Rained Out

It’s doubtful there exists a greater American hero than Christy Mathewson. One of the original five inductees into the Major League Hall of Fame, “Big Six” dominated hitters for the full 17 years of his career at the beginning of the last century, amassing 373 wins, while finishing with one of the ten lowest Earned Run Averages in history. While his legendary manager, John McGraw, was reknowned far and wide for having little patience for human beings in general, he openly adored his star pitcher. Although the two could not have been more different, McGraw the epitome of a hard-drinking, near compulsive gambling Irish hothead, and Mathewson, every bit the “Christian gentleman” one of his nicknames implied, they were as close as brothers, feeding off the respect each had for the other.

In 1905 the New York Giants won the World Series solely due to the efforts of Mathewson, who pitched three games, 27 innings, and gave up zero runs. McGraw would go to his grave assuring any and all that no feat ever came close to “Matty’s“ dominance that October week. Asked for his opinion, the ever humble Mathewson admitted “I was hard to hit.” And so a legend was born.

When Christy Mathewson told his wife he was set on joining the US war effort in 1918, she begged him not to… unsuccessfully. Sworn in as a Captain, Mathewson became a member of a gas warfare division and was deployed to the WWI European theater, by then a killing field, where he was accidentally exposed to toxic gas in a training accident, promptly inviting an eventually fatal case of tuberculosis. He died way too young in 1925, recognized along with Walter Johnson as Baseball’s greatest pitcher. The day after his death, the Oklahoma daily, The Oklahoman summed up succinctly where Mathewson stood in America’s estimation: “He was loved as no American athlete has been loved.” Tough guy John McGraw was said to have cried like a baby.

Near a century later Europe is commemorating the war to end all wars, and our POTUS is attending the solemn proceedings. In flight toward Europe, in between rants about factless Democratic cheating in Tuesday’s elections, President Trump tweeted his disdain for French President Macron’s “insulting” remark that, in line with the disdainful recent statements by the US President, perhaps Europe needs to rearm with America as an adversary in mind. Trump, who has never given much thought to context or appropriateness, has no problem picking a fight with his host on the way to events meant to honor shared sacrifice. Apparently, rain and wind, always the enemy of our leader’s precision combover, precipitated cancellation of this morning’s planned visit to a cemetery of the fallen. Like his nastiness and resentment, Trump wears vanity on his sleeve. We should count our blessings he didn’t don  a MAGA hat to protect his fragile coif.

Projecting who we are as Americans is an important chore within the job description of our Presidents. Fair or  not, the world sees us through them. The noxiousness of Fox/AM, and indeed the first meaningful glimpse into America First ugliness, was on full display when our first black Chief Executive flew abroad.  Even as the world was dispatching huge crowds to raucously cheer our vibrant young leader, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh were abasing his every remark, shrilly accusing him of “apologizing” for American greatness.

Now their champion, met with near uniform derision, embarrasses us at every port he visits. Macron, auditioning this weekend to replace Angela Merkel as Europe’s preeminent advocate, has learned the hard way about Trump’s vapidness. The  ugly memories of our petulant toddler’s last visit to Brussels and Helsinki are still fresh in the French President’s mind, and his  domestic constituency exhibits little patience for acceding to L’Enfant Terrible’s guiding impulse to bully.  Tolerance for anything less than Trump’s best behavior will surely be in short supply.  Expect at best stilted politeness, at worst recrimination.

World War I claimed near 55,000 Americans in and around miserable trenches across France and Belgium. Associated deaths, many produced by a Spanish Flu pandemic every bit as lethal as a German machine gun bullet, also  killed more than 50,000. All told, more than 116,000 Americans fell in a conflict history makes clear resulted from grievous human miscalculations, which evolved rapidly into a series of events its instigators quickly lost their ability to control.

The Treaty of Versailles, which ended one world war while planting the seeds for another far more destructive conflagration, is a monument to how vengeful nationalist impulses threaten mankind. America First embodies most of what we hoped the deaths of millions of innocents taught us to forsake. Trump’s behavior on the world stage unabashedly displays our worst for all to see. Meanwhile, we sit across the Atlantic flummoxed at the pox we have unleashed, overwhelmed by the manic chaos on which his relevance depends.

It is not a question of if this President will start a cycle of ill will that could blossom into war, he’s already done it.  The same division he bestows on his home country he is hard at work exporting to Europe and beyond, something they need like a bullet to the temple. The country that blessed the world with Christy Mathewson, sacrificing him to the insanity concocted by Czars and Kaisers, has now addled it with our nastiest malignancy. This all plays out at a critical juncture, a familiar crossroads where it will be decided whether or not obsessions about national sovereignty, conjured up by consciousless troublemakers like our President, will be permitted  to incite events that lead to only one place… graveyards, sacred sites visited decades later by leaders unconcerned their hair weave will betray them in the wind and rain! BC