America Always Sucked: A Case for Optimism
Morgan Bulkeley and how to make yourself feel better by realizing that the wheels are always falling off the cart.
I’ll be live on Substack with Van Jones at 12:30 p.m. Eastern today. Link is here:
I’ve never met Van Jones before and he’s always impressed me as a smart and insightful guy. I hope you’ll join us.
Before we start: I’m not going to link to it, but last weekend a fellow on Substack wrote about how he had been Pope Francis’s nemesis. This ex-rad-trad Catholic (he’s a former blogger who used to run a super-traddy website) saw Francis as a demonic force who was destroying the Church and spent 12 years of his life railing against the pope.
Needless to say, the Holy Father had no idea who this dude—a random blogger in Virginia—was. It’s all very sad.
There is a personality type that tends to see itself at the center of world-historical events. Every conflict it witnesses is a Götterdämmerung. Every struggle is the Final Struggle.
I try to guard against this impulse myself. One of the ways I do that is by focusing not just on how terrible things are now, but how terrible things have always been.
Because one way to be optimistic about the future is to be realistic about the past.
So let me tell you about Morgan Bulkeley. Fair warning: This sounds like it’s a story about baseball, but it’s not.
It’s a story about America. Who we are. And who we’ve always been.
1. America
There are 346 members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Of those, 78 were military veterans. Most of those men served in World War II, but one of them—Morgan Bulkeley—served in the Civil War.
When I saw Bulkeley’s plaque at Cooperstown I was entranced. It was the quintessential American story: A man fights the war against his nation’s original sin, comes home after victory, finds a life in the pastoral rhythms of baseball, and eventually ends up in the Hall of Fame.
Morgan Bulkeley was America’s Odysseus and once I learned his name, I had to know more about the great man because I wanted to understand the kind of country America used to be.
Except it turns out that Morgan Bulkeley kind of sucked.
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