Auchtoon!

The University of Michigan baseball team didn’t win the College World Series, but they got closer than any Michigan teams have in a while. It’s nice to have a Michigan baseball team (professional or otherwise) that does well enough to play in a championship.

If you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, I don’t blame you. I’m a fairly big sports fan, but college baseball has never been in my wheelhouse (which is a baseball thing sportsy people say roughly meaning “it’s not my cup of tea”). The season starts in the spring in places where there is a spring (the south and west, not Michigan), and then finishes during the longest days of summer when we can comfortably be outside in Michigan.

Also, I don’t get the end-of-season format. For me, how the College World Series works is like how annuities function or how cribbage is played: I have the capacity to understand, and they have been explained to me several times, but I have the complete inability to retain any of it.

What is in my wheelhouse is the Women’s World Cup and the United States team. I can explain ad nauseam the nuances of group stage, knockout stage, goal differentials, shootouts, and so on. (Don’t ask if you don’t want to know.) Alas, the next game for the U.S. team after my deadline — a quarterfinal game against host France.

I’m hoping they win because I am a big fan and an American. But, honestly, also because there are some much richer editorial cartoon prospects to mine from women’s soccer — the equal pay for women issue, the pre-emptive rejection of a White House visit, LGBTQ rights. I’ll get it started here and maybe follow up in the coming weeks: Megan Rapinoe is the Muhammed Ali of our generation. Discuss.

Credit where credit is due — this is a variation of the classic Walt Kelly cartoon where his character Pogo observes the swamp that he and his friends live in (and trashed), declaring, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Sometimes we can be the worst. But let me be absolutely clear here: I am not in any way saying that politicians are never the source of road, environment, and health care issues. They can be and they have been. What I am saying is that it’s not a binary thing — it doesn’t have to be either them or us. It can be both.

I know. It’s June in Michigan — I should have sunnier thoughts, but you know how it’s been. I think it’s a combination of the weather and the massive amount of road construction everywhere. I should be grateful, and I will be grateful, but…

I think my son put it best in a recent tweet: “Hey Grand Rapids, so first of all thank you for fixing the roads but do you think you could maybe leave just one or two of them open?”

To be clear: I’m proud of our nation, our history, and especially our ideals. I am proud to be an American. But some of the things we do just mystify me.

This past week the Michigan Board of Education approved an update to the curriculum for social science studies in Michigan. There was some controversy. Initially, some standards proposed by conservatives hewed too closely to their unique views of the world. Those were cut back, but the standards approved by the Board have been assailed as inaccurate and anti-Christian. It all seems like an excellent prompt for a classroom of young minds to learn civil discourse and critical thinking. But unfortunately it’s mostly a crude game for political points.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be reacting (overreacting?) to all this in a normal week. But this is the week that The New York Times decided it would no longer run political cartoons. A brief backstory: In April, a Times editor decided to run a syndicated cartoon in its international edition depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a guide dog wearing a Star of David collar tag and leading a blind, yarmulke-wearing President Trump. It was widely seen as anti-Semitic. Because it was.

The Times appropriately apologized and promised corrective action. First, they over-corrected by announcing they would no longer use syndicated cartoons. Then this week they WAY over-corrected sacking their staff cartoonists, the brilliant Patrick Chappatte and Heng Kim Song, to bring the international edition “…into line with the domestic paper by ending daily political cartoons.” (The flagship Times paper famously and inexplicably has not had a daily cartoonist for decades.)

There are much deeper weeds for me to get into here, but I don’t want to drag you all down into the specifics of my obvious self-interest. Let me just say this: When political points or job safety become more important than thoughtful discussion, we become less American (or at least the kind of American we ought to be).

I see that Hulu has new mini-series of the Joseph Heller novel, Catch-22. It looks intriguing, but I don’t know if I’ll check it out. First, my Hulu/Netflix/Amazon queue is already impossibly backlogged. Second, it’s summer in Michigan for godsake — there will be plenty of winter for screen-based entertainment. But mostly because I read Catch-22 at exactly the right time in my life, as a 17 year-old primed and ready to learn just how ludicrous the world can be. I don’t want to mess with the perfect picture in my head.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term Catch-22 or in need of a refresher, I can explain it this way: Say the president of your country tells lies. He or she (let’s go with “he” for simplicity here) says and even tweets things that are demonstrably not true. A lot. Like, a staggering amount of times.

Now say you’re a journalist, a real one with training and ethics and everything. All this lying is a problem. He’s the elected leader of the country! So you do your job, report the lies, and provide the objective facts you have researched to back this up.

The President doesn’t like this, so he says something like, “Fake News!” But when you point out that this is a lie, he says “Fake News! Fake News! Fake News!” The more you report the lies, the more he lies. And if you didn’t report the lies, he would say his lies are true because nobody reported them as lies.

That’s the catch. Catch-22.