The Bosque Boys

On Oct. 8, 1956, Larsen was as close to perfect as any pitcher can be and he chose the most important series in baseball to have his shining moment. Story.

The occasion was Game 5 of the World Series, Yankees versus Dodgers. A perfect game.

We watch sports for many reasons: the excitement that takes us out of our narrow concerns and for a moment or an hour induces self-forgetfulness, the camaraderie with other fans that makes us part of a larger fellowship even if only for an afternoon, the satisfaction of the same deep feelings that caused pagans to mark the progression of seasons with ceremonies: fall football, spring baseball.

But we also watch sports to see occasional human perfection--Montana floating a pass through the narrow window that exists only for a moment between the cornerback and safety, and into the hands of the receiver who will cross that window for a fraction of a second, all as Joe evades a rushing defensive end with mayhem on his mind; Jeeter leaping to snare a scorching liner then twisting his body to throw a bullet to first, catching the runner off the bag, all before Derek's feet hit the ground again; Stockton surrounded by giants down in the paint, hitting Malone streaking in from the corner even though John's glimpse of Karl was a fleeting sight of jersey briefly glimpsed between defenders.

Those we watch on summer evenings and fall afternoons and winter nights give us occasional glimpses of human perfection, gods at play. Major league baseball has burned me more than once, but, I'll be in front of the television for all the games I can, watching the World Series. Maybe I'll see a god at play.

One of my favorite political commentators is David Brooks. He is a thoughtful, incisive, and well-modulated conservative beholden, seemingly, to no one.

I received his latest article via gmail from stalwart Bosque Boys reader and contributor, Tocqueville, with a succinct two-word introduction and endorsement: "he's right."

I agree with Tocqueville. This essay is a significant admission from Brooks, who (like me) has supported and exhorted the Bush attempt to remake the Middle East.

For those reasons, and in recognition of the New York Times and their recent decision to suspend their annoying and ill-considered pay-per-view regime, I am featuring this latest offering from Brooks via the NYT:

The Republican Collapse

"Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.

"When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders.

"Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while the temperamental conservatism of Burke has been abandoned."

Brooks goes on to sketch out the fissures in the modern American conservative movement.

I encourage you to read the full article here (free subscription still required).

And this conclusion from Brooks:

"American conservatism will never be just dispositional conservatism. America is a creedal nation. But American conservatism is only successful when it’s in tension — when the ambition of its creeds is restrained by the caution of its Burkean roots."

I have assumed for some time, based on anecdotal evidence, that what passes for gay culture in the MSM is a sanitized version. For a very unsanitized version Little Green Footballs links to a photoessay from the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. WARNING: the photographs are not safe for work and should not be viewed by anyone under 18.

It must be nice to have enablers like the MSM to present more acceptable images to the public, while the reality remains under-reported.

I don't think I'll leave my heart in San Francisco.

I find it significant that Gay Patriot, who is as his blog title suggests, has had no success in getting gay groups to protest the fact that children are allowed at the fair.

Rex Humbard, the first televangelist, is dead at 88. At his height he reached 8 million viewers weekly. Comparing him to the folks on television today, described by Will Campbell as "electronic soul-molesters," makes me long for more like Rex. RIP Story here.

I haven't blogged lately, so I missed posting on the actually birthday of George Gershwin.

September 26, the birthday of Jacob Gershovitz, better known as George Gershwin.

America has been blessed with great popular music. For my money it's hard to beat the Great American Songbook. Contributing as much as anyone was George Gershwin. Think Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, George and Ira's collaboration on Porgy and Bess. Here is the official website for George and Ira. You can listen to some of the music the brothers created.

The Gershwins demonstrated that "popular" and "high quality" can go together.

We do well to commemorate the heroism of the Little Rock Nine. No group of Americans stands any more deserving of our national commendations and gratitude.

However, too many stories this week, and even some statements emanating from the heroes themselves, identified remnants of segregation and re-segregation as the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Revolution. This far too convenient, conventional, and timid analysis misses the greater tragedy and current crisis:

Too many African American students are far less-prepared to succeed in school and society in 2007 than the Little Rock Nine were in 1957.

Some history:

For fifty years, sometimes ignorantly and sometimes purposefully, we have mischaracterized the goal of school desegregation. In truth, desegregation was never designed primarily to improve education. Rather, court-ordered integration of public schools was always a much larger social experiment designed to break down racial barriers within American culture.

In reply to the plaintiff's evidence presented to the Supreme Court in the storied Brown v. Board case, Justice Robert Jackson privately dismissed the argument as "sociology rather than law."

An aside: I might have added "bad sociology" to boot--but that may strike too many as redundant (something syntactically akin to "cold Vichyssoise").

Not too far removed from his role as the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, Justice Jackson understood that second-class citizenship in America based on race was no longer tenable in the post-World War II world. Moreover, Jackson understood that the moment for amelioration had arrived, and the Court was the proper venue for initiating drastic change. The famed jurist set his considerable talents toward cajoling his cohorts into making good law out of a necessary and worthy social goal. And, while reasonable people continue to disagree, for the most part, the Court accomplished its mission in a transcendently sublime way.

Brown inaugurated a social revolution. Thanks to the Supreme Court, Jim Crow fell away. Thanks to Brown, America came to grips with 350 years of oppression, discrimination, and mistreatment. Thanks to the "Washington Nine," the United States redeemed its troubled racial soul.

