Alles in Ordnung

Another lifetime ago it seems, I was on the mother of all art courier trips, bringing a major photography exhibit from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (its first ever photography exhibition), to the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. The trip involved a truck drive through the Russian/Finnish border, an adventure in itself, an overnight stay in Helsinki, an overnight ferry across the North Sea to Lubeck, Germany, then back on the truck for the final leg of the journey to Hamburg. 

That trip was just slightly less eventful than the first leg of the adventure when I originally brought the show to St. Petersburg from Chicago. I could write a book on that one. One of the greatest pleasures of the first trip was meeting Hessu, the Finnish truckdriver with whom I spent in addition to the time it took to drive from the Finnish capital to the magnificent city on the Neva, eight hours at the aforementioned border in the middle of the night in the middle of a Finnish winter, waiting in a several mile long line of other trucks trying to get into Russia. 

We had lots of time together Hessu and I, obviously, and we became fast friends. I can't describe my joy when later that year, waiting for my ride while standing in the courtyard of what was once the Winter Palace of the Russian Tzars (until the Bolsheviks stormed it on October 26,1917), and learned that it would be none other than Hessu, driving my cargo and me from Russia to Germany, 

Hessu's job took him far and wide. Like every Finn who expects to spend time outside of his country, he spoke a number of languages, although I don't recall him being able to speak Russian. There, what seems to have become the lingua-franca of much of the world, English had to suffice, which was really helpful for poor, pitiful, mono-lingual me. 

Truly an international man, much of our conversations centered around his adventures hauling freight throughout the continent. He wasn't shy talking about the characteristics of people from the various countries he spent so much of his life in, including his own, where it seemed he spent the least of his time.

In our day and age, we tend to shun ethnic stereotypes. I'm not talking about cartoonish depictions of say the drunken Irishman, the penny-pinching Scot, or the Italian with mob ties, although those things do indeed exist. But the reality is, stereotypes don't come out of thin air, and people tend to in one degree or other reflect the values, customs and traditions of their cultural identity and the place they come from. 

Why wouldn't they? 

Perhaps because of their connection with the events surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust, one group that no one seems to have problems stereotyping are the Germans.

Germans, the cartoonish stereotype goes, drink copious amounts of beer, the men wear lederhosen, the women dirndls and everyone socks with sandals, they are humorless, strictly efficient, punctual to the second, and above all, have an almost religious devotion to rules. The latter of these traits many believe, is a contributing factor to the rise and acceptance of Nazism and the Holocaust in the 30s and 40s. I don't necessarily buy that but it's a subject for another post.

Hessu's take on the Germans was their almost super-human efficiency. He pointed out the German expression that he felt defined the German people more than any other: "alles in ordnung." Literally it means "everything in order" but it is used in several contexts including asking someone if they're OK as in: "is everything in order?"

Well as they say, in a case of life imitating art, when we reached our destination in Hamburg and unloaded the nineteen crates containing the exhibition, we asked the person responsible for packing at the museum if we could help him place the crates in storage. He politely declined saying that he had a detailed plan on where the crates would go and it would take too much time for us to hang around to implement it. He then showed us his plan which was an intricate to-scale drawing, created by the hand of someone who was obviously a grand master champion of Tetris, with each crate tightly interwoven into its own place, leaving no room for error. Which meant that if one of the crates had been measured wrong, even by an inch, the whole plan would have to be scrapped. Unfortunately, the crate sizes provided to him were not complied by another German, so.... We didn't stick around to check how it all turned out, but hopefully for the best. 

I have another little anecdote of an experience in Germany. My wife and I were visiting friends in Frankfurt. From there we were headed to Prague and our friends helped us find the trains that would get us there. In this particular itinerary, there was to be one stop where we would need to switch trains. I asked how much layover time there would be between trains, assuming it would be about an hour or so. It was four minutes. "Isn't that cutting it a little tight?" I asked my friend, "...what if our first train runs late?". "Don't worry" was his response.

