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Hey, as TomDispatch regular and former New York Times sportswriter and columnist Robert Lipsyte, author of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, reminds us today, we're in a different world. And that's not just true in Washington with Donald Trump in the White House (again), but everywhere, it seems, and in relation to just about everything, even baseball, where "our" president can't imagine anyone, whatever he did, including himself, not in a future Hall of Fame. (Of course, a Hall of Shame would be so much more appropriate!) He's not only come out in favor of pardoning former Cincinnati Red star Pete Rose, something Lipsyte focuses on today, but also Shoeless Joe Jackson, that great hitter of the infamous Chicago White Sox team that threw the 1919 World Series.
Strange, though, that he hasn't considered pardoning that Trumpian figure of an earlier age, Shoeless -- oops, sorry, "tailgunner" -- Joe McCarthy, the infamous Wisconsin senator, who, in the early 1950s, denounced public figures of every sort as communists. Or what about Shoeless Dick Nixon, whose political dirty tricks as president led to the Watergate scandal? Why hasn't he focused on putting them both in the Political Hall of (SH-F)ame? Or since he's known to be a forward-thinking guy, how about getting ahead of the pack and of history itself and pardoning Shoeless Donald Trump? What better thing to do than pardon himself in advance for anything he does -- and he's already done plenty, including if that "big, beautiful bill" goes through the Senate anytime soon, overseeing, as Katrina vanden Heuvel recently reported at the Guardian, "the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history."
And with all of that in mind, let me turn you over to Lipsyte to consider what Pete Rose and Donald Trump have in common. Tom
Ending Manhood in the Hall of Shame
Pete Rose and Donald Trump Are the Dregs of American Maleness
Thanks to our current misbegotten model of manhood, we are once again arguing about this moral question: Should former Cincinnati Reds player and manager Pete Rose be inducted into Baseball's Hall of Fame?
In a sane time, the proper answer would be: Are you kidding?
Maybe many of you reading this couldn't care less.
Unfortunately, you probably should care because the real question in these chaotic times of ours is: What does the Hall of Fame stand for? In the same way, you might now wonder what America stands for and whether, in our moment, Pete Rose -- bully, liar, cheat, sexual predator, and fan-favorite superstar athlete -- has, in fact, become a sports surrogate for Donald Trump.
Back in my sports-writing days for the New York Times, I must admit that I liked Rose for some of the same reasons I liked that other shady character I covered -- Trump. They were accessible, friendly, and could always be depended on for a quick, good-enough story.
That kind of careerism should, of course, be considered shameful in the journalism trade and might, in its own strange way, also be considered one of the reasons we find ourselves in our current crisis.
Though one of them is dead and the other is still all too with us, Rose and Trump are indeed of the same era, so who can be sure which of them gave permission for the deformed growth of the other, or whether both of them are parallel products of the same toxic all-American climate that has changed far too little over all these years? Of course, they both grew up in a time when, for men, bad behavior, especially toward women, was often excused, if not encouraged, as part of a winner's attitude.
And here we are in the second presidency of Donald J. Trump facing revived interest in forgiving Rose, now falsely glorified as yet another White man trapped in a fantasy conspiracy against White men. Under the circumstances, who could be surprised that Trump has promised to pardon Rose?
Rose was infamously guilty of compromising the integrity of baseball by betting on games he managed. Recently, after meeting with Trump, Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred erased a previous commissioner's 1989 ruling that banned Rose from baseball for life. And like all too many other American institutions, baseball has good reason to listen to Trump. For one thing, its clubs can't afford to lose access to international talent any more than Harvard University and other institutions of higher education can. At the moment, in fact, two of its most exciting performers are the Los Angeles Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani of Japan and the New York Mets' Juan Soto of the Dominican Republic. And there are plenty of other foreign nationals in the pipeline. Another vulnerability for baseball would be possible government restrictions on sports gambling.
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