The Reds in the Bleachers
Bill Mardo, sportswriter for the Daily Worker newspaper, died last week. His NY Times obituary notes his column’s crusading role in pressing for the racial integration of Major League Baseball in the 1940’s.
“In the years before the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson as the first black player in modern organized baseball, Mr. Mardo was a leading voice in a campaign by The Daily Worker against racism in the game, a battle it had begun in 1936 when Lester Rodney became its first sports editor.
…
The Daily Worker asked fans to write to the New York City baseball teams urging them to sign Negro league players at a time when the major leagues had lost much of their talent to military service. A milestone in baseball history and the civil rights movement arrived in October 1945 when Robinson signed a contract with the Dodgers’ organization, having reached an agreement with Branch Rickey, the Dodger general manager, two months earlier.”
There’s a book – maybe a movie – in this story. It wasn’t just the constant agitation in the Daily Worker. There were also regular protests by Yickels and Yipsels in the bleachers and the checkmate: a groundbreaking NYS anti-discrimination law that invited lawsuits that would have dragged Branch Rickey into the 20th century if he hadn’t decided to preempt it all and jump out ahead of history as the Hero we all now agree to pretend he was.
(Personal note: my old comrade Si Gerson was an editor at the Daily Worker, if not the Editor-in-Chief, during some of the campaign for racial integration in professional baseball; it is he who first admonished me to dig deeper and learn the real history of what it took to help Jackie Robinson break the color barrier.)
Something Pointless About Generation X
It’s been a while since we Gen X’ers had a good, long stare at our collective navels. The occasion of the 20th anniversary of our invention by the media is begging for more of this “are we becoming them?” kind of nonsense. Count me in!
Nirvana marks this auspicious anniversary with a reissue of “Nevermind” so bloated with extras and marked up in price that even Mick Jagger would blush. Pearl Jam team with Cameron Crowe for a career-retrospective documentary that makes a compelling argument that Eddie Vedder did the right thing by not blowing his brains out too. And R.E.M. trumps everybody by quietly, gracefully calling it a career, provoking pangs of nostalgia in, well, just about everyone I know.
Here and there, you see the media-bait question, “Wait, aren’t all these Generation X people waxing nostalgic about the rock-n-roll of their youth just doing what they angrily accused Baby Boomers of doing twenty years ago?” Well, yes and no. Look, we’re all entitled to mourn our youth. And this was a hell of a week to remind anyone who was a teenager twenty years ago that we’re not young anymore; that our heroes are dead or dying and that nothing – no song, no record, no band – will ever speak to us like the music of our youth. Not because Nirvana, Pearl Jam and R.E.M. were better than Elvis, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, or better than…whatever the hell the kids are listening to today. But because music that speaks to you when you are 15, does so on a much deeper level than when you are older. Every crush, every kiss, every three week romance just kills you and the music that helps you understand it all tattoos your brain permanently. Everybody Hurts, if you will. And that is the feeling that we mourn this month. And we are entitled to this period of mourning and to the sense of outrage we will feel when our beloved songs inevitably get sold out and are used to sell cars, hamburgers and life insurance.
One key difference between this round of Gen X nostalgia and all the previous decades of Boomer nostalgia: twenty years ago, we still had a mass media. This meant we all had to share Rolling Stone magazine with its endless “greatest ever” lists that always placed the Beatles at the top; we all COULD NOT AVOID that Beatles documentary that took over ABC for a year and OMG the Elvis stamp! Fat Elvis! Skinny Elvis! And that is largely what makes “Nevermind” so noteworthy. They pierced through. They made it to the Top of the Pops and dozens of great bands got to follow them, for, like, two years. Now, who cares what is the best selling record in the country? We download music and share it on blogs. Don’t like Rolling Stone? You can actually read the NME online and immerse yourself in a weird little world where Oasis’ recent break-up is, like, the biggest news ever. Don’t like that? Migrate over to Pitchfork, where the LCD Soundsystem break-up is the biggest thing ever. My friends and I aren’t clogging up the TV airwaves with our nostalgia; only our own Facebook newsfeeds. Which is important, because we are not the world. Hell, we’re not even the generation. Half our generation could give two shits about R.E.M. They were too busy listening to hip hop back in the day.
My Greatest Hits
Maybe it’s because I was recently badly quoted in the press that I’m revisiting some of my dark sarcastic hits from the past. I mean, I could claim that I was misquoted, but, no, I said it. I could quibble with context and editing, but anyone who deals with the press seriously knows the importance of staying on message. I could complain that I’m out of practice – and I may be – and that’s why I was too flip. But, flip used to be the point, back in my bad old Socialist Party days. Throwing out a little red meat is important if you’re the Socialist Party and nobody will pay attention to you otherwise. Things are different now. But I am, perhaps, too clever – and certainly too sarcastic – for my own good.
Case in point, about which I am currently cackling to myself: my too-brief stint as Editor-in-Chief of “The Socialist” magazine. I’ve written in the past about how I sparked a controversy in our tiny world with the cover of my second issue. But I was, nevertheless, given a third issue with which to prove myself and permanently secure the job. But I couldn’t help being slightly flip with the cover again:
This was – I thought – a reverent, teasing reference to Cesar Chavez, the great leader of the United Farm Workers whose spirit is reflected in the current student activist support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers boycotts of tomatoes.
Well, someone took offense. And someone else dogpiled on me. And I went to a dark place and quit. Here’s my final version of that last cover:
Pity it never got published.