CSotD: Good guy, Bad guys

I’m going to let Bill Bramhall’s tribute stand for all the Willie Mays cartoons, most of which took advantage of “The Catch” but too many of which cluttered it up, particularly with Pearly Gates cliches.

Bramhall keeps it simple, though I have to chuckle over him giving Mays a blue hat rather than a black one, because Bramhall, after all, is in NYC, where Mays played the tail end of his career with a team called the Metropolitans.

Bramhall and I, however, are the same age and I remember all the hoopla when the NY Giants left for the other coast.

I’d like to think you don’t have to be 74 years old to remember Mays, and, in particular, to care about the actual game instead of the actuarial game. PBS had a particularly nice tribute to Mays, in which Howard Bryant spoke of the excitement he generated:

I think it’s an interesting contrast to baseball today, where the game is essentially sold by math and science and numbers and launch angle and exit velocity and statistics. And William Mays was joy. He was electricity. He was emotion.

I used to enjoy baseball until I was trapped in a newsroom with an active fantasy league, in which people who seemed to honestly think they owned MLB teams exchanged stats about “their” players, but never said, “Wasn’t that a great catch?”

And they would root against the home team — Giants or Mets — if the outcome advanced their imaginary lineup.

MLB admitted this past month that the Negro League was more than a footnote, which inspired Jeff Danziger to sum up the current status of the game.

These days, even trash-talking requires a calculator and a spread-sheet. “Kill the ump!” has become “Reprogram the computer!”

Mays was already in the main room at the Hall of Fame, and, according to this analysis, they won’t have to do a major update on his plaque after all, because he wasn’t in the Negro League very long and the League didn’t keep exhaustive stats anyway.

Perhaps they preferred playing baseball. IMHO, the fact that Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson were facing Satch at his best skews their stats beyond meaningful comparison anyway.

Tank McNamara (AMS) also featured a series on the “redemption” of the Negro Leagues. The Baseball Hall of Fame at one point added a separate-but-equal section for the League, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve been there and I’d like to think they had improved their approach.

Mind you, the glitzification of the Hall of Fame is a different Grumpy Old Man issue. I liked it better when it was like a library and you had to know who Zack Wheat was in order to know why his glove was in a display case there.

Anyway, Tank ended the week with a pair of old timers getting it right.

In Less Charming News

While MLB was papering over a shameful legacy of intolerance, others are ramping up their own brand of separatism. Ann Telnaes notes Louisiana’s new law mandating that the 10 Commandments be displayed in every public classroom.

The law doesn’t specify which 10 commandments are required, and people may not know that the Jewish, Protestant and Catholic versions vary, but they do, and here’s a summary of that, with this helpful graphic:

It should be noted that Islam, in which Moses is revered, also has a separate vision of the 10 Commandments, which you can read here.

But given that the same rightwingers who want to groom young Protestants in our public schools are also planning to ban Muslim immigration if Trump wins in November, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them to mandate that the Qu’ran’s take also be publicly posted.

Nor would I expect people who fear that George Soros is living under their bed to want his version of the Commandments taught.

Still, they say it’s an issue of history and heritage, not an attempt to teach religion, and there I am in full agreement: It’s very much a part of our historic heritage.

Like the torching of a convent by an anti-Catholic mob at the start of the Know-Nothing movement, and the circulating of Maria Monk’s “Awful Disclosures” with its false, sexualized tales of convent life.

In the years after the Civil War, Catholics began protesting the teaching of Protestant theology in public schools, calling for elimination of the King James Bible as a text. Thomas Nast summed it up by having the evil priest tell the little Irish monkey-children to “Kick it out peaceably!” as they waved terrorist flags and clutched their rosaries.

One of the traditional defenses of Nast’s anti-Catholic bigotry is to show his positive depictions of other minorities, and here we see little Black and Chinese kids joining with their White classmates to slam the door on the “Gaunt and Hungry” Catholic, Democratic wolf who threatens the “non-sectarian” public schools.

I went to Catholic school for kindergarten and first grade, and at the time, I thought the words “public” and “Protestant” were synonyms.

I wasn’t far off, though in 1962, the Supreme Court ruled against formal prayer in public schools.

That was then, this is now: The Court has since declared that standing in the middle of a football field surrounded by students and parents and leading them in prayer is entirely a private and personal matter that is in no way school-led or coercive.

So we’ll see how the current crop of SCOTUS judges views Louisiana’s testimony to its proud history.

Meanwhile, a work-around has been found:

When Brown v the Board began to end segregated schools, there was a rush to establish private academies that just happened, by golly, to be all-white. However, they were privately funded and so outside the laws on racial preference.

No more. As Kevin Necessary points out, several states now have voucher programs to funnel money allocated for public schools to instead offset tuition at private schools. Theoretically, this helps low-income families choose to send their kids to such institutions.

Theoretically. But study after study has shown that most voucher funds award money from public schools to families that were already sending their kids to private schools.

At least the children are being carefully taught.

Thomas Nast would be pleased!