Resisting Caliban

“We must prepare to meet with Caliban.” – The Tempest

I’ve been married long enough to know that when my wife starts talking about “rearranging a few things” I had better go through the papers and books on my desk and on the floor surrounding my desk in order to save what needs saving before the rearranging nightmare commences. And of course the process takes longer than anticipated because I start to read the old articles and papers in order to decide what to discard and what to save.

This time through I noticed an old obituary of a favorite baseball player of mine from the golden era of baseball, the era of all white players. That obituary was much more important to me than the tons of articles I threw out about the Latin Mass and the crisis in the church. It might appear since I threw out the articles pertaining to the internecine wars in the Catholic Church and kept the obituary about a favorite baseball player (Walter Johnson) from the golden era, that I was no longer interested in Christianity but was still interested in the trivial pursuits of my childhood.

The old saw warns us that appearances can be deceiving. I kept the Walter Johnson obit because Mr. Johnson was a baseball hero from an era when the European people of America were at least, if not integrally Christian, then Christian in ethos. Such relics of the past must be treasured, because it is no longer possible in the modern, post-Christian-ethos era, to see even a trace of old Europe embodied in any European American or European institution.

The history of baseball in this country is a history in miniature of the white European people. Baseball has its roots in the agrarian tradition of Europe. The terms ‘infield’ and ‘outfield’ for instance are used by Sir Walter Scott in his descriptions of Scottish farming:

The residence of these church vassals was usually in a small village or hamlet, where, for the sake of mutual aid and protection, some thirty or forty families dwelt together. This was called the Town, and the land belonging to the various families by whom the Town was inhabited, was called the Township. They usually possessed the land in common, though in various proportions, according to their several grants. The part of the Township properly arable, and kept as such continually under the plough, was called in-field. Here the use of quantities of manure supplied in some degree the exhaustion of the soil, and the feuars raised tolerable oats and bear, [Footnote: or bigg, a kind of coarse barley] usually sowed on alternate ridges, on which the labour of the whole community was bestowed without distinction, the produce being divided after harvest, agreeably to their respective interests.

There was, besides, out-field land, from which it was thought possible to extract a crop now and then, after which it was abandoned to the "skiey influences," until the exhausted powers of vegetation were restored. These out-field spots were selected by any feuar at his own choice, amongst the sheep-walks and hills which were always annexed to the Township, to serve as pasturage to the community. The trouble of cultivating these patches of out-field, and the precarious chance that the crop would pay the labour, were considered as giving a right to any feuar, who chose to undertake the adventure, to the produce which might result from it.

The very concept of a professional baseball team is a bastardization of the sporting ideals of the European people, immortalized forever in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. In that work, Thomas Hughes enfleshes the Christian doctrine of the interconnectedness of body and soul. Sport, to a Christian of the old stock, is a spiritual exercise; how we conduct ourselves in sport and the type of sport we participate in can elevate or debase the soul.

The original professional baseball organizations, because they were created by people with a Christian hangover, mixed the Christian sporting ethos with a secular ethos. The Christian impulse was seen in the teams’ attempts to make heroism local and particular. Even though most players did not play for their home city, they were treated like native sons by the local baseball enthusiasts. But the serpent was in the baseball garden. A small little serpent called money was seen in the out-field.

Sport in America lost its remaining Christian ethos when baseball integrated in 1947. Though owners such as Branch Rickey and Bill Veeck, who brought the first Negroes into baseball, presented themselves as pioneers in the civil rights movement, they were in reality worshippers of the golden calf. It was simple economics. A bigger gene pool meant a better team, and a better team meant more money. The unsung heroes were the white players, such as Dixie Walker of the Dodgers, who said that it didn’t matter if you could win more games and make more money by integrating your team, it was wrong. The heroes of baseball were not the Jackie Robinsons and Branch Rickeys or the vast majority of white players who dared not place their financial futures in jeopardy by protesting integrated baseball. The real heroes were men like Dixie Walker who spoke out against the forces of money and Negro worship. In Cleveland, the small handful of white players who refused to shake hands with the Negro Larry Doby were traded off the team. (1) Such protestors were heroes of the blood. Their instincts allowed them to see the truth: the presence of the Negro within white culture is the beginning of the end of white culture.
One wonders what happened to all the old opponents of integration. The baseball players of the late 40’s are mostly gone by now. But what about the athletes from the mid-1960's? I remember reading about a Southern college football team in the early 1960’s. The white players on that team refused to play against teams that played Negroes. What happened to those men? Did they all ‘see the light’ and become Negro worshippers? Most likely they became part of the white underground. They grumble among themselves about the apelike negroization of their sport but dare not make any public criticism of integration.

