That song again

 Gabe Kapler did the proper thing yesterday. It was Memorial Day, our day to honor the dead of America's wars, and so the Giants manager came out of the clubhouse and climbed the dugout steps and stood on the dirt for the national anthem, because he said honoring the fallen was as important on this day as honoring America's other fallen.

That would be the 21 fourth graders and teachers who were murdered in our latest skirmish between civilization and semi-auto weaponry.

Not surprisingly, civilization lost again. It's got a hell of a losing streak going these days, here in America the Locked And Loaded. 

Which is why Kapler decided last week he could no longer come out and stand for a national anthem whose words no longer seem to fit our current reality. So Kapler figured he'd discreetly stay in the clubhouse during the anthem, until America decided it wanted again to be what that anthem celebrates.

And that was the proper thing to do, too.

Of course, it set off the usual suspects again, who worship the anthem almost as zealously as they worship shootin' irons. Somehow that song has gotten conflated with the flag and the troops and, you know THE TROOPS!, and is all about location and posture. Stand and you're being respectful; kneel with your head bowed or stay in the locker room, and you're being disrespectful.

I don't know why those usual suspects think they get to decide all that.  I don't recall any of them being appointed Official Poobahs of Anthem Etiquette or anything. But they sure seem to think they were.

Of course, it's pretty hard for them to say, this time, that Kapler was disrespecting THE TROOPS!, given that he came out for the anthem on Memorial Day expressly to honor the troops who died defending our nation. I'm sure they'll find a way, though.

In the meantime, Colin Kaepernick  just signed a deal with the Raiders, whose history of taking in iconoclasts and various other NFL orphans is long and distinguished. Kaepernick, of course, got run out of the NFL for his own anthem protest. Now he's back.

Bad week for the anthem worshippers, it seems.

Fantasy foof-ball

Full disclosure, to get this off the line today: I am a retired fantasy football player.

I played in a league with a bunch of friends and former colleagues, and it was great fun. We were print newsies who worked together at the Fort Wayne (In.) Journal Gazette back in the 1990s, and, the nature of print journalism being what it is, we'd all scattered to the winds since. Fantasy was a way to reconnect, revive all the inside jokes and have a few laughs.

I don't recall any of the guys ever threatening to slap me. Perhaps we weren't hardcore enough.

Or, you know,  major league enough.

Not so Tommy Pham and Joc Pederson, who play baseball for the Cincinnati Reds and San Francisco Giants, respectively, and who last year played in the same fantasy football league. 

Apparently, they weren't doing it for the inside jokes and to have a few laughs. Apparently, they saw it as bloodsport -- which is why Pham accused Pederson of cheating by stockpiling players on his bench, and Pederson responded by saying, well, neener-neener-neener, dude, you just don't know the rules.

Fast forward to last Friday, when the Reds were playing the Giants and Pham sauntered over to Pederson and ... slapped him.

"He called me a big dumb poopyhead!" Pham explained.

Well, not really. What Pham really said was Pederson was so cheating (the additional "was-so, was-so" here is implied), and compounded it by saying "disrepectful s***."

"I didn't like the sketchy s*** going on in fantasy," Pham said later. "We had too much money on the line, so I look at it like there's a code. You're f****** with my money, then you're going to say some disrespectful s***, there's a code to this."

A code! Hey, guys, did you know about this? Because no told me about any code. Not that I'm accusing you of keeping it from me or anything. That would be some disrespectful s***.

(BTW, I'm betting right now someone in your league renames his team "The Disrespectful S***s" this fall. My money's on Jim.)

In any event, Pham got a three-day sitdown for slapping Pederson, and the rest of us got yet another reminder that baseball is a game for little boys who never grow up. It's the game of eternal youth, which is why it became America's Pastime for awhile, and then just something to fill the time between NFL minicamps and training camps and Your Team's Fantasy Draft.

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, a fantasy football beef might be the best thing that ever happened to the former Pastime. I mean, what could better restore baseball's relevance?

