Tag / democracy

by Nathan Coumbe

History is tragedy, not melodrama

One of my professors in college, a tiny little man from the Delta named Dr. Bo Morgan, said one of the most accurate and poignant statements about history to all of us historians-in-training on our first day in his class:

“History is tragedy, not melodrama.”

Melodrama: think of all the westerns from the 1950s and 60s. There were good guys and bad guys. And you could easily see who was who.

Tragedy: real people with real flaws acting the way humans do… And their flaws destroy them in the end.

History isn’t a Western, as much as our politicians would like to treat it that way. There are rarely obvious villains and heroic good guys that you can easily spot. It’s full of good people doing bad things and bad people doing good things. Flawed humans acting as such.

Acknowledging the bad things we’ve done doesn’t harm America. It doesn’t make America or Americans “bad.”

Acknowledging the Holocaust doesn’t make all Germans or Germany bad. Why would recognizing our history of systemic racism or chattel slavery or the destruction of Native Americans harm the US?

If anything, acknowledging it helps us because we can learn from it and improve the present.

There is no point in erasing or hiding any of it except to please a small fringe on one side of the aisle.

And it’s also true that labeling our country as pure evil is equally wrong, something an equally tiny fringe of extreme people on the other side has tried to do as well.

History is tragedy, not melodrama.

This post was inspired by Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter from March 28.

by Nathan Coumbe

Baseball follows the decline of American democracy

“Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation. 

Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience. That means it requires a lot of compromise. Democracy is the slow politics of the half-loaf. 

Baseball is the game of the long season, where small, incremental differences decide who wins and who loses particular games, series, seasons. In baseball, you know going to the ballpark that the chances are you may win, but you also may lose. There’s no certainty, no given. You know when the season starts that the best team is going to get beaten a third of the time; the worst team is going to win a third of the time. The argument over 162 games—that middle third. 

So it’s a game you can’t like if winning’s everything. And democracy is that way, too.” 

—George Will, “Ken Burns: Baseball“

I would now posit that Americans’ declining interest in, and ability to watch and focus on, baseball directly correlates to our declining democratic ideals. 

When winning is everything—like it is in the new American pastime, football—and our culture reflects that, American democracy can no longer function. 

Baseball has become the jazz music of American sports culture: something we created that truly reflects who we are as a culture, yet no one cares about anymore.

Baseball and jazz—two of the greatest cultural creations that are 100% genuine American innovations—are the same two things most Americans don’t care about, understand, or appreciate. 

We’ve traded cerebral, authentically human jazz for three-minute pop songs, mostly created by computers with singers who rely on autotune to hit anything above or below a 5-note range. A 162-game baseball season over 8 months, for a 16-game football season that lasts 5 months. 

I’ve often said that our declining interest and ability to follow baseball is an indication of social media’s detrimental impact on our ability to focus for long periods. 

Now I’m quite certain it heralds something much worse.