From washingtonpost.com:

Fans Deliver Brushback Pitch

By Thomas Boswell

These days, it's hard to make people gasp. Bad taste is so commonplace and the lust for a buck so raw that it's hard to move the outrage meter, much less make it jump off the chart. But baseball managed to do it this week. The sport sold the bases, the pitching rubber and home plate as ad space for a movie sequel!

As satire, as spoof, as a parody of everything that has debased our games and driven the public away from big-time sports, this would seem excessive, improbable, just too far over the top to believe.

But baseball actually did it. Bud Selig's sport sold out the 150-year history of its pristine geometry for the pathetic price of $50,000 on average. Or about what Alex Rodriguez earns in one game. Baseball agreed to put ads for the movie "Spider-Man 2" on its playing field as well as both on-deck circles for the weekend of June 11-13. All over America, jaws dropped until they hit the floor.

That's the bad news. Here's the fabulous news. Within two days of the story's publication, baseball was so overwhelmed with outrage and mockery from inside and outside the game that, last night , it abruptly canceled the most offensive parts of the advertising campaign and pulled the ads off the bases. The campaign, however, will still be a presence at the ballpark -- in the on-deck circles, on the pitching rubber for pregame ceremonies and on stadium video boards.

For once, the public actually shoved an attempt at rampant commercialism back down the throats of the philistines who proposed it. Maybe they can put ridiculous "swooshes" and stupid little animals all over our clothes, but they better not mess with the baseball diamond! At least we draw the line somewhere, even if the choice of battlegrounds -- a picture of a spider's web on home plate -- must seem odd in other cultures.

Of course, baseball is trying to put a good face on its embarrassment. We shouldn't let them. Everyone associated with this decision-making processes should be mortified. This isn't just a baseball issue. It's a broader American cultural issue. If the pitcher's rubber at Fenway Park and second base at Yankee Stadium are up for sale, then what isn't for sale in this country?

Selig and baseball's president and chief operating officer Robert DuPuy -- who's had the misfortune to be the mouthpiece for this PR disaster -- should not be let off the hook. The idea, in its entirety, should be rejected completely. If there is any backsliding, if the "web-slinger" -- who is himself a legitimate comic book icon -- finds a way to swing himself anywhere near the game's actual playing fields, then heads should roll. "Spidey" has his place. It's not on the pitcher's mound or even in the on-deck circle.

"Major League Baseball and Columbia Pictures have agreed to remove the 'Spider-Man 2' logo from the in-field bases," baseball said in a news release last night.

"As stated when this partnership was announced, we think this is a terrific promotion . . . and a great opportunity to reach out to children and families," said a statement from DuPuy.

That's bunk, of course. It's a lousy idea and a blatant attempt to sell out, not to "reach out."

"The bases were an extremely small part of this program," continued DuPuy, ignoring the obvious -- that putting logos on the bases was the controversial centerpiece of the whole promotion.

"We understand that a segment of our fans was uncomfortable with this particular component," continued DuPuy. "We are pleased to be moving ahead with all other elements of this groundbreaking marketing partnership."

Oh, please. The only fans that weren't outraged by the idea were those who were downright apoplectic. Even former commissioner Fay Vincent, also a former president of Columbia Pictures, was appalled by the base logos. "It's inevitable but awful," he said before the plan was nixed.

It's is ironic, to say the least, that America is able to understand issues of taste and tradition vs. commercialism more clearly when the debate is reduced to a baseball field than it is in countless other venues where corporate gall and lowest-common-denominator values routinely carry the day.

But then maybe we understand baseball better.

No sport, except perhaps golf, has ever been so closely identified with the beauty and uniqueness of the place in which it is played. One of the central reasons that baseball is able to sustain a 162-game season -- twice as many contests as the NBA or NHL -- is that people, for generations, have loved to sit in a baseball park. On our American list of "perfect things," the baseball diamond has always held a high place. Even those who don't love the game understand the combination of power and peacefulness in a ballpark.

All around the world in these tormented times people ask, "What does America stand for?" If comic book movie logos had been stamped on all the bases in every big league park of the national pastime, maybe the correct answer really would have been reduced to "Money, money, money and money."

Luckily, we have risen up and prevented the editorial writers at Le Monde from having a "field" day?

A measure of baseball's lack of judgment and backbone under Selig is the fact that neither the NFL nor NBA has allowed anybody to do any advertising on their actual fields of play. The impoverished NHL, groveling for every dollar, has allowed ads under its ice. But baseball was the sport that was ready to sell its soul for peanuts -- $3.6 million. That's exactly the size of the NFL contract that the late Pat Tillman turned down so that he could fight, and ultimately die, as a U.S. Army Ranger in Afghanistan.

Make no mistake, three days of movie logos on the bases is just the thin edge of the wedge. What this week has taught us is that we need to keep a close eye on Selig's bunch. No breach of faith with the game's fans is apparently beneath them. They only relented because they were bludgeoned from coast to coast. "Signage" on a baseball diamond is pure spoilage. Each logo would have been like a gob of tobacco juice in the eye of every fan who has an ounce of feeling for the spirit of the game.

Luckily, the public said, "Enough is enough." But we will have to continue to say it. Our alternative is to docilely accept what Vincent calls the "inevitable but awful" -- in our games and in our culture. If we don't resist our commercial despoilers, then when they make a sequel to "Field of Dreams," Shoeless Joe Jackson may come out of the cornfield wearing a sandwich board that says, "This Space For Sale."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

 

One Nation Under....
By Don Feder

What is it about the Left and God? Why do the mildest public expressions of faith drive them nuts? Is there a connection between the treason of liberals and their war on religious expression?

