No one should be surprised by what the Daily Caller reports:
Environmentalists have declared that global warming can’t be stopped without ending the “hegemonic capitalist system,” saying that cap-and-trade systems and conservation efforts are “false solutions.”
“The structural causes of climate change are linked to the current capitalist hegemonic system,” reads the final draft of the Margarita Declaration, presented at a conference including about 130 environmental groups.
“To combat climate change it is necessary to change the system,” the declaration adds.
Environmental activists met in the oil producing, socialist country of Venezuela as part of a United Nations-backed event to increase civil engagement in the lead up to a major climate conference.
But environmentalists surprised U.N. officials by offering up a declaration that not only seeks to end capitalism, but one that also opposes U.N.-backed efforts to fight global warming — namely, cap-and-trade and forest conservation programs.
Climate-change news analysis site RTCC reports that it’s unclear which groups signed onto the declaration, adding that it runs in the face of the “green economy” solutions to global warming backed by rich nations.
But many poor countries, like Venezuela, do not support a “green economy” solution to global warming, instead, arguing that rich countries should give poor nations cash payments and technology transfers.
Rejection of cap-and-trade and forest conservation programs also fly in the face of U.S. and European environmental groups, which back programs to limit and price carbon dioxide emissions.
In the U.S., environmentalists rallied behind the Environmental Protection Agency proposals to cut carbon dioxide emissions from new and existing power plants — a plan that would force the shutdown of coal-fired power plants. …
“EPA is setting up our states to fail – our local economies to fail – to deliver on the president’s promise that electricity prices will skyrocket – all for immeasurable so-called climate benefits,” Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter said in a Thursday hearing on the EPA’s new rule. ”This rule is all pain and no gain.”
Dinesh D’Souza had a similar motivation in making “America: Imagine the World Without Her,” a new documentary love letter to his adopted country. He’s often described as the Right’s Michael Moore, but he’s aiming higher, hoping to contend one day with Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone in the feature-film business. He tellsNational Review that “the Left knows the power of telling a story.” Stone and Spielberg are “much bigger than Michael Moore. They don’t make liberal films — they just make films, and they have a point of view. I want to make films with a different point of view.”
D’Souza’s absolutely right about Spielberg (though too kind to Stone). One of my biggest complaints about contemporary conservatism — in and out of politics — is that it has lost sight of the importance of storytelling.
My late friend Andrew Breitbart liked to say that politics is downstream of culture, meaning that any truly successful political turnaround needs to start by changing popular attitudes. Adam Bellow, a storied editor of conservative books, has a similar conviction and is trying to launch a conservative revolt in the world of fiction.
I wish them great success. Still, I think there’s something missing in this ancient conversation on the right (conservatives have been making such arguments since the 1950s — if not the 1450s, with the publication of the Gutenberg Bible). Conservatives refuse to celebrate, or even notice, how much of the popular culture is on their side.
Sure, Hollywood is generally very liberal, but America isn’t. Judging by their campaign donations, Hollywood liberals are very supportive of abortion rights. But there’s a reason why sitcoms since Maude haven’t had a lot of storylines about abortion. Indeed, nearly every pregnant TV character treats her unborn child as if it’s already a human being.
The Left may be anti-military, but such movies tend to do poorly, which is why we see more pro-military films. Similarly, it’s a safe bet that Hollywood liberals loathe guns. But you wouldn’t know that by what they produce. Not many action stars save the day by quoting a poem. Most Hollywood liberals probably oppose the death penalty, yet they make lots of movies where the bad guy meets a grisly death to the cheers of the audience. The Left rolls its eyes at “family values,” but family values are at the heart of most successful sitcoms and dramas.
One explanation is that while it is true that culture is upstream from politics, reality and, I would argue, morality are upstream from culture. Good stories must align with reality and a sense of justice. They can be set in space or Middle Earth, but if they don’t tap into something real about the human condition, they will fail. As Margaret Thatcher used to say, “The facts of life are conservative.”
Confirmation of that, I think, can be found in liberal Hollywood’s failure to be as liberal as it wants to be. And that’s definitely funny because it’s true.
