Nice Guys Finish First
As Bart Giamatti said, let us abolish evil and restore paradise
Holy Week beckons, and snakes slither out of their holes.
Iagos and Sammy Glicks of all races and ethnicities generate noise and feign contrition, while they promote themselves as longtime political players or entertainment and media moguls.
They think that they can intimidate us.
And they try to defend the liars as well as the wizard of Oz, who has propped them up.
For so long, they have touted themselves as super geniuses, like Wile E. Coyote, or that other self-proclaimed, very stable genius.
But the traps they have set will backfire and only trap themselves.
The Road Runner wins every race.
More importantly, so does God.
Of course, the wizard of Oz and his minions posture.
They believe only in the power of evil, the power of war, of kompromat.
They desperately want to think that those of us who are on the side of good are the ones who are posturing.
They are greatly mistaken.
They might heed the words of Bobby Dylan and depart from the evil that is near and even kin to them.
“I ain’t gonna go to hell for anybody, not for father, not for mother, not for sister, not for brother, no way…”
Some of us know the truth.
Irrespective of whether people believe in God, they should know that in the end the good guys do win.
Leo Durocher, the baseball manager, famously proclaimed that nice guys finish last.
He was wrong.
And so is the devil, who is playing a losing hand. As are the Pharisees and all of those who attempt to cover for the wizard of Oz and the windowless mausoleum, or bunker, where he presides.
Unlike the wizard of Oz and his minions, all of whom are jealous of creative writers, Bart Giamatti was a literary maven and a language artist of the spoken and written word.
In the late 1970s, in what I believe was his first proclamation as president of Yale, Giamatti said that the school needed to abolish evil and restore paradise.
Some may have mocked him when he made that formal announcement.
But Giamatti was right.
There is evil, inherent evil, in secret societies like Skull & Bones.
The university is a beautiful one.
But light must shine on the truth. And it will. It already has.
The truth is that there is more good than evil in the world, and both exist everywhere, including at Ivy League schools, the White House, the Pentagon and media outlets.
The so-called masters of war are trying to destroy our democracy and our lives, threatening to take away the right to vote, even when our mail-in ballots are postmarked by election day, seizing ballots in Riverside County, California, and in Georgia on dubious legal grounds, and of course lying about the ruinous war in Iran.
Like Trump, these “masters” are jealous of people, who overflow with love, who overflow with art.
The masters of war will fail, and they will all be revealed.
And that is because God sees everything, and God is all-powerful.
As Bobby Dylan sings, “The iron hand, it ain’t no match for the iron rod.”
Fortunately, there are honorable people in the world, who perform good deeds.
Perhaps, they were Boy Scouts when they were young.
Years ago, I had a friend, who was indeed a scout.
He was also an avid reader when we were little. He loved the books of Roald Dahl as well as the stories and illustrations in Mad Magazine. He used to ask me if I was related to Al Jaffee, the cartoonist for the magazine.
My friend was a brilliant kid and a Renaissance man.
Not only was he a chess champion, like his middle brother; he was also a football quarterback, like his oldest brother.
And he had a sister, who, like my friend, was extremely gifted at reading and finding books in our public school library. In fact, they both won trophies and a large, baked toll house cookie for being the library champ, back in the days when card catalogs proliferated.
Perhaps, most importantly, this friend of mine had courage and integrity.
He was a Boy Scout, who truly lived by the principles of the Golden Rule.
He also had remarkable emotional intelligence.
Back in the 1970s, when we were dear friends, he invited me to join him at a neighborhood swim and tennis club.
He was very upset that my family had not been invited to join the club.
We were not invited to join because we were Jewish, and this bothered my friend, who was Catholic.
In my last piece, I wrote about Gavin Newsom’s courage in speaking so openly about his dyslexia, courage that he evidences all the time when he stands up to Trump on all kinds of issues.
In that piece, “Dyslexia Is a Way of Thinking Differently,” I alluded to a villain from my childhood named Dick, who pretended that we were best friends in kindergarten.
I will not give too much space to Dick in this post. As I have written before, Dick tried for decades to sabotage my friendships with so many people, including my dear friend, the Boy Scout, who joined us at Spring Glen School in second grade after going to Catholic school for a few years.
My dear friend lived just down the block from me.
Both of our homes were located by a brook that ran across the street and through a neighbor’s yard.
When I first encountered my dear friend on the lower playing field at Spring Glen School, he hailed me as Rober-dert Bob-adert, a reference to a character from a children’s book, if I am not mistaken.
In response, I made a ditty out of his last name, a rather harmless one that revolved around going potty and humor.
This Boy Scout and I soon became dear friends, in spite of an initial disconnect that came about due to Dick’s attempt at sabotage.
The Boy Scout and I got beyond that moment of awkwardness and teasing.
He taught me how to play chess, a game I played only for a couple of years but one that I enjoyed.
And he taught me how to catch a football, how to tuck it into my chest.
He was a wonderful friend, who stood up for me throughout our childhoods and after.
I believe in the eternal nature of the soul.
And I believe that we have all been here before, in different incarnations, sometimes over the course of one lifetime.
I have been friends with this gentleman many, many times, over the millennia.
And we have always been friends in this lifetime, more than once.
I love my dear friend, who believes deeply in the Golden Rule and in shining a light on the truth.
Someday, this Boy Scout, a Renaissance man, and I will reconnect.
Maybe, we already have.
At a time when our nation’s leaders are caving into lies from bullies and the so-called masters of war, I hail my friend and all of my old friends, who know the truth, who do good deeds, who apologize when they have made errors, who ask for forgiveness when they have hurt other people, and who believe in living a life of decency and honor as patriots and humanitarians.
There are more good people than bad on this planet.
And good will prevail in the end.
Yes, nice guys finish first!
Bart Giamatti would concur, as would my dear friend, both of them Renaissance men.
Giamatti was in fact a scholar of Renaissance poetry as well as Major League Baseball Commissioner.
He, like so many of us, would take heart in the verse of William Wordsworth and its sentiment of hard-earned optimism.
“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.”