Boxing Day? Well, thanks for the 3 Points!

As American stores pulled their employees back into work last night to strip out the old Christmas junk and get up the Valentine’s chocolates, the British and the inhabitants of their remnant Commonwealth are celebrating Boxing Day. Though most agree that the celebration of the day after Christmas began in England in the mid-ninetheeth century, disputes over exactly what the day means continue. Rest assured that the holiday’s name didn’t come from people fighting over the holiday’s name.

My thoughts lean toward the story of the aristocracy giving their servants the day off and offering them ‘boxes’ of small presents and leftovers from the Christmas feast those same servants prepped and served (from the left) Christmas Day. But that’s because I’ve a mean streak for aristocracies and find the fawning given to the queen or her grandsons rather nauseating. But let’s leave that fight for another day, and turn to the modern meaning of Boxing Day.

Football! Although every European league takes a break from the Sunday before Christmas to the end of January (or a bit later), and although every European league produces far more world-class players than the English Premier League (EPL), the cascade of footie that comes our way from across the pond are sheer joy for the fans (Thank you NBC Sports!). English clubs play 3 matches in 10 days, sometimes 4 in a fortnight (Easy mate. It’s the bloody aristos that git me ire. The footie and lager and Spice Girls are first rate!). Boxing Day 1963 still holds the record for the most goals scored in a single day of top-flight English football. And it was mostly done on snow-covered pitches, which players today would whine about.

Today’s matches offered fewer goals (a mere 23 vs. 66 in ’63), but had more surprises: Manchester United continue to tumble down the table like a box of Christmas coal. Chelsea – last year’s champions – still look like a parody of self-important rich kids petulant that the world won’t give them what they want. Aston Villa didn’t simply give up again, having been scored on, and fought back for a draw. Mere Liverpool defeated top-of-the-table Leicester City, which gave Arsenal a chance to go top against Southampton, riding a 6-match losing streak with no goals at all. But the EPL is the gift that keeps on giving, so Southampton lashed Arsenal 4-0.

The holiday stretch of the EPL marks the mid-way point of the season, the marker that largely augurs the final standings, and the last window through which one can throw risky predictions (if a pundit wants to claim true clairvoyance). When the season ends in mid-May, the top team is, of course, crowned champions, and the bottom three teams being sent down to the lower division for the next year at least. Installing relegation in American sports would create huge fan interest. Consider the possibility (probably best available to baseball) that an Oakland As or a Cincinnati Reds were threatened with relegation! The players would actually try to fight for a few wins in August to keep their multi-millions! And more than a dozen hundred fans might watch. Imagine a Durham Bulls or Toledo Munhens getting a chance to step up in their places, giving a couple dozen fresh faces who might become superstars! Of course, in the land of rampant post-capitalism, the cartel of American professional sports would never allow such meritocratic free enterprise. But if MLS and the NASL agree to join forces to build such a system, I guarantee you the advertising dollars will flow soccer’s way. But – as always – I digress.

For an example of how the league table after Boxing Day pretty much reflects the league table in May when the season ends, only once in the post-WWII era has the team at the bottom of the table at Christmas escaped relegation: Leicester City last year. And only twice in the twentieth century has a team gone from bottom of the table one Boxing Day to top of the table the next Boxing Day: Leicester City this year. Good for them! Few pick them to hang on to win the championship, and I don’t either. They’ll finish second. Third? Alas, they’ll tire in the wet late winter when richer clubs can afford to rest a top player or two and still win. Leicester play some lovely, quick, incisive footie. But they need eight or nine of their best eleven to do it. Arsenal and Man City (Leicester’s closest competitors) aren’t as much fun to watch but they can beat most teams with about 2/3rds of their first-team squad. That staying power will likely give one of them the championship, and I’m pulling for Wenger’s Arsenal, even after today’s shambles. He is a gentleman in and a professor of the game, and if there were poetic and heroic justice in the game, he would retire as manager of the league champions. But there isn’t. Ask Steven Gerard.

(Photo by Clive Brunskill/       Getty Images)

Which leads me to my beloved Liverpool, who just beat the league leaders 1-0 at home today on Boxing Day! Three points that move us up to 8th! The Klopp Effect is back! We’re on our way to a top-four place! (And thus a place in the incredibly lucrative European Champions’ League next year. And no, Virginia, you don’t need to be a champion to be in the Champions’ League.)