… with this:
If you took great offense of the recent episode of HBO’s “True Blood” in which two vampires crashed a Ted Cruz fundraiser — at the Bush Library no less — and said some bad words about Republicans, I have some advice: Lighten up.
The other week I wrote about how the standard conservative critique of the popular culture is just a bit too tightly wound. This minor kerfuffle strikes me as a good illustration of my point. For those who don’t watch the show — i.e. somewhat more than 300 million out of America’s 314 million residents — True Blood is about a world in which vampires finally “come out of the coffin” thanks largely to the invention of a synthetic blood substitute “True Blood.”
Most of the series takes place in the Louisiana town of Bon Temps, a town infested not only with improbably important vampires and mystical deities, but a small army of nasty southern caricatures living alongside sexually liberated Bohemians that would make Brooklyn hipsters blush. The utterly ridiculous plot lines aren’t important for the purposes of this discussion — or pretty much for any other purpose. But suffice it to say pretty much every episode involves lots of sex — often including the homosexual variety — drugs, profanity, tedious and logically inconsistent speeches about the evils of bigotry, and a hodgepodge of mossy clichés about, again, sex, politics, culture, history, and religion wrapped in the candy coating of pretty naked people. “Gilligan’s Island” was vastly more plausible than True Blood (even accounting for the fact the Howell’s had an extensive wardrobe for a three-hour tour, yet the people who lived on the boat had only one set of clothes apiece).
For instance, in the offending Ted Cruz episode, the people who shot up the Bush library weren’t the vampires, but Yakuza gangsters with submachine guns (last seen beheading a post-coital yoga swami). My biggest complaint is that none of the vampires have decamped for New York to slaughter the cast of “Girls” (“I can’t die! I just landed an internship at the Utne Reader!”).
I find the show moderately (probably not the right word) entertaining, but then again I have a soft spot for the vampire genre, not to mention gratuitous sex and violence. That’s just me. I’m not proud of it. But I certainly don’t take the show too seriously, and anyone who does probably isn’t worth taking seriously.
And that goes far more for its fans than its foes. The show was intended from the outset to provide running commentary on gay issues. It was never subtle about this. The opening credit sequence shows a sign like you might see outside a small town church or fire station that reads “God Hates Fangs.”
Now the problem with analogizing homosexuals to vampires is really quite simple: It’s a terribly bigoted analogy! Whenever the show dives into extended comparisons of vampires and gays — which is often — I always wonder if the writers realize what they’re saying. If you made the show from an even remotely right-of-center perspective, it would be boycotted by LBGT groups immediately.
According to True Blood‘s own storyline, vampires have been evil, bigoted, cruel, and murderous for millennia. They have their own secret, manipulative agenda. They control events from dark corners. They quite literally have the power to brainwash people. Not surprisingly, the comparison to vampiresis a classic staple of anti-Semitism. Indeed, some argue that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was one extended anti-Semitic caricature (a rich, manipulative, blood-sucking rootless cosmopolitan from Eastern Europe with a “hooked” nose at a time of high Jewish immigration? Pure coincidence!). A fan of the show might say, “Only some vampires are evil, bigoted, cruel and murderous. There are nice vampires too.”
Okay, well. First the whole original storyline is about how Bill Compton is different than other vampires because he’s noble and decent, suggesting the other vamps aren’t. Second, try to make that kind of “it’s not all gays” or “it’s not all blacks” or (outside of the Middle East, U.N. or, increasingly, MSNBC) “it’s not all Jews” argument without sounding bigoted. Hey, I can’t be anti-vampire, some of my best friends are vampires! And, third, let me explain something else: Shut up.
It reminds me of when “28 Weeks Later” came out and everyone went gaga about how it was an extended anti-war metaphor of the Iraq invasion and the “green zone.” Few dwelled on the fact that in that metaphor the enemy — the zombies — must be shown no mercy and ruthlessly exterminated. They just thought it was cool that a zombie movie was making such an obvious reference to the war, or something.