The coalition that destroyed white baseball was the same type of coalition that destroyed the European people. A group of money men joined forces with Christians who needed a social gospel to buttress up their faltering faith in the Gospel.

The cynical money men were careful to present the negroization of baseball, and other aspects of white culture, in Christian terms. The pastor of my parents’ church, who regularly extolled the black man but had very little to say about Christ, was fond of saying that Branch Rickey was the greatest civil rights advocate of them all, ‘them all’ being liberals like the pastor, who ended up divorcing his first wife, second wife, third wife, and then the church.

There was an episode in the old Leave It To Beaver television show in which the moral eunuch, Eddie Haskell, during a camping trip falls off a cliff onto a ledge slightly below. A park ranger (played by the same actor who played Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy in the movie serial) has to come and rescue Eddie. When Eddie tries to mouth off to the park ranger, he is told, “Things like this don’t happen to boys who are careful in the woods.” Precisely. And things like the negroization of baseball don’t happen to a people unless they have taken little care to keep faith with their past. The capitalist, because he worships the golden calf, must break faith with his ancestors who worshipped Christ. But why did the Christians, the people I call the halfway-house Christians, break faith with their Christian ancestors? A traditional Christian people seeks to remain close to their past because by doing so, they are staying close to their God. A serious Christian does not jettison the customs and traditions of a Christian people in favor of the new customs and traditions of a Godless, utopian people, but confused halfway-house Christians do jettison the traditions of antique, Christian Europeans.

The European walls between the races were in place for good reasons, for Christian, European reasons. 1) God saves particular people and persons; He does not save en masse. It is His will that people retain their racial identities. 2) The second reason is like unto the first; if the Christ-bearing race becomes a non-race, will there be faith on earth?

The negroization of the world is a holistic movement. The liberals have left no part of the European world free from the presence of the Negro. And as Midas turned everything he touched to gold, so does the Negro turn every aspect of white culture into a savage, tribal, barbarous rite. Who is served by the interjection of the Negro into white culture? Is the white man served? Maybe the rich capitalist is served in a material sense, but is the real white man, the Christian, served by an integrated society? No, he is debauched and degraded. He losses his identity as a white European, and by that loss he becomes worse than a man without a country; he becomes a man without a soul.

Is the Negro served? Again, some are served in a material sense. But the black man is dependent on the white man to keep him from descending to the level of the apes (I mean that in a behavioral sense, not an evolutionary sense). The white man’s burden and duty is to control and civilize the black savage, as the pre-civil war, Southern whites did so admirably, and not to make him a deity in a Godless, golden-calf-worshipping society.

The whole purpose of a Christian culture is to create opportunities for white moments. Somewhere between our birth and death, we need to see the face of Christ, at the hearth, in pure sport, in our art, or in our work. The liberal wants to eliminate the white moments of existence. He demands that we give up the white moments of life, in which we get a glimpse of heaven, in order to live in a future heaven on earth that he, the liberal, is building for us. But it is always in the future, this heaven on earth, and it always entails the sacrifice of our faith in the God whose kingdom is not of this world. Negroization is the liberal’s road to earthly bliss, but the European of the old stock sees it for what it is – the road to hell. We shall never give up on the culture of white moments and we will never accept negroization. +

________________________
(1) Bill Veeck is lauded for bringing the second Negro into baseball a few months after the first one. What type of man are the liberals lauding? They are lauding a man who put money above every decent human sentiment. He once, when he was owner of the Chicago White Sox, brought a midget up to bat. His only worry was that the midget might attempt to gain some self-respect by actually swinging at the baseball and getting a hit. In order to put a halt to that, he told the midget that he had a man with a high-powered rifle ready to shoot him if he swung at the ball. The midget walked on four pitches, and Bill Veeck got what he wanted, celebrity and money. What of the midget? He suffered scorn and ridicule the rest of his life, which lasted ten years longer. He died from injuries resulting from a beating he received from men who still wanted to mock and ridicule him for his infamous at bat in the major leagues. Did the great civil rights champion, the great humanitarian, attend his funeral? No, he did not. The only man from major league baseball that attended the funeral was the pitcher who gave up the walk. “I felt I owed him that much.”

Now, Bill Veeck didn’t force the midget to prostitute himself for money. But a pimp is even more loathsome than a prostitute. Veeck and the liberals call negroization ‘civil rights.’ The correct term for it is pimping.