The Bad News

On the other hand, the pretext for Brown, as a remedy for inferior education for African American citizens, was misleading then and has played out over time as a much less happily successful story. In truth, the state of American education today lies in critical condition. More to the point, the state of education for African American students seems perilously unacceptable.

One of the most under-reported elements of the Little Rock Nine story has always been the scholastic aptitude of the young people tapped to integrate Central High. As Ernest Green asserted recently, the black kids were superior intellectually to vast majority of their 2,000-plus white schoolmates in 1957.

The black students were extremely well prepared to compete at Little Rock's model white high school. The Nine were already poised to excel in post-secondary education long before they attended the big school. They had attended black schools in the Little Rock area where they learned with inferior materials (hand-me-down books) and studied under teachers paid less than their white counterparts. Nevertheless, the Nine emerged from the experience academically disciplined and well-educated.

Why?

They had the support of talented black educators and tight-knit families and communities.

Watching the archival footage of the Nine--and comparing them to the students of today—I am in awe of their courage, demeanor, and sophistication.

What happened?

We lost sight of what makes for good education. Somewhere between then and now, we decided learning revolved around technology, impressive buildings, newer editions of school books, and the shibboleth of self esteem.

This crisis threatens all American students, but African Americans are especially at risk.

The challenge of 2007 is to somehow move beyond political correctness, therapeutic education, and our understandable awkwardness and guilt concerning historic racial injustices. During the first half of the twentieth century, talented and dedicated black educators prepared black students to accomplish great things. Selfless and optimistic black families supported their children and held them to high standards of conduct and achievement.

We won a great battle during the Civil Rights years. However, if we don't find some way to save families and restore discipline in schools, we are going to lose the war for American survival.

The VA now is recognizing the benefits of traditional ceremonies for returning Indian soldiers. Story here from The Christian Science Monitor.

Native Americans enlist in the military at a rate higher than the general population.

The Death Notice from Downbeat magazine of Joe Zawinul:

Keyboardist Joe Zawinul, who played with Miles Davis and won wide acclaim for his work with Weather Report, died Tuesday morning in an Austrian hospital, the Associated Press has reported. He was 75. Zawinul died from a form of skin cancer called Merkel cell carcinoma, according to a statement from his record label, Heads Up. He had been hospitalized in his native Austria since last month. Zawinul was on the cutting edge of the electric jazz movement, playing with Davis on pioneering albums Bitches Brew and Live-Evil, among others. Along with Wayne Shorter, he founded Weather Report in 1971. The group became the definitive jazz fusion outfit, reaching extraordinary heights in popularity and charting new territory in jazz with the use of synthesizers and electric piano. Zawinul's other accolades include a Grammy Award for his composition "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," which he played with Cannonball Adderly during the 1960s, and praise for such later groups as the Zawinul Syndicate, his post-Weather Report combo. This past spring, Zawinul toured Europe to mark the 20th anniversary of the Zawinul Syndicate. He sought medical attention when the tour ended. Zawinul's wife, Maxine, had died earlier this year. He is survived by his sons Eric, Ivan and Anthony.

To mark the passing of keyboardist, composer Joe Zawinul, this video performance from YouTube. Joe is with his band Weather Report and the chart is Birdland which he wrote. See also the other links on the page to performances. I especially recommend the joint Weather Report, Manhattan Transfer version of Birdland.

Powerline has this memorial.

Here is an early Weather Report performance from 1971.

Here is the Joe Zawinul Syndicate performing in Paris, 2002. Joe had been into world music for30 years by this time.

Biography.

Joe Zawinul belongs in a category unto himself — a European from the heartland of the classical music tradition (Vienna) who learned to swing as freely as any American jazzer, and whose appetite for growth and change remains insatiable. Zawinul's curiosity and openness to all kinds of sounds made him one of the driving forces behind the electronic jazz-rock revolution of the late '60s and '70s — and later, he would be almost alone in exploring fusions between jazz-rock and ethnic music from all over the globe.

Decades ago, Baptists sent their children to public schools without giving thought to alternatives. Roman Catholics, Missouri-Synod Lutherans, and Christian Reformed folks, established parochial schools, some Episcopalians sent their children to private schools--sometimes with a Saint's name--, but Baptists and others supported public schools.

But things changed. In the nineteenth century American public schools supported a generic Protestantism. This situation continued, perhaps in a milder form, through the early 1960s. When I was in first grade in my public school we began each day with prayer and a Bible verse over the intercom. Then two things happened. First, overt religious expression by the school itself was banned by the Supreme Court. Second, as American culture became more secular and more diverse, an increasing number of teachers, administrators, and parents, pushed an agenda that challenged traditional Christianity. As a result, conservative Christians began feeling more and more uncomfortable sending their children to public schools. Combine this discomfort with increasing perceptions that public schools are not doing a good job educating students, and evidence that student culture is becoming ever more sexualized and prone to violence, it is not surprising that more parents have become willing to spend the money for parochial education.

This story (link from The Layman) covers the phenomenon of Southern Baptists establishing parochial schools. This practice began during desegregation in the South with the establishment of "private academies," but now is accelerating fueled by religious concerns.

More below.

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MSN lists and describes the 10 best donut shops in the U.S. I love America.