Well, it turned out our first train was indeed running late, by about a minute and a half, which is why the efficiency of the trains is a constant source of frustration for most Germans. I was sweating bullets fearing that we wouldn't have enough time to de-board our train, then find the track of our next train to make the connection. 

Turns out we had plenty of time.

As I mentioned in several previous posts, I've been studying German for the past year or so. I've discovered over the years a very useful resource for language learning is YouTube videos. In several of the German videos I've been watching are references to stereotypes about Germans and how in fact, a lot of them are founded in reality. According to them, and these videos are made by Germans mind you, most German people are indeed obsessed with punctuality, tidiness, order and rules. So just deal with it OK?

But I stumbled across another video, this one in English and made by an ex-pat Brit living in Germany named Benjamin Antoine. That could be the reason that his YouTube channel is called "Brit in Germany". The aim of his channel as you can imagine is to describe the cultural differences between Germany and especially the UK, but also other cultures, that expats living in Germany might experience. 

The title to this particular video is Freedom Isn't the Point Here and in it, he points out that there is a much deeper meaning to all the perceived rigidity found amongst the Germans. 

Here is a link to the video.

I won't go into details because I highly recommend you watch the video, but the point of his thesis can be summed up in the following "money quote": 

Germany isn't structured around individual freedom, it's structured around shared responsibility.

In other words, all the rules, regulations, personal habits and the rest, do not exist out of some irrational compulsion, but out of a sincere desire, to make society work for everyone. 

Here's more from the video's notes:

There is a core difference to how German society is structure as opposed to American or British society. It all comes down to the individual vs. the collective. In Britain and the US, the self comes first. In Germany, the structure and the system come first. 

Now of course I am generalising here but American values and to a lesser extent British values prize autonomy. German values prize reliability. And neither is right or wrong. But they produce very different lives.

As an example, Antoine points out in the video something I was already well aware of, that the Germans are diligent about recycling. Unlike Americans at least here in Chicago where if we do bother to recycle, we just throw all our recyclable material into one bin where someone in a recycling center allegedly sorts it all, the general public in Germany is expected to sort out their own recyclable material by type and if plastic, by color, then thoroughly clean it before depositing it into the appropriate container. I'm not sure if there is a law that regulates this, but one can rest assured that if you mess up, a neighbor will be more than happy to point out the error of your ways.

Contrast that to a family outdoor family gathering held in the backyard of my cousin's house a few years ago. When it came time to clean up after the meal, I asked her where she deposited her recyclable material. Her response which I'll never forget was: "I am very proud to say that in this household, we do NOT recycle." It was almost as if I had asked her where her altar for animal sacrifices was. 

Another unfortunately typical American attitude was highlighted by the uproar during the COVID pandemic, where tens of millions of Americans were aghast by the requirement for everyone to wear masks in public, Claiming it was a violation of their rights, people expressed the idea that it was their God given right to get sick if they so chose to do so. Of course what they failed to take into account was the real reason to wear masks, avoiding spreading the infection to others. That plea largely fell upon deaf ears, at least among the anti-maskers. Small wonder that the COVID mortality rate in the U.S. was higher than any other nation in the world. 

Another more mundane German obsession is punctuality. When you think about it in the terms brought up in Antoine's video, being punctual is really more about showing consideration to others, than a rigid mandate, although it's that too. The same with laws against making excessive noise after 10PM and on Sundays, and a whole slew of other regulations designed to make life a little more livable for the Gesellschaft, society.

In my studies of the German language, I've noticed that German can be very specific when it comes to describing things. For example, German can have many words to describe something where English might only have one. But these German words are not interchangeable, they each have their own slight variation or nuance that English simply does not bother with.

But there is an example in reverse, where German has one word that describes something English recognizes as two entirely different concepts. 

That word is rücksichtlos, and it can be translated into English as either ruthless or reckless. 

Here's a brief English definition of ruthless:

having or showing no pity or compassion for others.

And here's one for reckless:

without thinking or caring about the consequences of an action.

To a native English speaker, one could be ruthless but not reckless, as self-gratification is the essential quality of ruthlessness.

