This is an important and exciting week for local sports fans. Both Vols basketball teams will play in the middle round of the NCAA basketball tournaments. And the Atlanta Braves open their 2024 season widely-rated major league baseball’s best club.
NCAA’s “March madness” occurs when underdog Davids defeat more highly-rated Goliaths enroute to the crowing of a national championship at the end of a long and grueling season. Baseball’s opening day on the other hand represents the start of an even more grueling season that culminates in late October’s World Series.
Even if we disagree on more important matters, many of you share my affinity for the Atlanta Braves. As such, we can agree that pre-season reputations do not guarantee anything. Record and talent-wise, the 2021 Braves could not match the teams of the last two years. But much to our shared delight they won the World Series while the 2022 and 2023 Braves disappointed us by falling in the first round of the playoffs.
This leads to a philosophical question with non-sports implications. How should we measure success — or lack thereof? As longtime, loyal Braves’ fans, should we judge them game by game? Or only at the end of an exhausting regular season followed by a series of playoffs when random factors such as injuries or a few players getting “hot” at an opportune moment distinguishes baseball’s “winners” from its “losers?”
Most fans typically consider end of year performance the marker of success. But the historian (and baseball fan) in me thinks otherwise. Indeed, as one who defines history as the remembered past, I am skeptical that that there is a single “right” standard for assessing past performance in any pursuit. Nor do I think there is ever a single “right lesson” to be learned from history. Our very subjective and fickle historical memories reveal more about us than they do about the times and people that we recall. And, like the generations before us, mine proves that the history we least understood is our own.
Let’s apply this premise to our own historical moment. Although, Donald Trump never exactly defined American “greatness,” clarified when it prevailed, or explained how it was lost, the fact that his signature MAGA message appeals to many of my fellow baby boomers is not coincidental.
We grew up in a truly exceptional era and — by its lofty standards — are disappointed with developments from our aging years. Once our parents realized that the Depression would not return with the end of World War II, they displayed a consensus unusual in US history. This was evident in widespread support for three great departures from long standing traditions. First, the recent war taught our “greatest generation” that, as the world’s preeminent economic power, they should not repeat their World War I era forebear’s futile “return to isolationism.” Real and perceived threats from our erstwhile World War II ally, the Soviet Union, affirmed this impulse leading to Cold War policies that shaped our global role until the 1990s.
World War II also affirmed lessons from the Great Depression and New Deal that led that same generation to selectively abandon an inherited preference for limited government. Rightly or wrongly, this eventually led to what paranoid critics now deem “the deep state.” Finally, our early Cold War forebears cautiously re-envisioned “we the people” to include persons who had long been denied that status.
Undergirding these great departures was a relatively widely-shared, presumably permanent prosperity. Both cause and consequences of our newfound global economic hegemony, this prosperity drew from our inherited capitalist tradition and two factors that had shaped our republic since its beginning: relative abundance and a generously-insulated geographical location.
Thanks to two wide oceans ours was the only industrial economy in tact in 1945. This gave American factories and workers almost sole access to global markets for a generation. The resulting affluence fueled the aforementioned departures and reignited a quest for a lofty, elusive greatness defined by the preambles to our Declaration of Independence and Constitution and reaffirmed by the 14th Amendment. Leaders who “(chose) to go to the moon” and dreamed about ending such age-old ills as racism and poverty reflected and affirmed our sense of no limits.
Ironically, the great departures along with history’s ever-churning nature undermined the illusion of permanent prosperity that bankrolled those very departures. Along with technological and communications advances that we developed, new global commitments sacrificed benefits geography had long bestowed on us. A major casualty was our era’s unprecedented cohesion and consensus.
By the 1970s, limits — military defeat in Vietnam, “stagflation” that was both cause and consequence of overspending, and intertwined environmental and energy crises confounded us. Over the past half-century, denying and evading those limits has only perpetuated our disappointment. Meanwhile, ever-churning history has brought a host of new crises: terrorism, public health pandemics, and income disparities rooted in economic globalization. Today’s confusion, cynicism, and polarization are rooted in these realities.
How should Americans remember the years of we baby boomer’s youth? Yes, they were truly exceptional. First, we advanced our nation’s historic quest for greatness — even as we fell short of those ideals. But the circumstances that allowed this were also exceptional (i.e. not normal) and the notion they can be renewed is like me at 73 presuming I can do everything I did 50 years ago.
Are we better served by nostalgic notions about restoring a selectively-sanitized past greatness? Or might more honest, if less pleasant remembered pasts that the likes of our Tennessee state legislators dismiss and ban as “divisive” be more instructive?
As we ponder this sobering question, sports offers a respite. Not to evade nor deny the serious challenges of our historical moment but to reenergize our quest for a greatness appropriate to today’s realities. Go Lady Vols, Vols and Braves!
