Alan Jacobs

Sports metaphors are of course overused, but it occurs to me that one particular set of them — ones involving batting in baseball — are uniquely useful for delineating, especially in relation to writing, the many forms of failure. I just told someone that I thought Garrison Keillor’s Trump-thumping didn’t quite work, that he had taken a mighty swing but popped out to the second baseman. If I had a lower opinion of it, I might say that he swung for the fences but fouled it off his foot, or struck out swinging; if a higher one, that he flied out to the warning track. All of these options arise, in this particular case, from my sense that Keillor was trying to write the definitive put-down of Trump — that he was trying to hit a homer.

But of course batters don’t always try to hit homers: some of them are singles hitters, some of them look to walk a lot; occasionally one will be called upon to, or will decide to, bunt, and bunting can be done sacrificially or for a hit. The point being: batting in baseball offers us a remarkably varied vocabulary of aspiration and failure (or success). And that’s very useful for describing writing too.

Christopher Sykes, in his biography of his friend Evelyn Waugh, recalls how Waugh treated the soldiers under his command in World War II:

To the naturally weak he was as merciless as he had been in his bullying school days. I witnessed the spectacle many times and it always utterly disgusted me. It was useless to remonstrate as I sometimes did because he was always ready with a witty and plausibly logical defense.

This is the same man whose response to the death of an infant daughter was a brief note in his diary — “Poor little girl, she was not wanted” — and who would later taunt his older children by forcing them to watch him eat treats that he denied to them. “My children weary me,” he told his diary. “I can only see them as defective adults.” For one of his children he was simply “a figure to dodge” as completely as possible. For another, “The worst punishment our nannies would threaten us with was to be sent down to the library to see our father.” (He did, however, encourage his children to ride trains without paying on the grounds that as long as the Labour party was in charge England was “an occupied country.” Not that he had voted Conservative, mind you: “I have never found a Tory stern enough to command my respect.”)

When Nancy Mitford told him that he was scarcely an advertisement for Christianity, he replied, “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” It is difficult to imagine how much worse he could have been without ending up in prison or the victim of murder. Sykes reports that during the war he and some other officers had to keep close watch on the men in their company to prevent them from killing Waugh. If the men had managed to do so, there might have been a slight loss to literature but probably an overall gain in the happiness of the human race.

Waugh is one of those converts in whom Catholics take great pride. If I were in their position, I would do everything in my power to prevent the world from finding out that he belonged to my communion. If the rightly administered sacraments are presumed to be instruments of grace, it appears that Waugh, at any rate, was invulnerable to their power. I would appreciate it if my Catholic brothers and sisters took the unremitting nastiness of the man more seriously. I have yet to hear one say that when Waugh took the Sacrament he did so unworthily, though I do not believe, given his gleeful and freely expressed hatred of almost everyone he knew,  that anyone could reasonably say that he did so worthily.

He believed that by becoming Catholic he had ensured his own salvation, and from that elevated seat taunted his friends who remained Outside: “Awful about your obduracy in schism and heresy,” he wrote to the Anglican John Betjeman. “Hell hell hell. Eternal damnation.” Only someone wholly unacquainted with Waugh’s views would think he was joking. Betjeman certainly didn’t.

What Jacobs doesn’t happen to mention, however, is the attitude of most Baby Boomers toward Christianity as One of the Things We Definitely Aren’t. That whole generation has defined themselves against their parents, and most of their parents were at least nominally Christian. So who wants to hear more from that quarter? Everybody knows what Christianity is, and says, and does. It’s boring and outmoded at best; oppressive and retrograde at worst. Buddhism or Hinduism? Exotically interesting.  Judaism? Well, if it’s Kabbalah, at least, it’s cool. Islam? Dangerous, and so it leads the evening news. Christianity, though? Yesterday’s news and good riddance.

Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown and author of the book How to Win at College, has interviewed hundreds of students about their college experience. Based those interviews and observation of his own students, Newport believes that those who chose majors simply to please their parents are more likely to give up or burn out. ‘It’s just harder to weather the hard times if you don’t have the intrinsic motivation,’ he said. You might not expect college freshmen to understand that careers don’t proceed in straight lines, but surely their parents ought to. In the real world, most physics majors don’t become physicists, most psychology majors don’t become psychologists, and most English majors don’t become writers or teachers. You’ll find a surprising number of philosophy majors at hedge funds and lots of political-science majors at law firms. I was an American studies major. Among chief executives of the largest corporations, there are roughly as many engineers and liberal arts majors, in total, as there are undergraduate majors in business, accounting and economics combined. Indeed, one study found that only 27 percent of people have jobs that are substantially related to their college majors — a reality that applies even to the STEM fields. 'Choosing a major is not choosing a career,’ says Jeff Selingo, author of There Is Life After College.

Me: ‘Hey, Siri, find me a Catholic Mass to go to.’

My phone: ‘I don’t know how to respond to that.’

Me: ‘Okay then, take me to a strip club.’

My phone: 'Which strip club? Tap the one you want.’

Kaepernick’s decision to sit for the anthem did not rely on disruption. In fact, it was so unobtrusive that it wasn’t even noticed the first time he did it. It relied on a symbolic act, one with enough room for interpretation that Kaepernick needed to spell out its meaning. His protest was a piece of performance art, and in staging it he blurred the line between art and protest. Kaepernick isn’t just a part of the long line of black athletes who have used their platforms to speak out about political issues; he (unintentionally) inserted himself into the rich tradition of black artists who have invoked the American flag in political protest.

Selfie Takers are not snobs, at least as far as I can see. In fact, they seem pretty indiscriminate in their appreciation of works of art. And their way of appreciating art is to approach it aggressively. I mean aggressive in a physical sense. They lurch toward a painting, register its existence, and then, by way of appreciation, turn their backs on it. They raise their cellphones aloft and adjust the camera’s position to take in themselves and the painting. They mince, they pout, they grin, they tilt their heads and part their lips in a way that is meant (I’m guessing) to be seductive. The photo is snapped and the Selfie Taker lurches forward without a backward glance, to further appreciate man’s deepest yearnings as expressed through art. Civilization is really terrific.

Onward we went, asking people everywhere we stopped about the Flushing Remonstrance. None of them knew anything about it. We ended up at the Macedonia AME Church, the third-oldest religious organization in Flushing, a block west of Bowne House, on Union Street, another ‘God’s Row.’ Partway through the service, we managed to wrest ourselves from the centripetal pull of the funky organ. On our way out we encountered a deacon who not only knew about the Remonstrance, but regaled us with reminiscences about growing up in Flushing with close friends whose surnames included Lum, Vargas, O’Neal, and DiVecchio. He saw in himself—part African American, part Native American—the story of the place. He told us that John Bowne had been an abolitionist, as were many of his descendants. For the deacon, the significance of the Remonstrance wasn’t whether it had bequeathed the diversity he celebrated. It was in providing a model for how that diversity could be preserved: A group of men stood up to defend the religious freedom of people with whom they disagreed, refusing to demonize them. They stood up for unity as well as diversity, just like the Chinese and Italian friends who’d come to his defense as a kid, when they would travel together to parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island where his skin color wasn’t welcome.

Garnette elegantly links the story of the Flushing Remonstrance to recent controversies in the city, for instance the whoile “Ground Zero mosque” kerfuffle of a few years back. When that was fresh I wrote a post about tolerance — and why George Washington didn’t like that word. I think it’s still relevant.

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The Christian intellectual tradition is alive and well