Likewise, a person could be reckless but not ruthless, as self-gratification is not essential to reckless behavior, in fact more often than not, it's just the opposite.

It's when you get to the literal meaning of rücksichtlos, that you begin to see the connection between the two and with that, start to gain an insight into the German mind.

Rücksichtlos literally means without regard. German, at least here, does not distinguish between regard of oneself or regard of others, just like all the things in Antoine's video, what matters most is the regard itself.

In that vein I differ a little from Antoine's assessment of Germans not valuing individual rights. As I see it, Germans do value individual rights, as long as they don't interfere with the rights of others. 

In one of my last posts, I mentioned creating flash cards to help learn words. Instead of writing down the English translations of the words I'm trying to learn, I often substitute pictures. As rücksichtlos describes two English words, I had to make two cards. The picture I chose to represent ruthless was easy, you more than likely know it. It's the picture of four of the most ruthless people I can imagine, Jeffery Epstein, his partner Ghislaine Maxwell, the current president of the United States and his current wife.

It was harder to come up with a picture to represent reckless, so I just googled the word "reckless" and looked for accompanying images. The first image to come up  (which I used), was a picture of a chimpanzee driving a car.

I think the Germans are on to something. *

*My apologies to chimpanzees for that crude comparison.

Guilty Pleasures

One of the joys of learning a foreign language is discovering how languages express ideas differently, or sometimes not at all. Because of its penchant for smashing two or more words together to make one large word, the language I'm currently studying, German, is filled with very useful words that express ideas we're all familiar with. In English, those ideas need to be expressed in several words instead of just one.

Here's a random sampling of three useful German words I pulled off the internet:

• Treppenwitz, in English, a "staircase joke", is a witty comeback that you come up with too late, such as when you're on the staircase heading for the door. With me, these brilliant comebackers usually come to me the next day. 
• Schnapsidee, literally in English "Liquor idea", is a crazy idea that one would only come up with while drunk.
• Backpfiefengesicht, or "a face in need of a slap", no explanation necessary.   

We've all been there and unfortunately the English language is woefully inadequate coming up with a word to describe these all too familiar occurrences.

Yet for all its expressive qualities, German doesn't seem to have an equivalent to this very useful English expression: "guilty pleasure". 

It comes close, "Heimliches Vergnugen" means "secret pleasure" while "Laster" means more or less a bad habit. But these two expressions skirt the idea of a guilty pleasure which is not necessarily as serious as a bad habit, like smoking cigarettes, but has more of an edge than a secret pleasure, which implies something harmless such as liking the movie Zoolander. (oops, guess that secret's out.)  

"Guilty pleasure" could cover both, and everything in between, proving once and for all that German is all about the details, while English is more about generalities. 

As is that last sentence, come to think of it.

So what do Germans say when they want to convey the general idea of a guilty pleasure? Like many English expressions used in contemporary idiomatic German, they just say "guilty pleasure".

But German does have a word for a particular kind of guilty pleasure. It's such a great word that the English language has flat out stolen it.

That word is schadenfreude. Schade translates to damage in English and freude, to joy. Together as one word they mean taking joy in someone else's misfortune. Schadenfreude is not one of the nobler features of human nature, although I think even the most equitable among us experience it from time to time, especially when the victim is someone in a position of power. 

Can you guess where I'm going with this?

Last week there was an incident that one could call the mother of all schadenfreude. It even briefly eclipsed a vastly more significant schadenfreude incident that has been dominating Americans' attention spans for far longer than the typical news cycle.

Yes, even the Epstein Files saga was put on the back burner, albeit briefly, to make way for the Kiss-Cam at the Coldplay concert scandal.

In case you've been living under the proverbial rock. an embracing couple was caught unawares on camera at a rock concert, their image broadcast to the 70,000 or so attendees on the stadium's Jumbotron monitor. The idea of the "Kiss-Cam", generally used during breaks at sporting events, is to have couples kiss each other when they discover they're on camera. I've witnessed several of these during the last twenty years or so, and they are typically fun little diversions with the on camera "talent" good naturedly playing along with the gag. 