Hold on, lads. Liverpool have also beaten Manchester City and Chelsea (Ok, that win doesn’t seem as impressive now at it did in mid-October). Yet they can’t beat any of the teams near them in the table, and they barely earned a draw against relegation-threatened WBA. The Boxing-Day gift of a win against the league leaders needs to be put in the context of the match itself. I fear we’ll find that the sparkly present is only so much cheap tinsel.

First off, Divock Origi, a rare striker in Red who moves both on and off the ball, went off hurt late in the first half. Though his is probably not serious, Anfield Road (Liverpool’s stadium) has become the land where decent strikers go to get ground down by injury. We had to run Michael Owen to death back at the turn of the millennium, and Danny Ings is only the latest on that list – though Daniel Sturridge has now earned the untimely honor of having sat on the bench injured for more matches than he has suited up to play. In what other walk of life besides sport can you get paid millions not to do what you are paid to do? Well, besides being a politician?

Next, Liverpool’s/Klopp’s “gegenpress” continues to look so exciting in the first half-hour of most matches but is so ineffective if we look at the results after 90 minutes. Rarely do the Reds turn such dominance in pace and possession into dominance on the scoresheet. Once Origi had to step off to be replaced by Christian Benteke, the high-pace pressure (a ‘full-court press’ to use a basketball analogy) was guaranteed to slack off. It did, and Leicester started to find their way toward the Liverpool goal. Benteke is such an odd player, and evidence that, alas, previous Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers really had no idea how to spot a player with reserves of skill. Benteke undid LFC twice last year when he played for soon-to-be-relegated Aston Villa. So Rodgers wanted to buy him, apparently oblivious how the player worked in Villa’s squad but not really offering something for whatever stew Rodgers was trying to cook up.

Football Soccer – Liverpool v Leicester City – Barclays Premier League – Anfield – 26/12/15 Christian Benteke scores the first goal for Liverpool Reuters / Phil Noble Livepic EDITORIAL USE ONLY.

That Benteke got the goal that gave LFC the three points will only delay the reckoning that he is a solid striker in a certain team with a certain style, none of which Liverpool seem to be wanting to emulate. It was a nicely taken goal, no doubt. But the beauty and opportunity were created by the Brazilian Roberto Firmino − another player who must have had a good match or two that Mr. Rodgers just happened to see. And what gave Benteke any chance were the two steps he took back from the Leicester defender marking him. But I fear he won’t have learned the lesson, so he will continue to line up in an offsides position and try to run at some long cross that may, or likely won’t, find his high head. The linesperson will flag him anyway.

And finally, the Reds missed two wide open goals on breakaways that saw them with numerical advantage over an ever-spirited Leicester. If you don’t have the clinical confidence to put opportunities like this away (at least fifty percent of the time!), you won’t move much up the table, no matter where you’re sitting on Boxing Day.

To be fair, others missed the goals, but in both cases (87th & 92nd minutes; In the latter instance Leicester keeper Kasper Schmeichel was at the other end of the park having tried to head in a last desperate corner kick!), Benteke made the wrong run − ‘run’ singular because both times he made the same mistake: he ran straight ahead and parallel with his teammate with the ball. Such runs are made by naive players who think they are faster than they are and better than they are. Moreover, such runs hurt the man on the ball as well: he is being closed down in front of goal by opponents because his shadow has not created any space for him, and while that space is not there, he also has no one to pass to.

Is Herr Klopp happy, or is Emre Can about to get a wallop for cheaply losing possession yet again?

And all that seems to summarize Liverpool FC at the half-way mark. Under Klopp, they can play a more spirited and lively game if in the mood, which is certainly fun to watch. But under Klopp their record is really no better than it was in the last months of Brendan Rodger’s tenure. Given the fact that Klopp is working entirely with players Rodgers brought in, it really isn’t a surprise. Nor is it a surprise that pundits smirked at Rodgers’s purchase of a lanky, lumbering striker named Christian Benteke, brought in to replace a lanky, lumbering, and lazy striker named Mario Balotelli, himself bought to replace an off-loaded lanky, lumbering, but lively striker named Andy Carroll − all while management keep talking about this beautiful Barcelona-esque passing game they are brewing. I’d rather have Andy back if these are our choices.