And that I think is the source of the real problem here. By any objective or commonsense measure, the uptight Republicans slaughtered at the Ted Cruz fundraiser are happier and more productive members of society than virtually every other character in the show. From the sympathetic white-trash werewolves to the corrupt human rabble-rousers, from the vampire aristocrats to the endless string of slatternly young women and men who come and go with regularity, the show focuses on creatures who are, variously, decent-but-doomed, evil, stupid, or morally, spiritually, or intellectually lost.
The one thing these people have going for them? They are cool — at least by the glandular, knee-jerk liberal, fashion-forward, standards of the show’s producers and its niche pay-cable audience. In other words, to the extent the show is politically appealing, it is an irrational hot mess (much like the goo vampires turn into when struck with a wooden stake). It’s like it was written for Bill Maher’s studio audience, a group that doesn’t care about real facts or arguments — they just want to hear how they’re awesome and the people they hate aren’t.
To them, rich Republican men in bolo ties and rich Republican women in prim pantsuits aren’t cool. And you know what? That’s fine. Indeed, in real life, those Republicans would look at most of the motley characters inhabiting “True Blood” and see a gaggle of losers. And for the most part, they’d be right.
Conservatives need to get over their insecurities about not being cool in the eyes of liberals (and American adults generally could stand to worry about this sort of thing a lot less than they do). Once you start looking for it, it’s amazing how much liberal commentary — particularly about sex and religion — boils down to a kind of sneering self-satisfaction that liberals are hip and conservatives are squares (just think about how much “analysis” of Obama has been rooted in the assumption he’s cool). …
Moreover, the simple fact is that the popular culture has lots of archetypes that are essentially conservative and cool. Very few male action stars fit the model of how Salon thinks men should behave, what with all the gunplay, mansplaining, and refusal to get the required signatures on the necessary sexual-consent forms. The men of “Lone Survivor” are certainly cool. Even better, they are cool and have a code of honor. The same goes for the female protagonist of “Zero Dark Thirty.”
The point is that cool isn’t monolithic in a diverse and rich culture. For some, Southern Gothic sybaritic crapulence is cool; for others, self-sacrifice and patriotism are cool. And for lots of us, both have their places.
The Republicans appear to hold a slight advantage in the fight for the Senate and remain in a dominant position in the House. They need to pick up six seats to gain Senate control, and they hold a clear advantage in races in three states: South Dakota, Montana and West Virginia. The data from YouGov, an opinion-research firm that enjoyed success in 2012, finds the G.O.P. with a nominal lead in five additional states.
The five states where the Republicans hold a slight lead in the YouGov panel include three Southern ones — Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina — where Democratic incumbents face tough re-election contests and where Mitt Romney won in 2012. Republicans also have a slight edge in Iowa and Michigan, two open seats in states that usually vote for Democrats in presidential elections.
… and Jim Geraghty comments:
A couple reasons to find these results plausible:
It’s not all roses and sunshine for Republicans. In Colorado, Cory Gardner, one of the stronger GOP challengers, trails Sen. Mark Udall, 47 percent to 51 percent. In Alaska, Begich leads both challengers listed. In the two GOP-held seats that the party needs to keep, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is up 4 and in Georgia, Purdue is up 6 on Michelle Nunn — neither margin is particularly overwhelming in states that are deep red in presidential elections.
There aren’t a lot of results that look wacky. In four of the Senate races where the GOP candidate leads, the margins are 2 percentage points or less — Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Joni Ernst in Iowa, Bill Cassidy in Louisiana, and Terri Lynn Land in Michigan. Flip those, and Republicans only gain four seats, a sum most on the right would find disappointing.
If there’s a thumb on the scale, it’s the wrong one. If you think of the New York Times and CBS News as liberal news organizations, these results are an argument against interest.
Americans are so down on President Obama at the moment that, if they could do the 2012 election all over again, they’d overwhelmingly back the former Massachusetts governor’s bid. That’s just one finding in a brutal CNN poll, released Sunday, which shows Romney topping Obama in a re-election rematch by a whopping nine-point margin, 53 percent to 44 percent. That’s an even larger spread than CNN found in November, when a survey had Romney winning a redo 49 percent to 45 percent.
Two years ago, Obama won re-election with about 51 percent of the vote.