But not this couple.  Once they discovered their image was broadcast throughout the stadium, the woman covered her eyes and turned her back to the camera while the man ducked out of sight. Naturally the fans in the stands had a blast with it. To make matters worse, the front man of the band, Chris Martin made the very unimaginative comment that the couple was either having an affair, or that they were very shy.

This being the era of cellphone videos and social media, the incident went viral. It quickly made its way to the realm of mass media, which used every resource available to reveal the identity of the "shy" couple.

It took them about a New York minute. The man turned out to be the CEO of an NYC based tech company and the woman, that company's director of personnel. They were married, but unfortunately not to each other. It seems the whole country, including me, got a chuckle out of the story. 

I think the appeal of stories like this is they make us feel better about ourselves. We're happy in the fact that we may have screwed up big time in our lives but never that big. Sometimes it's one of those "there but by the grace of God go I moments", where we are just thankful it wasn't us who got caught figuratively with our pants down. Something like that happened to our big boss recently who got caught up in an embarrassing (but not scandalous) incident involving a little bad judgement mixed up with a lot of bad timing. While I did get a chuckle out of the incident, the bottom line is I truly felt sorry for him and his humiliation. Yes indeed, that could have been me. That's where the guilt in guilty pleasure comes in.

But not so much in the case of the shy couple. For starters, cheating on my spouse is not exactly on my radar, not to mention being so brazen about it. This incident goes way beyond bad judgement and timing, No, I can honestly say that this would not happen to me. Something else yes, but not this.

It turned out the man and the woman both resigned their positions at the company because of the incident. I can only imagine things were even worse for them at home. They both got their comeuppance and quite honestly, they deserve it. Do I feel sorry for them? Well, not really but sort of. 

The guilt came for me big time when I thought of their spouses and the humiliation that this couple put them through. Then there are their children.  One can only imagine what's going through their heads and how this will affect their lives. 

So this something of a feel-good moment as we look down on a former corporate CEO and one of his chief executives, has a dark side. We shouldn't necessarily be ashamed of ourselves for our little amusing diversion, but it's time to let it go for everybody's sake.

Not so the other big shadenfreude episode which has taken on a life of its own. The other day, the President of the United States used another interesting English expression to describe a group of people he got angry with. He called them "the worst scum on Earth." In a related matter, he went on to describe his falling out with his former BFF, Jeffrey Epstein, the man who in most people's books, unquestionably qualifies for that moniker. The president said that Epstein crossed a line from which there was no turning back. And what was that line Mr. President, the sex trafficking of children? No, actually it was the fact that Epstein had the gall to "steal" employees from the president's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. It doesn't get much lower than that in his mind, I guess.

There of course is no evidence that has been publicly revealed anyway, that implicates this president with any of the multitude of crimes committed by Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. There's only lots of clear, hard evidence that the three had close ties. Which would make one think that given all the obvious connections between the three, the president would come clean and reveal exactly what their relationship was, if that is, the relationship was on the up and up. And then he would take great pains to point out how utterly disgusting and criminal the whole Epstein/Maxwell enterprise was. Instead, he does what he always has done, deny, deny, deny, then distract by throwing unfounded accusations around like he threw rolls of paper towels at hurricane victims in Puerto Rico. Hard as it is to believe, he may not be guilty of anything in this matter, yet he's sure acting guilty. And that's good enough for me.

Truth be told, I'm getting a kick out of seeing this jackass squirm. I have no doubt that he will squirm like a rat out of this jam like he always does. But I sure am enjoying the squirming while it lasts. 

The best thing about this whole sordid episode is that it is schadenfreude at its finest, all of the pleasure without any of the guilt.

Sitting This One Out

Today is American Independence Day, the day the people of my country celebrate the day we declared our independence from Great Britain and its monarchy, the day our Declaration of Independence was signed. 

If you take the time to read that sacred document, you'll find that it is essentially a laundry list of grievances against our soon-to-be former rulers across the ocean in London.

