Re:Balance -- Jim Peterson

Baseball Is Back -- Dr. Fauci Brings Some Joy to Mudville

This was drafted and ready this morning; as the footnote explains, because I paused for lunch, events overtook its prediction:

You win a few, you lose a few.

Some get rained out.

But you got to dress for all of them.

-- Satchel Paige

Dr. Anthony Fauci gave the country a lift and a smile last Thursday, when he threw out the ceremonial first pitch to open the abbreviated baseball season at Nationals Park in Washington.

Looking every inch his five-foot-seven, he shot-put an effort that at least bounced close to the first-base foul line.

A confessed Nats fan, Dr. Fauci displayed sports energy going back to his basketball days in New York, as Regis High’s plucky point guard and team captain. While his errant lob immediately earned a collectible baseball card – if not yet a Wheaties box – a grateful nation will prefer he stay focused on his day job, as America’s face of science and intelligence during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The game ended at five innings under lightning, thunder and torrential rain, with the Yankee’s own # 45, Gerrit Cole, pitching for the win. Earlier that day in Washington, even as “Fireball Fauci” was preparing to take the mound, POTUS 45 clutched for his own first-pitch publicity – a visit to Yankee Stadium on August 15.

Dr. Fauci was masked under his informed policy guidance, while also muffled under the official forces of unmasked ignorance and hostility. Here he is, sportingly enjoying himself, a picture of genuine boyish enthusiasm:

 

The same day, here is the handcuff of Mariano Rivera’s underhand toss into the ample Presidential breadbasket. Defended as if a hostile alien -- instead of a routine double-play ball, it would score an error, first-and-third, and nobody out:

 

Will August 15 actually happen? There are reasons for doubt. As heard from this White House so often and with such little effect, “We’ll know … in about two weeks.” Three seasons into this administration, the incumbent is the first non-participant in the baseball tradition started by President Taft in 1910.

On the political side:

• If not for the empty seats under the pandemic, the predictable reception by fans in New York -- the home city he forsook for Florida and one of the “Democrat” (sic) “hellholes” he so denigrates and disrespects – would have loudly reciprocated the hostility.

• Ardent animosity to Colin Kaepernick’s pre-game kneeling and bigoted militaristic reaction to all aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement would confront the banners, the ribbons and the players themselves – actions he’s claimed to mean “the game is over.”

• The mound can be even more lonely than the Oval Office. For someone eager to claim all credit but deflect all blame, there will be no subordinate or surrogate to demonize for a gaffe, nor a manager to pull him for a reliever.

• Performance anxiety will be raging under the red MAGA cap and the orange comb-over. Comes to mind the scene early in “Bull Durham,” after Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) gets into the thick head of Tim Robbins’s Nuke, whose wild throw shatters the window, and Crash calmly announces “ball four.”    

Further to the narcissistic personal vanity, POTUS would be at serious risk of being shown up by Dr. Fauci’s bouncy authenticity:

• The current major league mound was lowered years ago but is still built to the intimidating height of eight full inches – a slope that, unlike the platform at West Point on June 13, will offer neither a handrail nor a guiding elbow.

• That deteriorated frame shows scant evidence of enough shoulder rotation to launch a baseball the full 60’6” from mound to plate – neither two-handed water drinking nor awkwardly choppy golf swings inspire confidence.

• On my Little League team, anyway, an adolescent displaying the pain and clumsiness pictured in that close-distance game of catch on the White House lawn would have been banished to far right field and the eight-spot in the batting order.

Put another way, generously (if skeptically) accepting the claim of one-time high school level ability, decline is now on display. By comparison, Tony Fauci’s mound performance looked like Don Larsen against the Dodgers on October 8, 1956.

As a Cubs fan – anxiously noting that at this writing they have split their first two games – I have learned to my sorrow not to make predictions. Here however I hazard that by the morning of August 15, some intervening excuse will emerge to scuttle the much-ballyhooed event.

Certainly not a flair-up of the once convenient but lately unmentionable bone spurs. Nor would it be tasteful to invoke golf-induced muscle spasms.

Inclement conditions would be handy. Threats of moisture sufficed to cancel both a visit to a military cemetery outside Paris in November 2018, and the July 11 campaign event in New Hampshire. Rainout-ready Sharpies will be poised over the New York weather maps.

Or, more than likely, some staffer on the White House fringe will have gone rogue and taken a virus test with a positive return – despite the steadfastly illogical proclamations that fewer tests would mean fewer cases. That would offer an out, and finesse the prospect of an ugly and embarrassing debacle.