An electorate that’s disappointed and frustrated with Obama is not going to turn out to vote for Democrats. They’ll either vote for Republicans or stay home.
Curtis Dubay on Barack Obama’s speech Thursday that reportedly decried …
… corporate inversions. That is the process whereby a U.S. business merges with a foreign business and moves the new joint business’s headquarters to the foreign country. Inversions have been a hot topic recently because well-known businesses such as Walgreens, Pfizer, and Medtronic have been looking to engage in the process.
The president, like others before him, decried this practice because he believes it displays a lack of patriotism. However, inversions have nothing to do with love of country. They are all about U.S. businesses keeping up with their global competition.
When a U.S. business inverts it continues paying the same amount of tax it always has on its U.S. income. Any business, no matter where headquartered, pays the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate – which is the highest corporate tax rate in the world — on income earned within our borders.
The policy causing all the problems is the extra tax the U.S. levies on the income its businesses earn in foreign countries. This is known as a worldwide tax system. The U.S. is the only industrialized country that taxes the foreign earnings of its businesses.
The worldwide system makes it difficult for U.S. businesses to compete with their international brethren because those businesses don’t face an extra layer of tax when they invest in a growing new market. The extra tax U.S. businesses face makes certain investments unattractive for U.S. businesses that remain attractive to their competitors. …
If U.S. businesses don’t do anything to remedy this disparity, their relative profitability will fall as they take a pass on more and more growth opportunities their foreign competitors eagerly chase. Eventually this would put the viability of their businesses in jeopardy.
The preferred liberal fix to this problem is to make it harder for businesses to invert by requiring foreign shareholders to own a larger portion of a merged business (50 percent compared to 20 percent under current law) before the headquarters can be moved from the U.S. This change would only make matters worse.
Business will still find ways to remain competitive, such as by selling themselves outright to foreign competition. Raising the threshold could backfire by sending the message to businesses that the U.S. tax system will remain uncompetitive and could become more hostile to investment, causing more to want to flee our shores.
The only fix for this problem is tax reform that reduces the corporate tax rate and stops taxing the foreign income of U.S. businesses. Instead of demonizing U.S. businesses that are trying to do best by their shareholders, employees, and customers, Obama would better serve the country by spending his time working with Congress to make tax reform a reality.
The first reaction of Obama’s criticizing anyone’s supposed lack of patriotism should be: Pot, meet kettle. The second reaction is that since Obama has spent his entire term in office demonizing business and the successful, it could certainly be said that the worst thing in the American economy right now is Obama’s fat mouth.
The other parallel is to businesses that move their corporate headquarters from states with bad tax or legal structures to states with business-friendly tax and legal structures. That started here with with Kimberly–Clark’s corporate headquarters move from Neenah to Dallas in the 1980s, and has continued with businesses incorporating in such states as Delaware and South Dakota.
Rep. Dale Kooyenga (R–Brookfield) pointed out last week that once the Illinois income surtax expires later this year, Illinois’ income tax rate of 3.7 percent will be half as high as Wisconsin’s highest income tax bracket, and higher than Wisconsin’s lowest tax bracket. Democrats refuse to admit that Wisconsin’s taxes are too high, but not only are Wisconsin’s corporate income taxes — some of the highest in the world when combined with the federal corporate tax rate — too high, Wisconsin’s personal income tax rates are too high too.
J.D. Tuccille sees a nation divided, and he’s got an answer neither side will like:
About two-thirds of Americans say the country is more politically divided than it was four years ago, with blame going equally to the president and Congress. Fortunately, our countrymen have a plan for addressing these divisions: they plan to vote this November, presumably to enact their vision of the good life into law and stuff it down the throats of the folks on the other side of the divide.
Maybe, just maybe, the country should be really divided a whole lot more, so that people wouldn’t have to hope “candidates they vote for will steer the country in the right direction” rather than the direction the other side wants. Bringing decision-making as far down the food chain as possible—preferably leaving most matters to individual choice—would make the current fretting over political polarization irrelevant.
Anyway, according to Rasmussen Reports, “Sixty-seven percent (67%) of Likely U.S. Voters say America is a more divided nation than it was four years ago.”
