Month: October 2017

Decision time in Bangor and Baseball

Hank Garfield

Let’s see… do I write about the Bangor City Council election, or the World Series? Which is more important?

Our local newspaper, the Bangor Daily News, seems impartial on that score. They didn’t send a reporter to the recent candidate forum, and I doubt they’re sending anyone to Los Angeles for Tuesday night’s Series opener, either.

I was gratified that the Community Connector bus system got a lot of love from the potential city councilors. Five of the six candidates for three seats showed up, and all expressed varying levels of support for extended bus hours.

I’m also happy that the Houston Astros eliminated the Yankees, even though a Dodgers-Yankees World Series would have had interesting historical implications.

If you don’t like baseball, I’m sorry for you. Stanley Cups and Super Bowls and whatever the other championships are called come and go, and I’m challenged to remember many of them, but I can mark my life by the World Series.

The last time the Yankees and Dodgers met in the Fall Classic, in 1981, the Yankees took a two game lead before Fernando Valenzuela, that year’s rookie of the year and Cy Young Award winner, gutted out a 5-4 complete-game victory that propelled the Dodgers to three more wins and the championship. The only other time the Astros made the Series, they were in the National League, and were swept by the White Sox in 2005.

As a little kid, the Dodgers were my first team, even before we moved to Maine during the 1967 Red Sox Impossible Dream season. The Dodgers had no hitting to speak of, but they had Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, and they won a lot of 1-0 games.

“Someone would beat out a hit, be sacrificed to second, steal third and score on the overthrow,” Koufax recalled in his autobiography (as told to Ed Linn). “Then we would gather the wagons into a circle around the dugout.”

This strategy came back to bite them in the 1966 World Series, when they scored two runs in the first three innings of the first game against the Orioles, and no runs at all for the next three games. The last two games were 1-0 losses decided by solo homers.
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Within the next year, we’d moved to Maine, Sandy Koufax had retired, and the Red Sox had captured hearts all over New England, including mine. I didn’t pay attention to the Dodgers again until I lived in California, during the Tommy Lasorda years. I took my kids to their first big-league game at Dodger Stadium, traveling by train from Oceanside and then by bus to the ballpark, to see Valenzuela pitch on a Sunday afternoon.

It should come as no surprise that someone who remembers watching Sandy Koufax’s last game on a black and white TV is older, in some cases substantially so, than all of this year’s Bangor City Council candidates. Steve Harrison, who was not present at the October 18 forum, is the oldest of the group at 50.

The other five candidates expressed support for extended bus hours. Laura Supica has made later bus service a centerpiece of her campaign. Incumbent Ben Sprague, running for a third term, said, “It’s gonna happen.”

Whatever the outcome, this will surely be one of the youngest councils in years. I’m encouraged that a new generation of local politicians is embracing the idea of public transportation, walkable communities, and alternatives to the automobile.

Sprague seemed like the elder statesman of the bunch last week. I’m inclined to vote for him because of his intelligence and seriousness. Supica will likely get my second vote for supporting the bus system so ardently.

As for the others, I haven’t decided on my third vote. But I’m leery of anyone who can turn a question about sidewalks into a call for “social revolution.” Good grief.

I’m agnostic in this World Series, too, despite my loose history with the Dodgers. I revere Dave Roberts, their manager, for The Stolen Base Heard ‘Round the World in 2004. But he lost me as a manager when he pulled a rookie pitcher from a no-hitter in his first game. Did Dick Williams do that to Billy Rohr in 1967? Unthinkable.

The Astros, in baseball time, are a young franchise. They’re younger than I am. They have pitchers who can throw complete games. They have Jose Altuve, who is the shortest and may be the best player in the American League. It’s a team full of new faces. Perhaps this is their time.

 

He said his name was Columbus, and I just said ‘Good luck.’

Hank Garfield

In 2004, I published a historical novel titled The Lost Voyage of John Cabot. The book is a fictionalized account of Cabot’s return trip in 1498 to the “newfound land” in the North Atlantic he had discovered the previous summer, five years after Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas.

