By Steve Sailer
06/19/2011
The New York Times' long-running campaign of hate directed at the voters of Arizona continued Friday with From Jackie Robinson to Dead Silence [June 17, 2011]. The Times' new sports columnist Jonathan Mahler demands that Major League Baseball yank its July 12th All-Star Game out of Phoenix in order to demonize Arizonans for daring to pass SB 1070.
When read carefully, Mahler’s essay offer amusing insights into the role Hispanics are being drafted to play in the ethnic obsessions of America’s media elites. You could call it: Fantasy Baseball for Liberals.
The photo illustrating this NYT article is wonderfully pathetic:
"Enrique Morones, the former director of Hispanic marketing for the San Diego Padres, has threatened to protest at the All-Star Game on July 12 in Phoenix."
Stop the presses! An ethnoactivist, who makes his living Being Hispanic, has threatened to travel from San Diego to Phoenix to pose in front of TV cameras!
The NYT’s picture of Mr. Morones was staged at Imperial Beach, California with a backdrop of the Fascist Fence keeping out Mexicans. (Ironically, maintaining the border is of such low priority to the U.S. government that the right side of the photo reveals a big gap in the fence that anybody could wade through. But the NYT isn’t terribly alert to irony when it comes to the sacred topic of illegal aliens.)
Who else is up in arms over the All-Star Game being played in Arizona? Well, uh … Mahler mentions that spokesman for Today’s Youth, guitarist Carlos Santana, who played Woodstock.
In other words, practically nobody outside the NYT cares about the Movement to Boycott the All-Star Game. But, that’s not the point. According to Mahler:
"The larger truth is that Arizona’s anti-immigrant fervor is still very much alive, and Selig is putting his Latino players in the impossible position of having to choose between showing solidarity to their people or to the game that has enriched them even as they have enriched it."
Mahler begins by lamenting that organized baseball has no history that he can denounce of banning players based on Hispanic ethnicity.
"There is no Latin American Jackie Robinson, no single Hispanic ballplayer who lifted his people onto his back and crashed through baseball’s racist barricades. But there always has to be a first, and many of the game’s historians point to two Cubans, Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans, who made their debut with the Cincinnati Reds a century ago."
In other words, Mahler is frustrated that there’s no Hispanic equivalent of Jackie Robinson for him to use to remind white people of their evil legacy of discrimination. That’s because there was no discrimination against Hispanics. Mahler would be happier if there had been an Ethnic Line banning Hispanics because that would give him a weapon to use in vilifying other white people.
Mahler makes an unintended point:
"No American institution owes a greater debt to Latin Americans than baseball. "
Indeed.
And the "debt" baseball owes Latin Americans is … what exactly? Baseball has been very, very good to Latin Americans. Individual Latins have made huge amounts of money off our national pastime built up over the generations by Americans. But what have Latins ever contributed institutionally to baseball?
And if baseball owes the greatest debt to Latin Americans, then what do the rest of American institutions owe?
Mahler burbles:
"Our national pastime would be nothing today without the likes of Pujols, Bautista and Reyes …"
Huh?
Those are three baseball players from the Dominican Republic. I had certainly heard of Albert Pujols, but I had to go look up Jose Bautista and Jose Reyes.
Like a lot of Americans, I've slowly lost interest in baseball over the years. The plague of steroid-using ballplayers making a travesty of the record book had the most to do with it. Yet, the lack of compelling personalities among the growing number of Latin ballplayers has also contributed to baseball’s long decline relative to the American-dominated NFL.
American fans liked Sammy Sosa, who hit so many home runs for the Cubs in 1998, but he turned out to be another steroid cheater.
And it doesn’t help that you can buy steroids in the Dominican Republic without even a doctor’s prescription. Mahler rationalizes: "Given the starkly different fates that await them, it’s hardly surprising that 13 of the top 40 Dominican prospects came up positive for performance-enhancing drugs last year."