As often said, “We’ll see.”[1] 

[1] At 3.44 pm EDT this afternoon, POTUS tweeted a vacuous trio of reasons why he will be “unable to be in New York to throw out the opening pitch for the Yankees on August 15…” As Casey Stengel put it, “You could look it up.”     

     

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COVID-19: Florida’s Inexcusable Fiasco Goes National

 “There are no words” is not a default available to those presuming to take a public platform. Today, though, I struggle to express my anger and dismay over an experience with the corona virus – one that both strikes close to home and exposes the multiple consequences of the cascading failures of our country’s office-holders.

It falls specifically on Florida governor Ron DeSantis – incited as he has been by the abject failings of the bunkered White House, whose occupant from the emergence of the pandemic has confirmed on a near-daily basis his apt if vulgar characterization in July 2017 by then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as a “f***ing moron.”    

It’s about an elderly friend in Chicago – a woman both indomitable in her fortitude and among the world’s most caring, sensitive and empathetic – always accessible, wise and perceptive with friends, clients and all who know and love her.

While bravely bearing a lifetime of severely compromised immunity, this gentle soul undertook in early June to fly to Florida. She was generously motivated by the desire to give care and support to an even-older relative. Regrettably too, she was credulously enticed by the attitude and messaging of DeSantis.

By then the consequences had long been evident of the blinkered failure of the Trump administration to appreciate the intelligence widely available – the literally vital necessity to stock up, close down, and take seriously the certain aggression of a novel virus that cared not the slightest for the disrespect and denial shown by the comprehensively ignorant. It was unleashed and spreading, to be affected only by drastic measures with social and economic consequences unknown to modern societies.

Sadly, she bought the governor’s blind-eyed optimism. Despite compelling evidence in the data and the science, DeSantis – along with his minions and enablers in Florida and his cretinous coevals in other states -- had resolutely opposed and resisted calls to close churches, parks and beaches. His wildly premature phase 1 re-opening in late April covered indoor dining, and his June 5 phase 2 extended to bars, theaters, and most retail.

For all of which, as wryly put by the Los Angeles Times, where that state too “for a brief moment … returned to bars, beaches and botox,” the still-developing extent of DeSantis’s tragic recklessness has been thoroughly validated as ill informed and deadly in its consequences.

So it falls on DeSantis, that my friend in all her innocent misapprehension spent three weeks in Florida within the scope of his misbegotten policies – nurturing her relative, and in close social contact with his community of the aged including a now highly suspect birthday celebration.

From which, there is this horrific added complication: My friend was robust and asymptomatic as she left to return to Chicago – taking a flight last Saturday evening. The next day she was immediately overcome with classic indications of COVID-19. Promptly hospitalized and tested positive, she is as I write released and isolating at home with her quarantining spouse – feeble, depleted, and barely able to speak.

At this point -- like the many other states that were too late to close and far too hasty to open, and which as of July 6 will be subject to the emergency order announced by Chicago’s mayor Lori Lightfoot that imposes fourteen-day quarantine requirements on travelers to our city -- Florida is over-whelmed. Under the incompetence of the DeSantis administration, there is no chance of tracing the source of my friend’s infection, or calculating the extent of its spread among the groups of at-risk elderly with whom she shared contact – not to mention the likelihood that she herself could have been a virulently infectious spreader on her airplane and in the airports she traversed.

Up to this week I had already been managing proximity with three early-stage cases – a college student, a millennial of world-class athletic stature, and a previously robust, marathon-qualified Gen-Xer whose very survival was at risk and who likely confronts long-lasting adverse pulmonary effects. These suffice to confirm that the virus has no respect for age or politics, or for the wishful thinkers or the deniers who would cry “hoax” or wish that it should miraculously “disappear.” They are instead enough to raise my anger level that even these cases could have been mitigated by competent policy-makers prepared to respect the intelligence and pay attention accordingly.

With that, what additional reaction is possible now, to the multiple threats in my beloved friend’s situation, both to herself and to all those to whom she was exposed due to the compounding negligence of DeSantis and his fellows? Frustration and outrage are insufficient, that she and others are sacrifices to the ignorant political optics of elected officials and their devotees.

Last night I made a no-contact delivery of a get-well card and a bouquet of flowers. That -- along with my heartfelt wishes for her recovery and this telling of her story, which I invite you to share – is what I can do, for my friend and for us all.

Because nobody who has bought into the hoax and conspiracy theories will have stayed to read this far, I need not advocate for changes of views; if there is a message to the sympathetic from this pulpit it would be one of simple encouragement:

Pay attention – be cautious – keep distances – keep wearing your masks. Brave people are putting their lives on the line for us. Respecting them and each other is the least we can do.