Columbus is a character in the story. He and Cabot were not only contemporaries, but also compatriots. Both hailed from the Italian seaport of Genoa. It is likely that they knew each other and were rivals. In my novel, Cabot confronts Columbus upon the latter’s return to Europe in 1493 and challenges his claim of finding a western route to Asia.

My timing as an author has seldom been good. I missed the 500th anniversary of the Cabot voyages, and by the time the book came out seven years later, the backlash against the European explorers (and exploiters) of North America was in full swing. Columbus Day has now become Indigenous Peoples Day, and we are encouraged to disparage the European explorers as enablers of genocide.

History is rarely that simple.

In the course of researching the book, I learned the European colonization of the Americas did not begin with one man or one voyage. The Greenland settlements of the tenth and eleventh centuries endured into the 1400s. Fishermen from Britain and northern Europe knew about the rich sea bottom off Newfoundland, and almost surely of the island itself, long before Cabot’s voyages. There’s evidence the Chinese beat Columbus to the Americas by several decades, but the discoveries were buried in the rubble of political upheaval.

Columbus was a pretty good con man, though. The Greek-Egyptian mathematician Eratosthenes came up with a more accurate estimate of the Earth’s circumference than the one Columbus sold to Ferdinand and Isabella nearly 1500 years later. And Columbus was a hard-bitten Christian at time when Christian Europe felt threatened by the incursion of Islam and the subsequent loss of overland trade routes.

Thus his dealings with the indigenous peoples of the Americas were informed by a similar kind of paranoia that runs through much of white America today. Through the lens of modern sensibilities, the actions of Columbus and his ilk indeed appear monstrous.

While considering the generic india viagra pros and cons of this decision, many people confirm that an internet or web course is true for them. It is not uncommon for users of the medication to experience an increase in thirst or light headedness after brand cialis price making any sudden movements. Consuming foods loaded with saturated fats like red meats and whole fat dairy cheap online levitra products increases your danger of developing prostatic adenocarcinoma. If your reproductive organ responds to buy viagra no prescription the blood flow and the messaging system of the body. But let us remember for a moment that tyranny has been the history of most of humankind. Advances in the way we treat one another have never moved as fast as advances in technology. This is why we have an overabundance of nuclear weapons and a shortage of housing and health care facilities for the poor. Most of history has been laced with bigotry and bloodshed. Christopher Columbus may have been, by every modern judgment, an unsavory character, but he was hardly an outlier.

It is intellectually dishonest to lift a historical figure out of his own time and judge him by today’s moral standards. Hitler was a monster in his own time. Columbus is a monster in ours. There’s a world of difference.

Thomas Jefferson likely forced himself on one or more of his female slaves. Today that would make him a sexual predator. But he also wrote: “…governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” words that changed the world. Are we to vilify him in 2017 for his use of the word “men,” when he lived in a society where sexism was unquestioned? Do we disregard the brilliance of the Declaration of Independence because of the personal failings of the man who wrote it?

Don’t misunderstand me. I have no use for a celebration of the Columbus depicted in Samuel Eliot Morison’s fawning 1942 biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea. I think the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins should change their mascots. I don’t like public displays of the Confederate flag in its ugly, modern context.

But the European colonization of the Americas cannot be undone. Anywhere you go in the Western Hemisphere, you will hear people speaking French, English, Spanish or Portuguese: the languages of the colonizers. Similarly, you don’t have to be a Christian to be living in Anno Domini 2017. The approximate date of the birth of Jesus is a common frame of reference for the world we live in now.

When we try to sanitize history, we put ourselves in the company of the Taliban and the Soviet communists, blowing up statues and airbrushing photographs. It’s easy for me, a white male American, to downplay historical grievances. But that is not my intent here. Our imperfect past should inform us in our daily struggle toward a more kind and just future for all.