Photo(genic) finish

 Look, don't come at me with tradition, this fine May morning. I'm all about tradition, at least as it applies to that auto race they put on in Indianapolis every Memorial Day weekend.

I would, for instance, be the first to boo lustily if they decided all that spilled milk in Victory Lane was wasteful ("Starving children in China would be glad to have this!" I hear Ralphie's mom scolding in "A Christmas Story"), and offensive to the lactose intolerant, besides.

I'd yelp "The hell is THIS??" if they decided, ah, 30 cars are enough for one race.

And I'd lead the march on Doug Boles's office if they decided to pave over the yard of brick because, you know, it just doesn't work esthetically surrounded by all that asphalt.

That said ...

That said, I had zero problem with the way the 106th Indianapolis 500 finished up yesterday.

How it finished up was, they let 'em race to the checkers, which is the way something called a "race" should finish up. When the wall off Turn 2 bit Jimmie Johnson with four laps to run, it didn't bring out the yellow. It brought out the red -- as in, "Everyone back to the pits until we can clean up the mess and finish the 500 the way the 500 should finish."

And, no, that's not in the IndyCar rulebook, officially. And it's not consistent, seeing how they wouldn't do that in the same situation anywhere else on the IndyCar circuit. And, yeah, it wiped out Marcus Ericsson's three-second lead, and that seemed a trifle unfair.

But you know what?

A finish under caution would have been a trifle unfair, too. And mainly that's because the mass of humanity who turned the Indianapolis Motor Speedway into an insta-city of 300,000 weren't anywhere else on the IndyCar circuit.

They were at Indy -- full name, the Indianapolis 500, which means it deserved to be the Indianapolis 500 and not the Indianapolis-490-And-Then-Grandma-Drives-Her-Buick-To-The-Grocery-Store-10. 

So they parked 'em, and cleaned off the track, and raced to the end. Ericsson staved off a charging Pato O'Ward by snake-dancing around the place to keep Pato off his air, and outdragged him to turn one when Pato took his shot with a lap to run. 

The result: The 500 got the photo(genic) finish it deserved. As did Ericsson, for that matter.

He hung around in the top five all day and hit the pit window just right, and avoided the mistakes and bad luck that took out the frontrunners, Scott Dixon and Alex Palou. It was an impeccable performance, and A Grandma-Drives-Her-Buick finish would have dimmed its luster a tad. 

Says here, anyway.

The quiet and the loss

 GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- The Run wears its Sunday best now, here in these last bursting days of May. Down the way, a few steps from this footbridge, a mop of lilypads sprawls across the narrow reach from bank to bank; bushes and trees crowd close; tiny marsh flowers so cover the dark water that, even swollen with recent rains, you can hardly see its modest trickle.

Late spring at Gettysburg National Military Park, and there is new life everywhere. Everything is one shade of green or another, and the air is soft, and the only sound is the sound of birdsong.

I hear it now, standing on this footbridge watching the Run lollygag beneath my feet. That's shorthand for Plum Run, and along its banks, years and years ago, human beings shot and stabbed and murdered one another. 

Men bled and fell and gasped away their lives. Their bodies swelled and stiffened in grotesque postures in the July heat, And this lovely trickle became an obscene thing, its very name a synonym for the worst we can do to each other.

A few insignificant yards behind me, I know, a squad of desperate soldiers drew a bead in the fading light on a man with flowing white hair on horseback. This was Confederate general William Barksdale, and he died later that night with five bullets in him, and the Mississippians he led ran out of steam right about where he fell. 

They fled back through the fields they'd come howling across an hour or so before, the air thick with dusk and smoke now.  And their bodies would carpet the ground they crossed to mark the way.

Somewhere in front of me and to my left, meanwhile, a man named Freeman McGilvery would place a line of cannon and blast away at other advancing Mississippians, and more men and pieces of men would fall. And way down there to the south and east, where Plum Run meanders sluggishly at the foot of a pile of rock the locals called Devil's Den, yet more lives would violently end.