But it’s Boxin’ Day guv-nah! So a tip of me cap to your lordship, and thank ye for the scraps! See you in 7th spot in May, Scousers!

 

A Renewal of the Christmas Truce

First given at my school’s Holiday Festival in 2014, I had the opportunity to tweak it and offer it a second time to a community association a few days later. I wanted to post it here not with a claim of it being worthy of a “Best of…” end-of-year proclamation, but because it still seemed a timely call to peace after a year marked by terrible religious violence. The attack in Paris in November stands out for western, nominally Christian, nations for its horrors – but also for its uniqueness. Such numbers are killed for their faith weekly in Chad, Nigeria, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan… And rarely with a mention on CNN or Fox.
May you enjoy your holiday with family, friends, delicious foods, and with the embrace of love (both eros and agape) that we all hope for and Christmas represents. But (on the assumption what whoever is reading this is sitting comfortably in a professionally built home in a politically stable country) may I suggest that no present any of us will receive over the next forty-eight hours compares to the one given by a group of Islamic passengers on a bus bound for Mandera, Kenya on 22 December. When members of the terrorist gang “Al-Shebab” shot at the bus to stop, and began trying to separate the Christians on board for execution, Muslims on board shared head scarves with the Christians and refused to separate from them. One convinced the attackers that the bus’s escort was not far behind. Two people were murdered, but a massacre was averted and the Christians on board continued on to the town to celebrate Christmas. I pray I remember that bravery if I don’t get the drone I asked for.

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This season, many are marking the hundredth anniversary of the “Christmas Truce” that was observed between especially German and British soldiers for a couple of December days in 1914. Though they sat on opposite sides of muddy fields and across the too many dead, soldiers up and down the front allowed the spirit of the season to soften their many differences and to share a few hours of peace. In a far less dangerous way I stand before you as a conflicted speaker, and I do not want to mask that conflict from you. As a professional historian, I know that the holidays we celebrate at this time of year – Christmas, Hanukkah, and every 15 years or so, Ramadan – are not the holidays celebrated by those religious communities a hundred years ago, much less 500 or 1000 years ago.

Moreover, those holidays were formed in part by the clay of earlier and often Classical polytheistic festivals. And it is quite likely that festivals such as the Persian sacrifices to the sun-god Mitra or the Roman Saturnalia were themselves holdovers and elaborations of prehistoric ceremonies whose participants sensed some need to exhort the sun god to return with his longer days and warmer winds. What greater proof of the powers of the shamans and the benefits of the ritual slaughter of a bull do we need than the fact that the sun has indeed returned to lengthen the days and usher in the growing season each and every year over the past many thousands of years of human activity?

But rest assured that, despite the fact that I am a self-confessed “history geek”, you will not be forced to read a lecture on “Celebrations of the Winter Solstice Throughout History.” Nevertheless, I am aware of the human, all too human, story of how Christmas as we know it today was largely created in Victorian England and by the pen of Charles Dickens, I would like to take on the audacious task of reminding us all, and especially to remind myself, that through the sappy carols that play from mid-November, beyond the ever-growing string of holiday deals that land in our inboxes every hour, behind the flat-screen TVs that are fought over at the discount stores, it might indeed be the effort to understand, to reconcile, and to accept the holiday that remains the season’s greatest gift. For even though my mind tells me of the pre-Christian roots of the solstice festivus, my heart is ready to be swayed by the Christmas magic of flying reindeer, silver bells and angels in Bedford Falls.

How – if at all – to reconcile this conflict? I would propose that celebrating the so-called “holiday season” is itself an act of reconciliation and of healing − that even acknowledging it, whether you light a Menorah or an Advent wreath − even if you openly dismiss the claims of these holy days − we are all recipients of a gift and a truth that has somehow managed to elude skepticism for at least some four thousand years. Even the Christian celebration of Jesus’ birth is itself a product of centuries of reconciliations. The early Church paid no particular attention to Christmas until the latter 500s, when Catholic missionaries saw the need to re-establish Christianity among the backsliding Britons and Saxons. Missionaries looked on with envy as nominally-Christian Brits still decked their halls with boughs of holly and set alight their blazing “yule logs” during the shortest, darkest, coldest days of the year to enjoy drink, song, and fresh venison. Gifts, if given at all, were given on St. Nicholas’s Day, which is on the 5th of December. This day commemorated St. Nick’s generosity to early Christian children whose parents had been executed – martyred – by the Roman Empire. Even the holiday’s name comes from the rather vague and lackluster Latin term Christi messa: the mass of Christ. Christ’s mass, Christmass. Christmas.