Thirty-five percent put the blame on President Obama, while 34 percent tap Republicans in Congress as the culprits for all of this terrible disagreement.
To bridge the divide, or maybe just emplace fortified bunkers at their end of it, 57 percent of all voters say they are more likely to vote this year than they have been in past elections. Republicans have the edge on enthusiasm for the ballot box (65 percent), followed by 55 percent of unaffiliated voters and 53 percent of Democrats.
Fifty-nine percent “are at least somewhat confident that the candidates they vote for will steer the country in the right direction.” That seems, at best, a problematic “solution” for dealing with disagreement over just what that direction should be.
Other polling has found that much of the public at large actually has similar positions on many major issues—that is, the political battle lines may be drawn between Red and Blue, but many Americans are a tad purplish if you ask them specifics. But that doesn’t take into account levels of enthusiasm for different solutions, or for actually participating in the hard work of changing and implement policies.
It also doesn’t mean that the stuff on which much of the public agrees necessarily consists of good ideas. Lousy choices have a strong constituency, too.
And the Pew Research Center finds that political loyalties have grown so hardened that they’ve taken on cultural aspects. Liberals and conservatives don’t just believe different things, they live differently, and apart from one another. That suggests that the divisions people perceive may well be here for the long term.
Which is all the more reason to turn them into real divisions. Forget ballot-box games of winner-take-all. Divide power as far as possible down to the level of individuals, and reduce the stakes of divisions and disagreements.
The divide isn’t just between Democrat and Republican, or conservative and liberal. I have two Facebook Friends who support opposing Republican candidates, Van Wanggaard and Jonathan Stietz, in the 21st Senate District. Having watched, from an opposite corner of the state, the bullets fly over who has the best position on Second Amendment issues, and who supports school choice more than the other, it occurs to me that each candidate’s supporters are working really hard … to get Democrat Randy Bryce elected.
It was the great disaster of the 20th century, the one that summoned or forced the disasters that would follow, from Lenin and Hitler to World War II and the Cold War. It is still, a century later, almost impossible to believe that one event, even a war, could cause such destruction, such an ending of worlds.
History still isn’t sure and can never be certain of the exact number of casualties. Christopher Clark, in The Sleepwalkers (2013), puts it at 20 million military and civilian deaths and 21 million wounded. The war unleashed Bolshevism, which brought communism, which in time would kill tens of millions more throughout the world. (In 1997, The Black Book of Communism, written by European academics, put the total number at a staggering 94 million.)
Thrones were toppled, empires undone. Western Europe lost a generation of its most educated and patriotic, its future leaders from all classes—aristocrats and tradesmen, teachers, carpenters and poets. No nation can lose a generation of such men without effect. Their loss left Europe, among other things, dumber.
Reading World War I histories, I have been startled to realize the extent to which the leaders or putative leaders of the belligerent nations personally suffered. A number of them fell apart, staggering under the pressure, as if at some point in the day-to-day they realized the true size and implications of the endeavor in which they were immersed. They seemed to come to understand, after the early hurrahs, that they were involved in the central catastrophe of the 20th century, and it was too big, too consequential, too history-making to be borne. Some would spend the years after the war insisting, sometimes at odd moments, that it wasn’t their fault.
As Miranda Carter shows in George, Nicholas and Wilhelm (2010), the king of England, the czar of Russia and the kaiser of Germany—all cousins, all grandchildren of Victoria—were all in different ways wrecked by the war.
Kaiser Wilhelm, whose bombast, peculiarities of personality and lack of wisdom did so much to bring the conflict, folded almost from the start. Two years in, he was described by those around him as a “broken man”—depressed, lethargic, ill. An aide wrote of him as “violent and unpredictable.”
Barbara Tuchman, in the classic The Guns of August (1962), notes how in the early days of the war Wilhelm’s margin notes on telegrams became “more agitated.” (“Rot!” “He lies!” “False dog!”) In time, top brass shunted him aside and viewed him as irrelevant. The kaiser rarely referred to the sufferings of his people. Ms. Carter writes: “Wilhelm had always had difficulty in empathizing with others’ difficulties.” When his country collapsed, he fled to Holland, where in conversation he referred to his countrymen as “pigs” and insisted that the war was the fault of others. He died at age 81 in 1941, two years into the World War II.
