The farmer let the local boys use one of his back pastures to play baseball. One day he was walking behind the outfield and cupped his hands to his lips and yelled to the outfielder, "What's the score?"
"Twenty-five to nothin'," replied the outfielder.
"Twenty-five you or 25 them?" asked the farmer.
"Twenty-five them," replied the outfielder.
"You all ain't doin' too well, are you?" yelled the farmer.
"Well," came the thoughtful answer from the outfielder, "It's really too early to tell. Our team ain't been to bat yet!"
Is it possible – just barely, vaguely, conceivably, faintly possible – that OUR team, the – name it: Republican, conservative, the opposite of the Clinton-Gore team – has finally come to bat?
The average lottery winner looks at least 26 times at his ticket to check it against the winning numbers before he believes it. That's what I'm doing right now with what's gone on since the election and, at this point, it looks like we may be winners far beyond defeating Al Gore and today's Democrats.
(As a Southerner and, until 1968, a lifelong Democrat voter I still cannot bash "the Democrats." I have too much respect for the Democrats That Were. I carefully confine my bashing solely to "Today's Democrats." If you want an explanation, I'll be happy to write it all out, but it'll take 189 clicks of your page-down button to get to the bottom of it.)
My basic training in the Army took eight weeks. Is it possible our crowd mastered the basics in only those five short weeks between the election and the concession? I mean, "we" were there shouting, "Let us in!" to a global audience when the Dade County Democrats wanted to move the vote-counting operation to a more secure club room upstairs.
"We" were there, in fact, EVERYWHERE when Jesse Jackson tried valiantly to organize street mobs in the south Florida counties to protest their "disenfranchisement." Jesse had a terrible time picking a spot where he could even emerge from his limousine without the TV audience being treated to views of mobs of our teammates chanting, "Jesse, go home!" instead of the intended friendly crowds shouting the desired, "Hand-count our ballots!"
If you see Jesse, tell him there's a paradox. Although an overwhelming statistical per capita majority of civil rights demonstrators down through the decades were Jewish, the overwhelming majority of Jews don't demonstrate!
Every rural Romanian's fear is that, contrary to legend, Dracula will not melt down into beeswax and goat yogurt when his intended victim brandishes a cross. This time, for a change, "our" crowds refused to melt down at accusations of fraud, fascism, theft, chad-rape, bullyism, Katherine Harris being a Republican, and George Bush's brother being governor of the disputed state. I've been part of our crowd long enough to remember when any single one of those accusations would have turned our kneecaps into guava jelly and precipitated instant capitulation.
I can recall a day when one of OUR people – forget THEIR people – would have said: "Look. We don't want to win this in the COURTS, do we?" Instead, our people picked up the available weapons of the Florida courts and the U.S. Supreme Court as readily as our GIs in World War II picked up fallen Browning automatic rifles and enemy hand grenades from the battlefield in order to prevail.
Yes, I miss the thrill I used to feel when my team scored touchdowns "standing up," untouched by enemy hands as the ball carrier crossed the goal line. Sure, I wish Bush had sucked Gore up the exhaust pipe and given him a Nixon-McGovern or a Bush-Dukakis beating. But I've mellowed with age and now embrace the less-juicy glory of the goal-line pileup the video replay shows to be the winning touchdown by a quarter of an inch.
The mighty New York Times itself front-paged a piece just before Christmas detailing how the Gore forces were simply "outgunned" by the Bush forces during those five fickle and fateful weeks after the election. Gee! When did our team learn to "outgun" the other side instead of wafting away in a purple smog whenever the other side pointed the bony finger of indignation into our face?
How did we learn? Who taught us to spring the length of our chains and sink our fangs into them, the way they always used to do unto us while we stood paralyzed pondering the charges against us and assuming we MUST be guilty or all those loud and angry Americans with the signs and banners wouldn't be so upset? Who taught us at long last to do unto others exactly what they were doing unto us?
A black protests. A Jew protests. A Haitian protests. Who finally taught us that the minority protester is not necessarily always right, and that no race or religion is kissed by tongues of flame that automatically render its grievance holy and just?
When the overhandled ballots degenerated into an emulsified mass of gelatinous indecipherability and it was no longer physically possibility to ascertain the rightful winner, it became a battle whose outcome depended on a quality celebrated in the 1950s Broadway musical "Damn Yankees." You remember: "You Gotta Have HEART!"
Somehow we found that "heart" just in time. The British were not braver than the French at the battle of Waterloo. They were merely brave five minutes longer.
And so were we in the battle of southeast Florida.
He who arrives at bat may very well thereupon strike out. But that's better than never arriving at bat at all.
With a gingerness born of experience, I hereby smilingly conclude that our team has finally arrived at bat.
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