Bonds and Bridges

Through last night's baseball action, mercifully, Henry Aaron continues to hold the Major League home run record. I grew up watching Mr. Aaron play for (mostly) bad Atlanta Braves teams, although they did come within--I believe--8 games or so of winning the division one year in the early 1970s. I attended a game in which he played, on September 25, 1972, when the Los Angeles Dodgers and Frank Robinson defeated the Braves 5-4 (a score I would some six years later find even more painful). Ron Reed started the game for Atlanta and I remember thinking when I saw him warming up before the game, "We're going to lose." Reed never pitched consistently well, although he did belong to the Phillies team that won the World Series in 1980. I was pleased for him, but also wish Phil Niekro--also a Brave on "my" day--could have done so as well.
All that aside, most of you remember I posted not too long ago about my--shall I say--intense disdain for Barry Lamar Bonds. Barring something horrific that I do not wish for him, Bonds will in reasonably short order pass Mr. Aaron and receive credit for hitting more home runs than anyone else in baseball history. I could care less as even if Bonds plays until he is 725 years old--his knees already seem about that age--Mr. Aaron will be, in Milo Hamilton's words on April 8, 1974, "the new home run champion in baseball." Alex Rodriguez will someday--without major injury--pass Mr. Aaron and You-Know-Who, for which I will applaud his well-earned and legitimate accomplishment. Maybe Albert Pujols will approach 755 as well. I'm venting, of course, and trying to not pay attention to the inevitable.
The past 24 hours have been occupied with the much more serious news from Minneapolis and the collapse of the bridge over the Mississippi River. Some of my friends have posted about it and wrote in their usual eloquent fashion. It's easy to blame, even when--as it seems--the lack of funding from Washington in the Bush era has helped to create the circumstances in which our national infrastructure has been neglected. Given that they were in near total power from 2003 through last January, the Republicans and their aversion to "gub-mint" must assume most of the responsbility for the context in which these events can occur. It's in the hands of Norman Coleman, the Republican Senator from Minnesota, to make clear that they will "own up" to the neglect they helped to foster. It's also in the hands of the majority Democrats to push unrelentingly the sort of non-telegenic legislative drudgery that is infrastructure update and repair. Most people, I think, get "glazed eye syndrome" when "infrastructure" is mentioned, except when something like yesterday takes place. Then all too often, overheated, accusatory emotionalism assumes control more than reasoned debate and the necessary political compromises that rest at the heart of our political system. The Democratic Senator from Minnesota--whose name I can't remember how to spell--is in the position, along with her Congressional colleagues, to presently choose between blaming "Norm Coleman, George Bush and the Republicans" or doing the hard work of legislating that will insure increased funding for our very real and apparent national needs. Hubert Humphrey was as partisan a Minnesota Democrat as there ever was, but he worked with Everett Dierksen, Gerald Ford and other Republicans for the good of the whole country, not just the faithful who happened to belong to the same party. If, in any case, Norm Coleman, George Bush and other current Republicans try somehow to blame Democrats (or, in Pat and Jerry's words after 9/11, homosexuals and "liberals") for yesterday, then the Democrats ought to respond with some unrepeatable advice from Lyndon Johnson. Or, as Bill Clinton reportedly said, if they try to cut you with a knife, you cut their hand off with a meat cleaver. Human tragedy and suffering ought to be beyond even the most partisan political pale. But, as ever these days, we'll see.