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I had a friend who once said the saddest time of the year was the end of baseball season. He has since passed away, so I can’t tell him I agree with him as we reached the end of this baseball season last week. Is that a bit immature for a man who is nearing his 71st birthday? I’m sorry if you perceive it that way, but I cringe at the thought of that vast wasteland ahead, that stretch of incredibly dead time that doesn’t end until the beginning of April.
Perhaps I make too much of the importance of what is essentially just a game, but this game insinuated itself into my soul early in my life and has never abated. This same friend also loved the Frank Sinatra song "There Used to Be a Ballpark." Both of us saw the song as having much deeper meaning than the disappearance of an old ball field. His family played it over and over the day of his viewing. It is, for me, the saddest song I know. All the arguments he and I used to have about the most arcane elements of the game have disappeared in the mist of time. But that song and baseball keep his memory very much alive. The night I learned of his death, I went to the old Veterans Stadium and sat in the stands and imagined him sitting there with me. It was the same way when my favorite uncle died May 26, 1978. We had bonded over baseball and I sat alone at the ballpark that night, too, and wept during the game.
When someone dies in battle, you always hear someone muttering the clich� we ought to make sure he or she didn’t die in vain. I believe everybody who dies in war dies in vain. The only thing that we can do in wartime to stop soldiers from dying in vain is to stop soldiers from dying. In E.L. Doctorow’s novel "Homer and Langley," someone asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only it isn’t your life. That is the way it is in war. For a brief time, the fallen soldier is honored and then he is forgotten, except once a year on Memorial Day. The holiday, for my money, has become the phoniest day of the year. We worry more about the weather forecast down the Shore than we do about our dead soldiers. It is not because we are bad people, but because it’s the way of life. We go on living. It is something to instill in your sons and daughters, who may be anxious to risk their lives for some kind of glory. There is no glory in death, maybe even Pat Tillman would realize it if he were alive today. Is there anymore ironic phrase than "friendly fire?" Speaking of irony, many of those who ran off to Canada during the Vietnam War to escape the draft are still alive, while many of the war heroes are dead. The Grateful Dead had it right, you’ll be a long time gone.
My father always spoke of how a short time, after one of our many wars, we would become cuddly with our former enemies. He still had problems with having Germany and Japan as allies. I wonder what he would have thought about Vietnam becoming a prime American tourist attraction? But that is the way of the cynical world and no one understands cynicism better than Henry Kissinger. Good old Henry, with all of his deal-cutting with adversaries, is not in good standing with the patriotic right wing in this country. It is the credo, after all, of Rush Limbaugh that the definition of a moderate is a person with no principles. Richard Nixon opened the door to China. In today’s Republican Party, there would be no place for Nixon and Kissinger.
There is a popular notion on the Left we should continue the fight in Afghanistan to save Afghan women from being oppressed. That is a noble goal, but a futile one. We might as well invade and occupy the entire Middle East where females are subjugated by a culture still in the Dark Ages. Really, when are we going to recognize the limits of our power? Do we really think it is in the realm of possibility America can itself save an entire culture from its own religious fanaticism?
A regular feature on ABC’s "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" is to identify our war dead each week. Take notice sometime of who is doing the dying. The names are invariably from the small towns of America such as Hibbing, Minn., or Waco, Texas. That is where they still believe there is some purpose to dying young. The rest of us are just cynical enough to let them do the dying for us.