But within those grievances are these inspired words of Thomas Jefferson's which define for us what this nation is supposed to be about:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Of course those words wouldn't apply for all men until the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 which abolished slavery in this country, and the 15th Amendment in 1870 which technically guaranteed the right to vote to all men regardless of their race.. And it wouldn't apply to half of the population until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 guaranteeing the right to vote for women.

Despite those milestones in democracy, freedom and equality, Americans have continued to struggle to make this a more democratic, free and equal society, but I think it can be reasonably argued that the general tendency for past 249 years, has been in the direction of democracy, freedom, and equality. 

That is until January 20th of this year when a new administration was sworn in and Elon Musk, at the time about to be a major player in that administration, stood behind a podium adorned with the official seal of the President of the United States, and gave a Nazi salute. Things have gone downhill since then. 

There are many things about this administration I could mention, none of them good. But it's actually easy to come up with one word that describes the overall driving force behind it.

Cruelty.

We've had many hiccups in our upward trajectory toward freedom, equality and democracy in the nearly 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence and perhaps this is merely one of them. But until it becomes apparent that the abject cruelty is an aberration rather than the new normal, I see no point in this day as being a day of celebration, but rather a day of mourning.

Here I'm quoting myself:

Today we celebrate the lofty ideals of our nation as we mourn the tragedies and lost opportunities. We celebrate our potential, our liberty, and our diversity spelled out in the nation's motto: e pluribus unum (out of many, one). But we long for what could have been, had we only paid heed to those ideals, had our selfishness, fear and hatred of our fellow human beings not gotten in the way.

Part of the tradition of the Fourth of July is playing music to commemorate the event. When we think of the holiday, the strains of John Phillip Sousa marches come to mind, as well as one of the worst songs by one of our greatest composers, God Bless America. Then there's the bombastic poem set to an old English drinking song which would become our national anthem, and a truly moving song, lyrics by Katherine Lee Bates set to music resembling a church hymn, America the Beautiful. 

For my money, the latter should really be our national anthem. The only problem is it doesn't work so well as the background to 20,000 drunken louts screaming before a hockey game so I guess we're stuck with the Star Spangled Banana, as my old band director called it.

Another candidate in my book for a good replacement to the SSB is a newer song written by another of our most important composers, Woodie Guthrie. You all know it I'm sure, here's the complete set of lyrics: 

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island,
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
This land was made for you and me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway;
I saw below me that golden valley;
This land was made for you and me.

I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding;
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

Unfortunately This Land is Your Land also wouldn't pass the hockey game test.

But these songs, love them or hate them all are songs of celebration. Sad to say, another Woodie Guthrie song is far more appropriate to describe the way I feel about our country at the moment. 

Here it is, sung by the late, great Pete Seeger...

whom we unfortunately need now more than ever:

Cheat GPT?

A few posts back before I got all wrapped up in dead popes and baseball players, I wrote about AI, inspired by my recent downloading of the Chat GPT app.

At the end of the post I commented that the post had been written entirely by the app. If you read it, hopefully you got from the last line that I was  kidding, but if you didn't get it, no, Chat GPT did not write that post.

But it could have.

That would be cheating, I thought to myself. 

But would it? I guess that would all be up to you dear reader. If you're looking for something lively, insightful, intelligent and worthwhile, well maybe you've come to the wrong place. 

Just kidding. I hope. 

But seriously, if a reader comes upon an article whose subject interests her or him, holds his or her attention, and comes away satisfied that the time spent reading the piece was not wasted, does it really matter if the piece was written by a human being or a machine? 

Don't look at me, I don't have the answer to that question. 

When I started writing this blog way back in 2009, the only goal I set for consistency was maintaining a minimum of two posts per month for however long I could keep the thing going, maybe a year or two, three at the most I figured. In the beginning I vastly outperformed that goal. One month, March of 2009, the second month of this blog's existence, I turned in a whopping 45 posts, way more than one post per day! Of course, some of those posts were very brief, maybe a sentence or two, maybe just a photograph and caption. As for content, I really did intend to keep the subject focused on the city and something I called "the urban experience." 