King George V did have empathy, and it almost killed him. Touring the Western Front, he suffered at the sights—once-rich fields now charred craters, villages blasted away, piles of dead bodies. He aged overnight, his beard turning almost white. Ms. Carter writes that he now surveyed the world with a “dogged, melancholic, unsmiling stare.” A year into the war, a horse he was riding on a visit to the front got frightened, reared, and fell on him. The king never fully recovered from the injuries. Years later, he was haunted by what he called “that horrible and unnecessary war.” In 1935, war clouds gathering once again, he met up with his wartime prime minister. The king, wrote Lloyd George, “broke out vehemently, ‘And I will not have another war, I will not.’ ” He also said that the Great War had not been his fault. He died the following year.
Czar Nicholas II of Russia, of course, would lose everything—his throne and his life, as his family would lose theirs. But from the early days of the war he too was buckling. His former chief minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, called Nicholas’s faded eyes “lifeless.” In the middle of conversations, the czar lost the thread, and a simple question would reduce him to “a perfectly incomprehensible state of helplessness.”
Two years in, Kokovtsov thought Nicholas on the verge of nervous breakdown. So did the French ambassador, who wrote in the summer of 1916: “Despondency, apathy and resignation can be seen in his actions, appearance, attitudes and all the manifestations of the inner man.” The czar wore a constant, vacant smile, but glanced about nervously. Friendly warnings that the war was not being won and revolution could follow were ignored. For him, in Ms. Carter’s words, “Contradiction now constituted betrayal.” At the end, those close to Nicholas wondered if he failed to move to save his throne because he preferred a crisis that might force his abdication—and the lifting of burdens he now crushingly understood he could not sustain.
Then there is Woodrow Wilson at his second Versailles peace conference, in the spring of 1919. Negotiations were draining, occasionally volatile. The victors postured, schemed and turned on each other for gain. They had literally argued about whether windows should be opened, and about what language should be the official one of the talks. (They settled on three.) President Wilson developed insomnia and a twitch on the left side of his face. He was constantly tired, occasionally paranoid. After a trying meeting with France’s finance minister, Louis Klotz, Wilson joked with a friend of his weariness: “I have Klotz on the brain.” …
So what are we saying? Nothing beyond what I suppose has long been a theme, which may be a nice word for preoccupation, in this space: History is human.
And sometimes it turns bigger than humans can bear.
World War I was claimed to be the “war to end all wars.” World War II, 25 years later, disproved that. Historians also are coming to the view that 1919 through the mid-1930s was more a pause than peace. Certainly the peace settlement for the first war helped pave the way for the second war, though the rise (through democratic means, by the way) of Adolf Hitler had more to do with World War II.
Today in 1979, I believe I was back in Madison after nearly a month camping with my father, Boy Scouts and Scoutmaster in the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico.
I know I did not watch the Yankees-Brewers game at Milwaukee County Stadium that night. The game was not on TV, because the Brewers didn’t televise home games, feeling it would hurt home attendance, until the Sportsvue subscription TV service debuted in 1984. (Sportsvue then died a year later, in large part because the Brewers chose the 1984 season to crater, just two years after their World Series season and the year after the Brewers contended almost all of the season.)
It’s too bad the Yankees-Brewers game wasn’t on TV, because, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Gary D’Amato, it had everything, including an epic brawl:
OK, old Brewers fans, how many Brewers do you recognize? For that matter, how many Yankees do you recognize?
The Yankees back then were…well, how to describe them? Think of the team you despise most and multiply it by 10.
“I think there’s always a dislike for the Yankees,” said Sal Bando, then the Brewers’ third baseman. “Being in your own division (the American League East), I think there’s a bigger dislike for them.”
Owner George Steinbrenner was the symbol of big-city, big-spending conceit. Irascible manager Billy Martin had a perpetual chip on his shoulder. Reggie Jackson was the self-proclaimed “straw that stirs the drink,” with a home-run swing to match his enormous ego.
