Baseball, Hardball and Chris Matthews' Racist Wild Pitch

When Mighty Casey struck out, he may have disappointed the fans of Mudville, but he didn’t insult them. He didn’t brand them racists. Or at least Ernest Lawrence Thayer–the poet who immortalized Casey’s big whiff–didn’t mention any such calumnious castigations in his delightful ditty of the diamond.

But this isn’t 1888–the publication date of Casey at the Bat. No, it’s 2011–the much more modern and much less civilized era of loudmouthed serial interrupters like “Hardball’s” Chris Matthews, who makes rude conquerors like Alexander the Great look polite by comparison.

Used as I (and I suspect you) am to Matthews’ cheesecloth logic and scattershot, half-cocked accusations, I make it a point to miss “Hardball” as often as possible. When Fate is kind, on any given week I am able to miss all five episodes of The Interrupter’s Diatribe-Disguised-as-Dialogue program. Not catching Chris’ hour of senile logorrhea gives one a rare feeling of euphoria–akin to finding a free parking spot in downtown Chicago on a Saturday night, or–back in the days when apartment life compelled me to frequent laundromats–finding a vacant dryer with time still paid for on it. Missing “Hardball” is just one of those simple pleasures in life that puts a little extra spring in your step and a smile on your face. I’m grateful to MSNBC for affording me this little weekly bit of heaven on earth–missing “Hardball”–especially now that I can no longer thrill to missing “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” five times a week.

So it was at my own peril that, while channel-surfing on Friday afternoon, I chose to tune in to the end of the ironically-named Hardball. Here was the Addled Accuser interviewing Jimmy Breslin on Branch Rickey, Breslin’s new book about the man who engineered Jackie Robinson’s stunning move into baseball and, more stunningly, into the annals of racial history.

The man behind the man who broke baseball’s color barrier. It seemed an innocuous enough subject–after all, it wasn’t the national deficit, Obamacare, or the 2012 Presidential election. It was a feel-good story about our national pastime. Surely the Mighty Matthews would bench his tired tirade for his remaining five televised minutes of the week. Wouldn’t he?

Ah, but we underestimate the petty poison of a man weighed down by his own private Atlas-sized boulder of unexpiated white guilt. No, rather than confine the conversation to the story at hand, the Sultan of Shame threw a wild pitch curveball at Jimmy B. The latter hit it right back to the mound, where Matthews attempted to turn it into a double play of dirtballs and demonization.

For the record, here’s the whole interview, from MSNBC’s website:

But it’s after the interview had ostensibly ended that Matthews hurled his knuckleball. At the 4:53 mark of the 5:17 interview, Matthews and Breslin had the following final colloquy:

THE INTERRUPTER: Do you think…back to my question. Were the whites afraid of black competition? That’s why they kept blacks out of baseball for all those decades?

BRESLIN: Just because they’re black.

T.I.: It was just racial prejudice.

BRESLIN: That’s plenty. You don’t need anything else. They’re against Obama. What are they against Obama for?

T.I.: That’s what I think, my friend. Thank you.

BRESLIN: It’s race.

And there you have it. Two old white guys sitting around, projecting their unexpiated white guilt over slavery onto anyone who opposes Obama.

For thimble-deep thinkers like Matthews and Breslin, no, “you don’t need anything else.” Feel free to oppose Obama based on the color of his skin.

But for the rest of us, unburdened by the Matthews/Breslin boulder of white guilt, we have plenty of reasons to oppose Obama that haven’t a damn thing to do with his pigmentation. And by the way, the last time I checked Marx, Lenin and Stalin were all white.

If Obamacare had been the signature legislation of a white man it would be no less oppressive and no less liberty-robbing–and no less destined for repeal. If the $850 billion stimulus bill had been signed by a white man it would have been no less a failure. If the unrelenting redistributionist hunger for government control over states and the civil society were the trademark of a white president, it would be no less hateful or harmful.

Ironically, today’s greatest bigots are the white-on-white Chris Matthews variety, men and women who slander entire swaths of the conservative electorate with blithe and facile accusations of racism made because they cannot refute the real truth: that maybe, just maybe, Obama’s policies are dangerous not because he is a black man but because, regardless of the color of who’s proposing them, they erode our economic liberties in the sanctimoniously utopian name of (so-called) social justice.

But confronting that reality would entail something guilt-blind Matthews is incapable of: reason.

Unlike Mighty Casey, probably no modern-day Thayer will ever dignify Matthews with a poem. But if one ever did, it would end the exact same way: Mighty Matthews Has Struck Out.