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Differences between baseball and football provide strategic insights into the war currently being
waged in Iraq,
Afghanistan
and worldwide
by Islamic fanatics against the Western values of liberty and democracy disciplined by respect for
human rights. One of the fundamental differences between baseball and regular-season
football is that baseball's endgame is entirely event-driven, but football's is time-limited-- i.e.,
baseball continues until one side wins regardless of the number of innings required, but football ends with a "tie"
when neither side has won at the end of regulation time. Until the 1960's, baseball had been
our "national pastime," but soon after the first Super Bowl, football eclipsed baseball
and became, at least our "de facto" national pastime.
Baseball became our "national pastime" in an era in which the American psyche expected and
preferred decisive outcomes. After Pearl Harbor reawakened this American psyche from its naive
slumber following World War I, what would later become known as "The Greatest Generation"º¹
intuitively understood baseball's event-driven endgame strategy to be applicable to the historic
conflict they entered. They knew that preservation of liberty would require them to persist in
the conflict for however long it might take for liberty to emerge victorious. They
unapologetically proclaimed their faith in liberty over totalitarianism. They didn't subscribe
to such silly nonsense as "One man's totalitarian is
another man's humanitarian." They were "in it" for the duration of the
conflict. They understood the necessity of the goal being "victory" rather than
another Munich "compromise" designed by people knowing less than they believed they knew
about the nature of fanaticism.
The free press (then) astutely knew it to be sophistry to try to feign
"neutrality" in the struggle between liberty and totalitarian systems prohibiting a free
press. The free press didn't try to publish information useful to the enemy and hurtful to our
side. Today, the "free press" worships at the altar of the sophistry of trying to be
"neutral" in the struggle between an alliance
of mutual enemies (under the maxim "the enemy of my enemy is my friend") -- i.e., Islamic
fanaticism and Paleo-Stalinism-- on the one hand and classical Western liberalism
(including the very concept of a "free press") on the other.
Then, with the coming-of-age of the The Greatest Narcissistic Generation, a.k.a., the "baby
boomers," (excepting from such epithet, of course, those who served in the military), the
patience necessary for appreciating the event-driven nature of baseball's endgame all but vanished
from the American psyche to replaced -- at an ever accelerating rate-- with a craving for quick
gratification and a sense of entitlement that "things" should work-out
"favorably" within a reasonably short period of time.
This virtually instant-gratification craving and sense of entitlement empowered a national psyche
that wasted the sacrifices and almost unending string of victories by our military in Vietnam by
capitulating to totalitarians and then turning a blind eye to the slaughter of millions in the wake
of our departure. At least then, neither the North Vietnamese nor the Viet Cong overtly
desired the destruction of the West in general or the United States in particular. Today, as
was the case in the wake of the then-enemy's military-failure/propaganda-success known as the "Tet
Offensive," the mentality of American Self-Defeatists is in the ascendancy, and the craving for
an "end" to the conflict regardless of the consequences has become political
bloodlust.
Who are the American Self-Defeatists today? Currently, most of the Democratic Party (with a
few exceptions such as the dependably courageous and morally principled Joe Lieberman), virtually
the entirety of the traditionally dominant media (the so-call "MainStream Media" or "MSM"),
virtually the entirety of the entertainment industry, and a growing minority of white-flag
Republicans. Who's left? At present, not enough of us. That's what we
need to change-- and sooner, not later. We must cease merely "preaching to the
choir." We must convey the issues in a rational way to the countless
"independents" and "middle-roaders" misled by the unrelenting, propagandistic,
caricaturization* of the issues by the American Self-Defeatists. We must enlighten the
"independents" and "middle-roaders" in order to alter poll-results worshipped by
weak-kneed politicians who are now looking for the tall grass.
Is there enough time? No much. Let's get going. Let's get America understanding
and playing "baseball" again.
º¹
Credit Tom Brokaw for this great insight among the few he had-- to be fair, maybe none of us can
realistically expect more than one great insight as we stumble through life.)
*
So-what if it's not in the dictionary. It says what I mean.
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