Mahler complains that baseball teams are exploiting Dominicans by hiring vast numbers of Dominican teenagers, but then they "return the rest to lives of poverty". The real scandal, however, is that big league baseball doesn’t make much effort to return failed Dominicans to their own country. Baseball has facilitated the illegal immigration of tens of thousands of washed-up uneducated jocks. MLB privatizes profits and socializes costs.
The one Latin ballplayer who definitely had a historic impact on the game goes unmentioned by Mahler: Jose Canseco, the Typhoid Mary of steroids. This blue-eyed Cuban probably wasn’t the first baseball player to pack on bigger muscles through chemicals, but the earlier cheaters were furtive enough that we can only begin to guess who they might have been. Canseco brought Latin male narcissism to proselytizing for steroids in the locker room. When Boston fans serenaded him with taunting "Ster-oid" chants during the 1988 playoffs, Canseco struck bodybuilder poses.
You might have noticed something else that Mahler hasn’t: most Latin baseball players aren’t from Mexico. Despite their vast numbers, there aren’t many Mexican high achievers, even in baseball. Three decades after Fernandomania, Fernando Valenzuela remains the most famous Mexican ballplayer ever. But, the pudgy pitcher wasn’t an overwhelming athletic force. Instead, he was fascinating for how much he managed to get out of his typically Mexican body.
So, Latin baseball stars, on the whole, don’t much care about Mexican illegal aliens. Mahler thinks the Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans should be "showing solidarity to their people" but the plain fact is they don’t think of Mexicans as "their people". And why should they?
White liberals constantly try to meld all the different Latin American nationalities into one aggrieved race to use as a club to whomp white conservatives. Unless they are actually employed in the Hispanic Racket, however, Latins tend not to care very much.
Mahler finally gets to what’s really bugging him:
"… and it all started with Almeida and Marsans, who played in their first major league game on — I’m not making this up — July 4, 1911. So how is baseball honoring their legacy, almost exactly 100 years later? By holding its 2011 All-Star Game in the cradle of America’s new nativism."
Ah, "nativism" …
Mahler claims:
"The law [SB 1070] backfired, inviting national scorn, costly boycotts …"
What exactly happened to all those boycotts of Arizona that the NYT trumpeted last year? Surely, they must be highly effective at least in Los Angeles, with its vast Mexican population?
Attendance at Dodger Stadium in L.A. is down more than 8,000 fans per game this year. Is that due to a Mexican boycott of baseball over anger that the All-Star Game hasn’t been yanked away from Arizona?
Of course not. It’s due to the most iconic picture baseball has produced this year:
These are the police artist sketches of the two thugs who viciously beat San Francisco Giant fan Bryan Stow into a coma in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium after the Opening Day game. From the website of the victim’s family:
"Doctors are still lowering Bryan’s seizure medications, trying to adjust them to find a good balance. … If he hears us, he knows that Father’s Day is approaching."
In general, the Boycott Arizona "movement" has turned out to be largely a New York Times fantasy about what Hispanics ought to be worked up over. In the real world, the grandstanding by Latino "leaders" has foundered on the sensible ambivalence of Mexican-American citizens over illegal immigration and on their typical apathy. Just a couple of weeks before Mahler’s article, reporter Kate Linthicum asked What happened to L.A.’s boycott of Arizona? in the Los Angeles Times (June 4, 2011):
"A year after the City Council approved the sanction, little has changed. There’s not even an ordinance specifying how the boycott should work.
"… 'This is a moment of hypocrisy if the city of Los Angeles says one thing and does another,' said Rabbi Jonathan Klein, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice."
We always hear from the NYT, quoting self-nominated ethnoactivist nobodies like ex-Padre publicist Morones, that the Hispanic vote is a political juggernaut demanding amnesty. But we never see much non-fantasy evidence for this.
