October Baseball Takes Over Everything
Plus, a Bishop, a Smith, an actress, and an increasingly disgruntled cartoon character.
No op-ed this week, ergo a short edition of this “news”letter.
While The Thoughtful Spot sprints away from political endorsements, it endorses the Texas Rangers unequivocally in the 2023 World Series (the Dodgers’ NL West rivals delenda est).
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a charming profile of the Rangers’ most improbable postseason hero, 21-year-old rookie Evan Carter. Carter — who debuted in September and before the playoffs had seen just 62 big-league at bats — emerged from East Tennessee obscurity.
Much about his journey to the Bigs is unusual. His selection as the 50th overall pick in the 2020 draft interrupted his plans to pursue a career in dentistry, he declined to participate in the exorbitantly expensive meat grinder of pre-professional teen baseball, and a Covid-shortened senior season kept him hidden from other teams’ scouts.
It’s an old-timey, feel-good story in an era in which the MLB seems determined to ditch so much of the game’s history and tradition.
Some Wisdom
Alexander William Salter recently published The Spirit of ‘76, an incredibly useful examination of libertarianism, government, and the American Founding. His own arguments merit extensive discussion, but he also includes several wonderful quotes from various thinkers. A couple are below, slightly extended.
From Abraham Bishop, a friend of Thomas Jefferson:
A nation which makes greatness its polestar can never be free; beneath national greatness sink individual greatness, honor, wealth and freedom. But though history, experience and reasoning confirm these ideas; yet all-powerful delusion has been able to make the people of every nation lend a helping hand in putting on their own fetters and rivetting their own chains, and in this service delusion always employs men too great to speak the truth, and yet too powerful to be doubted. Their statements are believed – their projects adopted – their ends answered and the deluded subjects of all this artifice are left to passive obedience through life, and to entail a condition of unqualified non-resistance to a ruined posterity.
From Adam Smith:
The man of [a political] system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess–board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess–board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess–board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it.
Some Beauty
Dame Judi Dench recently appeared on the Graham Norton show, and when prompted, she uncorked an impromptu and astonishingly beautiful recitation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29.
Some Humor
With a new speaker in the House, Congress can begin to prepare for its regularly scheduled end-of-year legislative mayhem.
Schoolhouse Rock’s primer on the legislative process has accordingly received an update.