“They had some characters, some crazy guys on that team,” [first baseman Cecil] Cooper said. “But they had an awesome team with guys like Bucky Dent, Willie Randolph, Thurman Munson, Reggie, (Mickey) Rivers, (Lou) Piniella.”
The Brewers were coming into their own. After eight consecutive losing seasons (nine counting the franchise’s one year in Seattle), they’d gone 93-69 in 1978 and were en route to winning 95 games in ’79.
Bando and Cooper had arrived in 1977 to join Robin Yount and Don Money. Paul Molitor, Jim Gantner and Charlie Moore were ascending young players. Gorman Thomas had found a home in center field.
“We were a good team,” Bando said. “Oh, yeah, there was no question about it.”
Left-hander Mike Caldwell started the series opener. He was a bit of a character himself, known for carrying an expensive valise, in which he stored one item: a bottle of ketchup.
A crafty veteran who mixed speeds well, Caldwell already was known as the “Yankee Killer,” having shut out New York three times the year before.
“The Yankees always ruled the roost,” Caldwell said. “But I pitched extremely well against them my whole career. They had a lot of left-handers and free swingers in their lineup.”
The Yankees scored a run in the first inning, but Cooper answered in the bottom half with a two-out solo shot off starter Ed Figueroa. The homer earned Cooper a brushback pitch from Figueroa in his next at-bat, in the third.
“Figueroa was a different kind of guy,” Cooper said.
To underscore the point, when approached in the locker room after the game, Figueroa denied not only brushing back Cooper, but his own identity. “I’m not Figueroa,” he said, dismissing reporters while blow-drying his hair.
Jackson led off in the top of the fourth and Caldwell’s first pitch was high and tight and delivered the appropriate message.
“Mike was a hard-nosed, mean, grumpy kind of guy,” Cooper said. “He always stood up for his teammates.”
Jackson said nothing and worked the count to 2-2. On the next pitch, Caldwell again came inside, this time with a rising fastball that buzzed Jackson’s chin, causing the Yankees slugger to topple over backward.
“I’ll tell you exactly what happened, and it is truthful,” Caldwell said. “I wanted to throw Reggie a fastball on the inside part of the plate because he had some holes in his swing there. I was trying to telegraph to him that I was going to throw a curve and the ball slipped ever so slightly on my fingertips and I threw a fastball that was inside and it rode up on him.
“It turned into what you would call a perfect knockdown pitch.”
Jackson got up and dusted himself off. Caldwell then threw a curve and Jackson hit a towering pop-up to Bando at third.
Craziness ensued.
Caldwell moved toward Bando and was pointing to the ball and yelling, “Third!” when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a bat coming at him. Jackson, trotting to first base, had expressed his displeasure with Caldwell’s pitch location by flipping his bat toward the mound.
“As I’m waiting for the ball, I hear the fans yelling,” Bando said. “That usually doesn’t happen with a pop-up, so I figured something was going on.”
An angry Caldwell picked up Jackson’s bat by the fat end and slammed it into the ground. Dissatisfied that it didn’t shatter, he took a step or two toward home with the intention of breaking it on the plate. Umpire John Shulock was already coming out to meet him.
“He said, ‘No, Mike, not here,’” Caldwell said.
By then, Bando had caught the ball, Jackson had rounded first and now, shedding his glasses and helmet, was rushing the mound as the dugouts emptied.
“He got his hands around my neck and if you’ve seen pictures of it, it looks like I got killed,” Caldwell said. “His momentum carried him over me and I wound up on top of him. My right arm was pinned under his neck. I had my left arm around the front of his neck and I think I tore two or three gold chains.
“Reggie said, ‘You threw at me!’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t throw at you.’ He said, ‘You swear to God? You swear to God?’ I said, ‘Hell, yeah, I swear to God.’”
It took 10 minutes to restore order but the only casualties were Shulock, who’d gotten in the way of a punch, and Brewers manager George Bamberger, who strained a calf muscle. Jackson was ejected but Caldwell was allowed to stay in the game, none the worse for wear other than a few scratches.