Later a lot of the mortal remains would be collected and buried atop Cemetery Hill, and today that is a green place, too, and quiet. White headstones spread out in a neat geometry that belies the chaos that placed them here, and tourists walk among them with a reverence generally reserved for cathedrals and holy shrines.

That's because everything that happened along Plum Run, and in places with names like Belleau Wood and Iwo Jima and the Ia Drang Valley, is about both madness and sacrifice, and this weekend we honor the latter. It's Memorial Day, and it's reserved for all those headstones, all the men and women who came to places of which most had never heard, and who never left -- men and women who, yes, died to preserve what we have and often take for granted, but who mostly died for the human beings to the right or left of them.

Me?

I prefer to think about that footbridge across Plum Run, and the life and peace there now, and the death that paid for it. Those three days in July all those years ago preserved the Union,  ultimately. And if it remains a sometimes tragically imperfect union, it's up to us to make it less so -- if not for our sakes, then for the sake of  Bayard Wilkeson and Samuel Zook and Edward Cross and Strong Vincent, and all the others who died here. 

Died so I could find it almost impossible to imagine that, on the late afternoon of July 2, 1863, I would have had a life expectancy of about two minutes standing where I stand on this day. 

Died, so everything around me is now one shade of green or another, and the air is soft, and the only sound is the sound of birdsong.

A man and his brain

 Look, I don't care if Herschel Walker -- former football star; current candidate for  the Republican Congressional Crazy Train -- thinks Samuel J. Tilden* stole the 2020 election from his boy Donald Trump. Or if it was, I don't know, space aliens or AOC or Snidely Whiplash. 

(*If you don't know who Samuel J. Tilden is, look up the election of 1876. As Dwayne Pride says on "NCIS: New Orleans", learn things)

Now where was I?

Oh, yeah. Herschel Walker.

Who's been even more incoherent than his Fearless Leader during this campaign, which of course doesn't hurt him a bit with the Republican electorate. The other day, like a lot of politicians who believe we care what they think, he weighed in on the massacre in Uvalde, and he Herscheled the bejeezus out of it.

Here's what he said: Cain killed Abel and that's a problem that we have. What we need to do is look into how we can stop these things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation -- what about getting a department that can look at young men that's looking at women that's looking at their social media. What about doing that? Looking into things like that and we can stop that that way. But yet they just want to continue to talk about taking away your constitutional rights ...

OK. That's enough to give you the general idea.

Which is, what the hell is this man talking about?

Cain and Abel? Sexual predators cruising online for victims? This has what to do with 19 dead kids and a dead teacher in a Texas elementary school?

And, no, Herschel, no one's trying to take away your constitutional rights. Give it a rest.

What I conclude from all this incoherency, and various other examples Herschel's given us on the campaign trail, is maybe not what everyone concludes. What I see, and hear, is another former football player who might well be suffering from CTE.

It's impossible to prove, of course, and I suppose there are other completely viable explanations for Herschel's inability to form and enunciate clear thoughts. But I can't help where my mind goes, and the more I hear him speak, the more my mind goes to his days as a football player and how much head trauma he incurred.

Maybe that's unfair. But it's not unreasonable given what so often happens to a man and his brain if he's spent as many years on a football field as Herschel has.

I think I'm seeing that every time candidate Herschel opens his mouth.  And it makes me sad.

A few I-don't-knows for today

And now it's time for a humble bit the Blob calls Things I Don't Know, which could be the longest Blob post in recorded history except the editors (me) have promised to be ruthlessly edit-y.

Things I Don't Know:

* I don't know what the Cleveland Browns were thinking when they handed Deshaun Watson $238 million in guaranteed money, now that two of the 2,237 (OK, so only 22) massage therapists suing him have come forward with tales of his sick penis hijinks. 

Of course, I frequently don't know what the Cleveland Browns are thinking. So there's that.

* Tangentially, I don't know what sort of book the NFL is going to throw at Thomas if it ever wraps up its investigation of said penis hijinks. But it better have some Tolstoy heft.

* I don't know how many people will tell Steve Kerr to shut up and coach after his entirely appropriate meltdown the other day in the wake of America's latest sacrifice to its gun fetish. But I'm guessing it will be the usual suspects on the usual platforms uttering the usual incoherencies.