The Nativity Scene did not come into existence for another 700 years when the young nobleman-turned-peasant, St. Francis of Assisi, invented the Nativity Creche by re-enacting the famous manger scene, complete with an ox and an ass (pah- rum, pum, pum, pum), for the unlettered Christian community of Grecio. The local bishop even grumbled about the paganish activities playing out on the steps of his cathedral. Yes, the first complaints about the location of a nativity scene came not from Fox News but from the highest Christian official in the town. Nevertheless, Francis clearly struck a nerve among the people who wanted to see and hear and feel the events re-enacted, rather than have their skeptical bishop all-but-ignore this most awesome of events: the wondrous birth of a child.

The Christmas Tree stands as another reconciliation of pagan Germanic traditions. Martin Luther wanted his Protestants to emphasize Christmas Day as the birth of Jesus to distinguish themselves from the Catholics and their relative disinterest in December 25th. He thus Christianized the pre-Christian decoration of evergreens as a symbol of Christ’s everlasting life. Moreover, Luther did not seem to mind the fact that his followers started to pair St. Nicholas, whose gift-giving moved from the fifth of the month, with the pagan demon Krampus, who would appear fiery-red with pointy horns to swack the bad children with birch branches. And – despite Luther’s own heated rhetoric against them – Catholic Christians have since become some of the most fervent supporters of the Christmas-Tree Industry.

For me, one of the most touching – and contemporarily significant – reconciliations of tradition involves the story of the Three Kings. Matthew’s Gospel in the Bible speaks famously of an unnamed number Magi “from the east” bearing three gifts for the Christ Child. Quite soon the number of gifts was passed onto the number of priests, whose origins would have been from Persia or India. Nevertheless, a tradition developed among artists of the medieval era showing the Magi not as three Persians or Indians, but as a Middle-Eastern Semite, an Asian, and an African, symbolic of the known three continents who would welcome the good news of Jesus’ birth. To me this artistic, ecumenical, and humane innovation is a wonderful example of a phenomenon that modern scientists and mathematicians still struggle with: that to understand the truth we sometimes need to outrun the facts.

Commercialism, for which Christmas today is often belittled by the cynical and even the ambivalent – including myself – is really a product of British capitalism in the nineteenth century. Modern, Hollywood, Coke-Cola infused, Christmas arose in the latter nineteenth century thanks to story tellers like Charles Dickens and Clement Clark Moore, whose poem is instantly recognized by the opening clause, “‘Twas the night before Christmas…” If cards have to be mailed and gifts have to be given, somebody has to make them, and somebody has to buy them.

But what if all that advertising and selling and buying – annoying as it is for many of us – is not our way of reconciling and developing Christmas for our world? In our oh-so-hip yet oh-so-divided time, we are finding ways to make universal one of the most particular and divisive religious stories: celebration of a birth of a Man-God by a so-called Virgin in a barn under a single bright star in the heavens. We are drawn into it, whether we live in West Africa or Japan (where Christmas is becoming a notable, if still secondary, holiday), whether we are regular church goers or adamant atheists, because we are still human, all too human. And we love to exchange gifts. Some are home-made and other bought from the bargain bin at the supermarket. Some are found in a bit of a rush, others after careful consideration of “just the right thing.” But what we truly enjoy is the moment of interaction, the bond of friendship, even love, when we hand that something to another person or the other hands something of themselves to us.

The exchange of gifts bonds us in relationships that might last long enough to enjoy drinks together at a faculty- or office- party, or might initiate courtship rituals that lead to years of commitment, or could renew the spark of first love long after the children are finally asleep − the sort of gift we truly desire when we outgrow the Legos and the wireless Beats Headphones. Such gifts also might embarrass teen-aged sons who get but a glimpse of just how greatly and totally they are loved, even though one doesn’t support Liverpool with the same enthusiasm he shows the Florida Marlins, and the other somehow managed – despite my best efforts – to become a fan of country music.