For example, how is Morones’s All-Star Game boycott going? Dave Biscobing of 15.com in Phoenix reported on June 15, 2011:
"Last summer, calls for a boycott of the All-Star Game spread across the country in the weeks after the immigration law was passed. The fervor has fizzled … An overall boycott failed. Officials said that the game has sold more than 40,000 tickets."
However, there’s always somebody out there with some energy. Biscobing explains:
"There’s a new push for fans to form an all-Latino starting line-up for both teams in order to raise awareness about SB1070. 'We want people to stuff the ballot box,' said Dr. Rebecca Alpert, a baseball writer and professor at Temple University, 'Have the fans vote in an all Latino starting lineup.'"
Rebecca Trachtenberg Alpert is a lesbian rabbi and editor of the book Lesbian Rabbis. According to Wikipedia (June 19, 2011), her academic research specializes in "the place of gays and lesbians in Jewish religious history and she is currently writing on the relationships between Jews, blacks and sports during the years 1930-1950." Her latest book is Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball.
You can’t make this stuff up.
So much of what gets published in the MSM on immigration is the outgrowth of a weird mélange of Jewish nostalgia for their own immigrant ancestors and for the subsequent mid-Century era when liberal Jews guided blacks in the civil rights struggle.
But by the late 1960s, blacks started to tire of Jewish leadership. Hence the current liberal Jewish urge to mold Hispanics, so vastly numerous but so intellectually passive, into the New, Improved Blacks whom, they hope, will loyally follow their directions — the way nice Negroes like Sidney Poitier followed Stanley Kramer’s directions a half century ago. (It’s not yet clear how many Hispanics, outside of the Morones-type professionals, have even noticed.)
On Wednesday, billionaire / mayor Michael Bloomberg made an impassioned call to the Council on Foreign Relations for more immigration:
"The American dream cannot survive if we keep telling the dreamers to go elsewhere … It’s what I call national suicide — and that’s not hyperbole."
Immigration skeptic Larry Auster, who actually titled his celebrated critique of immigration The Path to National Suicide, commented on his View from the Right website:
"My theory: Bloombrain represents a florid extreme of the collective liberal Jewish narcissism I have spoken of previously. Such narcissists see every issue through the filter of Jewish experience and sensibility. Since Jewish immigrants to America and their offspring became successful entrepreneurs and professionals, the same must be equally true of all immigrants, even Mexicans with 90 IQs.
"And the Jewish narcissists believe this, not just because they blindly assume that everyone is just like them, but because, in their insane fears of an outbreak of white Christian anti-Semitism in the most philo-Semitic country in world history … they believe that if something is shown to be wrong with immigration, then America’s proto-Nazi white Christian majority will think there’s something wrong with the immigration that brought the Jews here, and will turn on the Jews. As crazy as it sounds, that is the way the liberal Jewish mind works, as I have shown at more length here.
"…Bloombrain’s statements about immigration have nothing to do with the real world, and everything to do with a fantastical tribal drama enacting itself in Bloombrain’s head."
It’s important to realize that this broad campaign in the respectable Main Stream Media to incite racial hatred of whites among Hispanics isn’t at all the result of a conscious Jewish conspiracy.
Instead, it’s largely the outcome of various stereotypical Jewish tendencies, such as neurotic anxiety, persecution complexes, and a weakness for he-who-says-A-must-say-B verbal logic, famously compiled in comedies such as Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.
The opinions on immigration held by Mahler, Klein, Alpert, and Bloomberg aren’t serious responses to the real world. When you understand their underlying attitudes and motivations, they are actually quite funny, like something out a Neil Simon or a Mel Brooks movie.
But, since few who aren’t Jewish (as Auster is) dare to criticize Jewish tendencies, these neuroses have been allowed to grow unchecked.
Thus they've become increasingly detached from reality — and they really have urged America onto the path to national suicide (Auster version).
The first step necessary toward a sane immigration policy is for Americans to start to get the joke.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.