road mileage than Cadillacs of the same engine power from 1959 or 1969 or certainly 1979. The car is heavy. It has metal. It is heavy metal before "heavy metal" existed. It is heavier than the 1979 model, but gets better mileage. Pound for pound, the 1952 is more fuel efficient than the 1972 or 1979. The reason, very generally, is that General Motors increasingly substituted power for engineering. It didn't matter that the 1972 or 1979 was less efficient. It could have a bigger motor, use higher octane fuel, go even faster. That's what people wanted, evidently, so that's what Cadillac built. Don't educate the consumer, advertise his mind into chocolate fudge and then pander to him. Same as the designated hitter rule, see?
Moreover, the `52 Caddy does not have air-conditioning. It had not been invented for cars yet, as far as I know. But the `52 has both front and rear-transom windows which, when opened at the proper angles, obviate the need for air-conditioning. Again, engineering skill was subsequently displaced by power. New cars don't have transom windows. If you're hot, you have to hit the AC and use up fuel. This is progress?
The `52 has power windows, and they can be operated whether the engine is running or not. There is an electric motor attached to the battery; that's how it works, and in the `52 it still worked off a 6-volt electrical system. (Cadillac went to 12-volt in 1953.) In a modern car, you can't raise and lower the automatic windows unless the engine is running. Again: This is progress? No, this is substituting power for engineering skill.
I could go on, but I won't, in singing the praises of 1950s' era Cadillacs. Let me just note that right around the same time as the designated hitter rule came mandatory emission control devices in cars. I think it was 1972. I don't want to get into the justification for them, though I'd be prepared on most days to argue that while they have reduced the volume of particulates shot out into the air, they have changed the mix in an unhelpful way. Cars with emission control devices produce more sulfur dioxide, I think, than the old cars. This is not good. But these damned things made it really hard to work on your own car. It reduced the independence of the owner and driver. It made you depend more on mechanics with lots of expensive machines. This was un-American, and I won't even mention the whole business about seatbelts (except that I just did).
I mentioned pinball machines. You are probably wondering what pinball machines could possible have to do with any of this. Well, if you'd been paying any serious attention between, say, 1956 and 1976, you'd have noticed that the average score you needed to pop the machine shot way, way up. On some of the old electro-mechanicals you could win a free game for maybe 5,000 points. By 1976 you needed maybe 500,000. Disaster. Run inflation, power inflation, score inflation. All the same, you see? It's a pattern, a trend. And what did this produce? Real inflation. That's right, inflation in the economy did not lead to the designated hitter rule, fuel-pig cars and bizarre pinball machines; it was the other way around.
You will notice, too, if you are clever, that run inflation in baseball, power inflation in cars, score inflation in pinball machines all track with the war in Vietnam. The government cared about high enemy body counts (run inflation), not winning hearts and minds. It substituted power for skill, failing to pay attention to those arguing for subtle counterinsurgency tactics and instead following William Westmoreland's "search and destroy" firepower approach. How does pinball score inflation fit in with Vietnam? I don't exactly know yet, but it just does.
All these terrible things reached a kind of critical mass in the early 1970s--1972 for the cars, 1973 for baseball, 1974 I'd say for pinball. And in 1975 (drum roll, please), we lost the Vietnam War. Coincidence? I think not.....
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