Commercialism might, in fact, be helping to bring the ambivalent, the agnostic, the indifferent, the conflicted… toward a festival of light in the darkness, toward a story of a birth unexplained that will change the world − whether we like it or not − toward an undeserved gift. We often are told that Christmas is about giving, but I wonder if – in the end – Christmas is really about receiving, and receiving more than we know we deserve. Can we accept the truth behind a story whose facts seem so outlandish, yet which has has inspired and irritated millions over the last couple of millennia? Can we embrace the various traditions of paganism and the many cultural variations of music and ritual and visitations by the Christmas Krampus as part of our own Christmas story? Can we grow to appreciate the countless small sacrifices of time and energy that our coaches and teachers and especially our parents have made, are making, and will continue to make to give us opportunity to put our own little ding in the universe? Can we receive the commercialization as a fact of our historical moment, but neither the foundation nor the fulfillment of this ancient celebration of life renewed and bonds restored? Can we remember that though Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree appeared short & scrawny at first sight, it was alive and therefore more full of hope and more beautiful than all the aluminum trees in the lot?

However you and yours will accept and celebrate the winter holidays, I can only humbly propose a Christmas truce with my own struggles with the final words of one of our best-known post-Biblical stories about the season: “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

The George W. Bush Library and Museum (& Gift Shop)

With all due respect to Richard Connell, history is, in fact, the most dangerous game. History is dangerous because it requires constant vigilance, shepherding, judgement, exploration, and reconsideration. Moreover, history is the most poisonous when presented at its most anodyne, which is why so few challenge China’s presence in Tibet any more or do more than make funny marionette films about the Kim dynasty in North Korea. What’s to reconsider?

Because history is so dangerous, those in power attempt to dilute its vigor by diluting its sources, artifacts, and arguments. What Stalin understood well and Orwell explored better is that simply removing people from pictures or stories from newspapers is enough for them to be forgotten. No reason to argue against Leon Trotsky or Winston Smith. Just don’t mention them. Soon enough no one will remember they were around to mention.

For those not in power, the loudest story often wins the day (vis., The Donald). Repetition means truth (vis. Goebbels). It wouldn’t be true if it weren’t entertaining (vis., Spielberg). As Thucydides warned us some 2400 years ago, we must challenge our sources and our witnesses to history. If not, we fall prey to accepting the first story we find as somewhere between good enough and gospel, and both positions are dangerous:

So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, and they accept readily the first story that comes to hand. On the whole, however, the conclusions I have drawn from the sources quoted may, I believe, safely be relied on. Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft [i.e., Homer], or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth’s expense. The subjects they treat are well out of the reach of evidence, and time has robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I

Take me to your leader…

The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum is far more the latter than the former. The books and documents are quietly and safely tucked away at the far end the east wing. One has to walk by the main welcome space and ticket kiosk, across a sparkling sample of shiny gifts given from various leaders to President Bush (though for what occasions is not mentioned. Oh, what would Ben Franklin say?), beyond the toilets and – harder still – past the Gift Shop to get to that pesky readin’.

That the library is situated on the campus of Southern Methodist University raises its own concerns (Full disclosure, I am a graduate of SMU, Class of 1989). Presidents usually give their libraries to their almae matres, which in this Bush’s case – well, in every Bush’s case – is Yale. Harvard could have had his library as well, given his MBA earned in 1975. But the girl who got him, Laura Welch, graduated from SMU with a BA in Education in 1968. When Yale and Harvard both, rather loudly, declined the privilege of hosting his monument, the Bush Library became something of a, well, political football. Baylor and the University of Dallas put their names forward as potential receivers, for reasons even more tenuous than SMU’s. Despite the establishment conservatism of the campus, a notable minority of the SMU community hoped to keep the center off the campus. But when does a private academic institution turn away deep money?

The building is austere, geometric, rather cold − odd traits given what even his political adversaries described as an affable, clubby, good-ole-boy. The interior is colder still. One enters to the right, along the Freedom Registry. The registry itself is to one’s right upon entering, and the table, the only organic object in the wing, invites the visitor by suggesting she or he can sign her or his name into the record book. Be a part of freedom! But no, if you’re visiting during regular hours with the hoi poloi , you clearly don’t have the  capital gains income to be worthy of the Freedom Registry. Move along, please.

