The Unmistakable Glimmers of Hope

Hidden deep within the noise, we still find hope that we have what it takes to survive as a people.

Announcement: The American War on Election Corruption (my new book), has been published for a month now and still holds multiple #1 positions on the Amazon bestseller lists. Please purchase a copy for yourself, your friends, or your legislator.

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By May 25, 1935, Babe Ruth was all but finished. He was 40, overweight, and lacked the tremendous bat speed he once possessed as the most feared hitter in America’s national pastime. His 1934 season had been his least productive year at the plate since 1918, and after that season, the New York Yankees released him so he could sign with the National League’s Boston Braves.

For 22 games, he was awful - a hollow shell of what fans remembered him to be. But in that 23rd game, at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, time turned back and the unimaginable happened. Ruth blasted three home runs, including the final (714th) one of his career, which cleared the roof in right field and escaped the confines of the stadium altogether:

With that score intact and Bush still pitching, Ruth came up for the fourth time in the top of the seventh with one out and the bases empty. By now the crowd was solidly on the Bambino’s side and rooted enthusiastically for more of his old magic. The Babe obliged. Career home run No. 714 came on a 3-1 count and bettered the earlier efforts, majestically clearing Forbes Field’s right field roof—for the first time in the ballpark’s 26-year history. “The way he smacked it, you knew it was gone. The crowd just roared,” Paul Warhola, brother of iconic Pittsburgh pop artist Andy Warhol, remembered. “He was fat and old but he still had that great swing,” was sportswriter Robert W. Creamer’s retrospective take.

After rounding the bases in a 1935 version of his classic trot, Babe saluted the fans with a tipped cap, and then excused himself from the game. Sole access to the visiting clubhouse was through the Pittsburgh dugout. Enroute, he briefly plopped himself down at the end of the bench and told rookie Pirate pitcher Mace Brown, “Boy, that last one felt good!”

Ruth’s final home run, #714

Ruth played five more games, and never even got another base hit. He hung up the spikes for good after a May 30 game in Philadelphia. Yet the legend of Babe Ruth came alive one final time the week before, and is captured within the pages of history as a reminder of what he once was as baseball aligned itself with the emergence of the United States as the world’s budding superpower.

Today, America is most definitely in decline. Sure, we can zoom in and look at snippets we prefer, like some election results, but zoomed out from the 1990s to present, we have far more bad than good, and definitely far more states choked out by the swollen bureaucracy than we had at the turn of the 21st century. I have written about this zoomed out view and how it relates to the rest of this century and China, particularly when discussing why I believe we are engaged in conflict with Iran:

Militarily, the United States remains unrivaled. China is decades away from being able to match our firepower (and our ability to project it), but by God, they are trying. If you want an idea of what their goals are, this is a great book to read:

Those of you who know me and my work realize that I read trends and use benchmarks and existing data to forecast the future. My assessment is that if the American decline continues for another three decades, and China continues to rise, then we are poised for serious conflict at the mid-century point. We appear to be living through what The Fourth Turning (a must read) describes as a “climax period” that will either reverse our decline, or entrench it.

The seizure of Nicolas Maduro in January reinforced my belief that our operators still have what it takes to do spectacular things unrivaled in military history. Algorithms and the dopamine cycle have memory holed anything that happened in Venezuela (which now is of no value to China), and focused people on the negative “what ifs” surrounding the conflict in Iran. However, the rescue of the unnamed Air Force colonel who went missing after the downing of the F-15E Strike Eagle conjures up some amazing imagery that shows that, at least in some ways, America is still America.