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-WA, went to Iraq in the fall of 2002 and loudly proclaimed that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and Bush would knowingly lie to the American people to foment a war. If there was a Nobel Prize for giving aid and comfort to the enemy, McDermott would be the odds on favorite.

On Tuesday, Mc Dermott struck again. The Washington state Democrat was given the honor of leading the House of Representatives in The Pledge of Allegiance. In discharging that duty, he did a bit of secularist editing, omitted the words "one nation, under God."

When asked to explain the revision, a spokesman for the Congressman replied that McDermott hesitated to recite the Pledge as written, because a 9th Circuit Appeals Court decision (declaring God in the Pledge unconstitutional) is currently under review by the U.S. Supreme Court. According to the psychiatrist-cum-politician, until the Supreme Court grants God a place in the Pledge, He should be left out.

Or, maybe McDermott thinks that invoking the God of Judaism and Christianity will offend Moslem fighters in Fallujah.

Unlike McDermott, Supreme Court justices did not travel to Baghdad to flack for Saddam prior to the war. Still the court is doing its part to give God the old heave-ho, weakening our moral defenses in the process. (Do the justices actually believe young Americans go into battle inspired by the latest judicial reinvention of the Constitution, instead of by the God of the Bible?)

While McTraitor was taking God out of the Pledge, the Supremes declined to hear an appeal from two lower court decisions banning cadets at the Virginia Military Institute from praying before meals.

We’ve all seen pictures of American military in Iraq praying in the field – and over the bodies of their fallen comrades. One can imagine Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg jumping out from behind a sand dune during one of these impromptu services, shouting: "Cease and desist! You’re shredding the Constitution. A state church is imminent!"

When it comes to removing religion from our public life, the Left (commanded by the ACLU, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and People for the American Way) marches triumphantly from victory to victory.

In the past 40 years, its banned school prayer (including silent meditation), eliminated graduation invocations, driven crèches and menorahs from public parks, taken carols out of school assemblies, purged Ten Commandments monuments and now has called into question God in the Pledge of Allegiance.

The atheist dad who initiated the Pledge case says he’ll next challenge House and Senate chaplains and the practice of opening sessions with a prayer. Can "In God We Trust" on our currency be far behind?

The Left claims its defending freedom of conscience. Apparently, for liberals, freedom of conscience begins and ends with those offended by religion.

Christian parents whose kids are given condoms in school or subjected to indoctrination in the guise of sex education, taxpayers compelled to subsidize the latest blasphemy from the National Endowment for the Arts, college students who are forced to listen to tax-paid Marxist propaganda spewed by their professors, traditional Catholics forced to fund population control – no one on the Left cares about their consciences.

God in the Pledge of Allegiance – what’s the big deal? No one is being forced to recite the pledge. It’s no longer mandatory in public schools. If they hear those fateful words, "One nation, under God, indivisible," will leftists faint, suffer emotional trauma requiring years of therapy, melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West?

It’s an excuse – and a weak one at that. I think even the most die-hard ACLU-er understands that the Founding Fathers weren’t Benjamin Spock, Margaret Sanger and George Soros, and that the Declaration of Independence isn’t the 18th century equivalent of the Humanist Manifesto II.

There’s more involved here than a need to maintain the mythical wall of separation. The Left’s antipathy to God and its hostility to America go hand-in-hand. It views both nationalism and traditional religion as outmoded and dangerous.

Marxists (the ideological precursors of modern liberals) expected God and the nation state to fade away together.

As they conceived it, the future would find mankind in a workers’ paradise with no need for flags, crosses and other symbols of a savage past. Marxists themselves were building on the legacy of the Jacobins of Revolutionary France, who closed churches, persecuted clerics and set up statues of a Goddess of Reason.

While some ‘60s radicals tried to harness religion to their cause (Fr. Drinan, the Berrigans and the Maryknoll Order come to mind), it was a fad whose fading echoes reverberate in the pronouncements of the National Council of Churches. The antiwar movement found more in common with the God-is-dead movement than with even the trendiest mainline churches.

Like the flag, God commands loyalty. Both the nation and traditional faith call for sacrifice. And while God and country can conflict, in America, religion provided the rationale for nationhood.

From the very beginning, the colonists viewed America as providential – working out God’s purpose in history.

Thus the multiple references to God in the Declaration of Independence. Thus the allusions to the Deity in the words of our greatest presidents ("That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom" – Abraham Lincoln.) Thus the appeals to God in times of trouble – "And this be our motto, in God is our trust." (The Star-Spangled Banner) "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" (World War II) and "God Bless America" on bumper-stickers that adorned a million cars after 9/11.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed: "Religion in America…must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it."

Confirmation of this observation may be found in the colonial churches that preached independence, and in the northern churches that preached abolition.

Perhaps the Left believes that spiritual sanitation will weaken America, thus facilitating the downfall of what it sees as the principal impediment to peace and justice in the world.

In his oft-quoted farewell address, George Washington (no secular humanist, he) advised his countrymen: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens."

For the Left, patriotism isn’t a tribute but a reproach. What Washington called supports and pillars, leftists view as obstacles to their deconstruction of America.

For the Left, it’s one nation under Gore, with income equality and racial justice for all.