For a mere $14, I got to play “Decision Points” with The W. I could reconsider the invasion of Iraq or its subsequent surge, Hurricane Katrina, dealing with the Aids Crisis, (Oh, that reminds me: W did do something for the betterment of humanity.) or the financial meltdown after the housing bubble. (My bad: the bubble is not mentioned. The crisis arose ex nihilo, though AIG in London seemed to have something to do with it.) If one chooses any of the options not taken by the W, he magically appears to point out why our decision was wrong. Tap the one he took, (For example, send a further 30,000 troops in 2007 for a war we were told we won back in 2003.) and he’ll give you a gold star for spreading democracy. What I smelled seemed more like spreading manure. Nevertheless, as the park reminds us time and again, through fetishized remains of that horrible day, he took up the call after 9/11 to defend our nation, and the World Trade Center has not been attacked since. ‘Cause look, that’s what deciders do – heh – they decided and – heh – act to bring peace to all the peoples of the earth.

Just as damning to his tenure is how little is said of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or or Tom Wolfowitz. By which I mean, “Nothing is said of…” Historians should always be circumspect about making arguments from silence. Political animals, however, should scream out against it. Silence is what power wants more than anything: the silence of those expected to accept what they are told.

To view it all (To be fair, I was pressed for time so I did not give every bay of the glory of the Bush Dynasty the attention it demanded.), one must cross back and forth across the main atrium. The upper tier serves as a backdrop to a striking video that is mesmerizing in its vistas of Texas scenery and people doing all kinds of peoply things. The high-def multi-media presentation seemed starkly and sadly and unintentionally apropos: Beautiful and engaging, yet entirely irrelevant to Bush or his presidency. I felt like we were to stare into the light so that the Neutralyzer could do its work to erase memories of the last couple of hours – or of the decade after 2000.

A couple of other notable presences can be found at the mausoleum of the W presidency: Laura Bush and George H.W. Bush. Their names and voices and likenesses and recommended books are sprinkled throughout.  No doubt that W loves both dearly, thoroughly, and honestly. Why would he not want them as part of his self-preservation? Or were they crutches meant to carry the legacy? Perhaps they the ballast to a sinking ship?

The history peddled here is easily debunked, laughably dismissed. The income inequality that began to slide precipitously in 2006 is now so bad even Republicans have to pay lip-service to doing something about it. The slam-dunk democracy that was to be dropped upon Iraq has killed nameless tens of thousands of innocents since 2003, and we are now having to cut deals with the Taliban in Afghanistan anyway (Obama’s “good war”) to take the pressure off there while we claim to degrade ISIS/ISIL in Homs. Or was it Brussels?

Play ball with me!

And yet, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that what infuriated me most during this entire moronic exercise of gilding the turd was the Gift Shop, and in particular a limited-edition baseball jersey with the number “43” on it. (W was the 43rd President, you see.) George W owns the Texas Rangers, and he is certainly a baseball fan. So a pseudo-jersey in his center’s gift shop makes sense. If it were at all associated with Texas or with his Rangers.

This limited-edition bit of detritus was designed by Ebbets Field Flannels, who deserve no particular approbation for completing an order. The jersey harkens a ‘vintage’ or ‘classic’ look, and according to the store website, “This baseball jersey is made out of 1950s-era wool blend baseball cloth. It features sewn-on felt lettering and detail. The George W. Bush Presidential Center logo is embroidered on the sleeve.” It sells for $243.

Ebbets Field is where the Brooklyn Dodgers played until they picked up stakes for Los Angeles. The Dodgers broke the color barrier (aka racial segregation) in 1947. Mr. Robinson wore 42. So W wants to associate himself with the Dodgers? With doing something heroic like breaking the color barrier in a civil society that already had touted for 160-odd years that all (white, college-legacy) men are created equal? Why doesn’t he fess up to the baseball team he owns, and could influence? Why does he want to sell instead a jersey that implies everything about an honorable man who put up with some of the vilest racist epithets and threats just this side a lynching, just to play a game? The only comparison W could dare make is that not a few pitchers threw baseballs at Mr. Robinson’s head – to kill him – and a journalist once threw a couple of shoes at W’s head. George W’s subtle historical association with Jackie Robinson is shameful. It is also dangerous because I fear the people who have bought the jerseys saw no cognitive dissonance between what the jersey is, and what it gently claims to be. History at its most damning precisely because it is presented in so pretty a package.

In an effort to calm my percolating anger, I stepped back to find the all-important café. As I entered the outer courtyard,  I stumbled into Bush’s library.