* I don't know if the Warriors or the Celtics close out their respective conference championship series in Game 6. But I bet if they don't, they lose to the Mavs and the Heat by eleventy-hundred points because that's just the way the NBA playoffs roll this year.

* I don't know who's going to win the Indianapolis 500 this weekend, so quit asking. Also I'm going to devote an entire Blob post about it later this week, and why I will be wrong, again, as usual.

* I don't know if Josh Donaldson of the Yankees was just, well, joshing when he kept calling Tim Anderson of the White Sox "Jackie" awhile back, which got him suspended for one puny game by the splendidly lily-livered MLB commish, Rob Manfred. But I can't see how referencing Jackie Robinson's name to a black player could be construed as anything but a mocking slur.

I mean, it wasn't like he was saying "Gosh, Tim Anderson, when you said, off-handedly, that you felt like Jackie Robinson sometimes, I thought 'You know, he's right. He's as brave and filled with character as No. 42. So I'm gonna honor him by calling him 'Jackie.'"

Yeaaah, those groceries won't sell.

And lastly ...

* I don't know who are bigger piles of dog-doo, Yankees fans or Louis Blues fans. But I bet it' goes down to the wire after the former booed Anderson for objecting to Donaldson's mockery, and the latter hurled racist slurs and death threats across social media at Colorado's Nazem Kadri. 

Oh, hell. Let's just call it a tie and be done with it, and them.

Just another day in America

I wrote the following eight days ago. Eight ... days ... ago.

Let that sink in while you read:

Me, I just wonder when these moments of silence will become as much a pregame standard at our sporting events as the national anthem. "And now tonight's moment of silence for the victims in Waxahachie ... Hog Waller ... Ferndale ..."

That sort of thing.

Might as well start doing it now and beat the rush, I figure.

I say this because the country we were over the weekend is apparently the country we want to be, where a constitutional amendment gets warped beyond recognition and people die damn near every day because of it. What happened over the weekend in Milwaukee and Buffalo was only marginally abnormal, after all. Mostly it was just Tuesday.

"Mostly it was just Tuesday ..."

Well, yesterday was a Tuesday.

And now we can add "Uvalde, Texas" to Waxahachie and Hog Waller and Ferndale and whatever town is next to our moment of silence.

And there will be a next town. You can count on that as surely as you can count on the stars coming out on a clear spring night, because this is America, where the price of freedom is sending your kid to school not knowing if he or she will ever come home. 

The price yesterday was 19 children and two teachers on a clear spring day in Uvalde, a town of 15,214 that sits 80 miles west of San Antonio. Some sick twist -- 18 years old, a kid himself -- walked into a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School and opened fire with some damn shootin' iron or another, and when he was done Uvalde's population had shrunk by 21 souls.

The police finally took him out, thank God.

Sometime in the future they'll have to do it again, because this is America, and a shooting gallery is apparently what we want America to be. Otherwise we wouldn't keep electing people who treat the Second Amendment like it's a religious tract, and only ever quote the back half of it anyway because it best fits their campaign platform of God, Guns and Freedom.

Well, good on you, folks. You can have your land of the free and home of the trigger-happy. You can water the tree of liberty with the blood of more innocents. You can free up more concealed carry permits that make law enforcement's job a nightmare and makes for jumpy cops who shoot first and ask questions later.

Which means more death by the gun, more dead cops/innocent civilians, more blood for that insatiable ol' liberty tree.

Somewhere today, the usual thoughts and prayers will be sent out by the usual suspects. And somewhere else (in Texas, maybe), some politician (Gov. Greg Abbott, maybe) will use the slaughter in Uvalde to push for arming teachers like an infantry battalion. 

Because that would be completely normal, and not, you know, evidence of what a completely insane place this country has become.

I used to love America because I know its history, good and bad, and in spite of that recognize it as an ultimately hopeful place. 

I still love America. But now I think America belongs in a straitjacket.

God help me. God help us all.