In his new book White Guilt, Shelby Steele describes
listening to early reports on his car radio about the
Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and feeling certain that the president was
finished. He reflects that, when he was a boy, if President
Eisenhower had done something like this, he would have had to
resign immediately. He remembers also that Eisenhower was rumored
to use a racial epithet to refer to blacks when he played golf, but
doing so (if in fact Eisenhower had) was not seen as a major sin
then. Yet if Clinton had been caught out using a racial epithet in
1998, he would probably have been destroyed. Realizing that
Clinton’s sexual transgression was no longer viewed in the same way
as it had once been, Steele writes that “it was the good luck of
each president to sin into the moral relativism of his era rather
than into its puritanism.”
The accuracy of Steele’s observations is well demonstrated in
the recent flap over derogatory comments made by Chicago White Sox
manager Ozzie Guillen regarding a Chicago columnist, Jay Mariotti.
In an obscenity-laced tirade, Guillen referred to Mariotti as a
“fag.” Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, who took nearly ten years
to investigate the rather obvious doping that was going on in
baseball, pounced instantly on Guillen, ordering him to sensitivity
training.
Guillen is a vulgarian who, as others have pointed out (see
especially here),
would have been taken to the woodshed long before now if he had
been a non-Hispanic white man. His use of a derogatory term that is
unfortunately a staple of locker rooms and playgrounds hardly
required bureaucratic intervention. Where was Mariotti with a
combative or colorful riposte? Mariotti claimed that “people call
me worse when I’m ordering coffee in the morning at Starbucks,” but
in the next breath he called for Guillen’s suspension.
If we were back in the Eisenhower 1950s that Shelby Steele
remembers, we would find it hard to believe that Ozzie Guillen was
in more trouble than, say, someone who had repeatedly insulted the
U.S. military. Yet that is the situation: Guillen is in the
doghouse, while the New York Mets’ Carlos Delgado is a figure of
moral integrity.
Until his arrival in New York this season, Delgado had refused
to stand to honor American troops overseas in the seventh inning of
games because he objects to the war in Iraq. He has consented to do
so this year at the request of the Mets, who do not engage in the
ritual for every home game, as their crosstown rivals the Yankees
do. Delgado has been for the most part celebrated by the media for
his supposedly courageous stand. Selig has never ordered Delgado to
sensitivity training so that he could better appreciate the effects
of his behavior on grieving military families. To borrow Steele’s
terms, Delgado has sinned into the moral relativism of his
time.
It’s a time in which patriotism is a subjective virtue at best,
always flexible enough to be redefined by whoever is rejecting its
most elemental requirements. Hence Delgado’s protest has been
lauded by more than one sportswriter as a demonstration of what
America is all about.
A different kind of man than Delgado could have reasoned that it
really didn’t matter what his opinion was about a particular
military conflict when he was merely being asked to honor those
fighting in it. He might even have reasoned that he owed such
individuals his respect all the more, given his view of the
conflict in which they were engaged.
And, finally, he might have realized that, being a citizen
(Delgado is Puerto Rican) of a country that has made him rich, the
decent thing to do would be to go along and bow his head and keep
his addled thoughts about American foreign policy to himself. That
would require humility, though, and humility is always in conflict
with the demands of an overdeveloped ego.
Like Clinton’s affairs, Delgado’s pompous display of ingratitude
is just a matter of opinion, an issue about which we are not
permitted to pronounce definitive judgment. This same subjectivity
is absent when it comes to Ozzie Guillen’s language for people he
dislikes. Ozzie didn’t have the good sense to thumb his nose at men
and women who die for the country that has enriched him. Instead,
he called a reporter a bad name. He should have picked his fights
better.
Guillen could still redeem himself, though: he could call
President Bush a fag. That would build some bridges for him. But
he’d still be a long way from playing in Carlos Delgado’s
league.