Martin declared that the Yankees were playing the game under protest, and when he returned to the dugout, he was pelted with a few objects and a fair amount of verbal abuse. He started climbing into the stands but was pulled back by players and security guards.
The game finally resumed and after the Yankees went ahead, 3-2, Money drove in a run and Cooper hit a two-out, two-run homer off Ron Davis in the seventh to put the Brewers back on top, 5-3.
Randolph answered in the eighth with a two-run shot off Caldwell to tie the score. Martin brought in the flame-throwing Gossage for the ninth and he quickly retired Molitor on a groundout and Money on a fly to center. Up came Cooper.
“Gossage was one of the toughest guys I ever faced,” Cooper said. “He was a big guy and he had that Fu Manchu mustache. He looked like he could take a big piece of steak and tear it in half.”
Gossage made Cooper look bad on a couple swings and ran the count to 1-2.
The next pitch, however, wound up in Brewers’ lore. Cooper turned on a fastball and the ball traced an arc in the night sky and disappeared over the right-field wall. Cooper hopped and skipped his way around the bases, the roar of “C-o-o-p!” ringing in his ears.
Bud Selig, then the Brewers’ owner and now the outgoing commissioner, called the fans’ reaction to Cooper’s game-winner the greatest he had ever seen at County Stadium.
D’Amato tells the rest of what happened in that series. (Hint: If you were a Brewers fan, you liked the other two games too.)
The 1979 season was the only year between 1976 and 1981 that the Yankees didn’t at least win the AL East. Much of the reason was the absence of Gossage, who three months earlier had broken his thumb when he fell in the Yankee Stadium shower during a fight with teammate Cliff Johnson.
Martin (whose stops as a player included, believe it or not, the Milwaukee Braves) was, well, indescribable. His record says he was one of baseball’s best managers. He had the ability to make bad teams at least competitive; until the Texas Rangers started resembling a baseball team in the 1990s, he was their manager during the Rangers’ best season, a surprise second-place finish. Martin also managed the 1969 Twins, 1972 Tigers and 1980 Athletics to division titles.
But Martin was born, or fated, or perhaps cursed, to be a Yankee. He got the Yankees to the 1976 World Series and won the 1977 World Series, despite, among other things, a televised argument in the Fenway Park dugout with the aforementioned straw who stirs the drink. He started the 1978 season as the Yankees manager before he resigned after his comments about Steinbrenner and Jackson. (Martin said the two deserved each other; “one’s a born liar and the other’s convicted.” The latter referred to Steinbrenner’s federal conviction for illegal, as in excessive, campaign contributions to the 1972 Richard Nixon presidential campaign; the former referred to, the most recent conflict between Martin and Jackson.)
Shortly after the resignation, Martin was introduced at a Yankees Old Timers Day, where the Yankees announced that Martin was going to be the Yankees’ manager in 1980, with manager Bob Lemon (who had just been hired after Steinbrenner tried to, believe it or don’t, trade Martin for Lemon) moving to a front-office position. Martin, however, replaced Lemon after the Yankees got off to a bad start in 1979, which is how Martin was in Milwaukee that night.
There was a permanent Yankee loss shortly after this. The Yankees were in Milwaukee on a road trip that ended in Chicago before the Yankees went back to New York. On a day off before the first game of their homestand, Munson, who had gone home to Ohio, decided to take his new jet out and practice takeoffs and landings. Munson’s plane crashed, and Munson died.
Martin — who, remember, was supposed to manage the Yankees in 1980, not 1979 — didn’t get to the 1980 season. He was fired after a fight in a Minneapolis hotel with a marshmallow salesman. Really. Martin returned to manage the Yankees in 1983 (the season with the infamous Pine Tar Game), 1985 (fired again after a late-season fight with pitcher Ed Whitson) and 1988 (canned again).
Martin’s career arc at any one stop was generally (1) get hired, (2) do surprisingly well with young players, (3) get in the playoffs, (4) burn out his young pitchers, then wear out his welcome with (5A) his players or (5B) management and (6) get fired. Martin was reportedly about to be hired by the Yankees again for the 1990 season, but he died in a car crash in late 1989.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 