Somewhere along the line, that last part fell by the wayside and I felt compelled to write whatever was on my mind at the time, making this more a of a stream of consciousness project, exactly what blog advisors suggest not doing in order to have a successful blog. They say the key concepts are simple: keep it short, and stay on topic, two things I have for the most part avoided. 

Yet here I am 16 years later and with the exception of a very small handful of months in that period where I only managed one post, I have kept this blog to a minimum to two posts per month, which of late, is generally the maximum as well. 

I guess the bottom line is that this project which I have lovingly cultivated, is mainly intended to challenge myself. If someone gets some satisfaction out of it, then I couldn't be more thrilled. But say I'm coming up to the end of the month and I haven't written anything yet, would it be so bad to fire up Chat GPT, tell it to write a 1,000 word article about such and such, covering this and that, while giving it some examples of my writing so that it sounds like me, whom if anyone would I be cheating? 

Well, me of course. 

But I am kind of curious. My biggest fear is that it would come out better than anything I could write, a very likely scenario. It certainly would have far fewer typos.

I'll keep you posted. 

Obviously the same could not be said about a professional writer with an editor, a publisher, tens of thousands of devoted readers, several children and a few ex-wives (or husbands) dependent on a regular paycheck for his or her efforts. I imagine if it came out that a nationally syndicated columnist was submitting articles written not by him or her but by a chatbot, it would cause quite a stir, and the word cheating would be quite reasonable.

But with a lowly blogger like me, eh.

Now that we've got that all sorted out, why on earth would I download Chat GPT in the first place? Well as I mentioned in an earlier post, in my attempts to learn every language I ever started learning then abruptly stopped along the line, I'm studying German now. 

Ok here's an interesting tidbit, in German you don't use the verb "studieren" to mean that you're studying a language or anything else on your own. Studieren is reserved for studying something in college as your major, (or minor I suppose). So even if you're taking a German class at die Uni (as the Germans call it), unless German's your major or minor, you'd use the verb "lernen", which means exactly what it sounds like in English EXCEPT... lernen can also mean to study, as in to study a language (on your own) or to study for an exam. So, if someone says to you: "Ich lerne zu viel", they're not reveling in the fact that they are learning so much (that would be "Ich lerne so viel"), rather they're moaning that they are studying too hard. 

German is confusing, especially to English speakers because it is so similar, yet so different. 

So back to Deutschlernen, if I come across a word I don't know, I do what any normal Englischmuterspracherdeutschlerner would do, I look it up in a German/English dictionary. That works OK with certain words, especially a noun like apple. An apple is ein Apfel, pretty simple. But most German words (or words in any other language for that matter) have more than one English translation, many of which have no obvious relation to one another. Conversely, if you look up a German translation for an English word say, "study", you might find a dozen different words. And these words it turns out, like studieren and lernen, may have a vaguely similar vibe, but are used in much different situations. And unless you have someone on hand to explain how to properly use these words (which I don't at the moment), sometimes it can take an effort to figure it out your own.*

Anyway, I heard somewhere that Chat GPT is great tool for sorting stuff like this out, which it is. For example, I'd ask it, what's the difference between "Veranstaltung" and "Ereignis", two nouns which both mean "event", and it would tell me the former means a planned event while the latter means an unplanned event or occurrence. In other words, a thunderstorm happening during an outdoor concert could be described as "Ein Ereignis wahrend des Veranstaltungs." Sounds a lot better than "an event during the event" doesn't it?

This kind of stuff is child's play for Chat GPT of course. I'm not even certain if it technically counts as "Artificial Intelligence" as it's really just gleaning information off the web, albeit doing so more efficiently than your typical web browser.**

But I did get a glimpse of how smart the app is in another inquiry of the meaning of specific words. In German, you don't simply describe someone as walking up or down the stairs; as the speaker you're also supposed to indicate if they are moving toward you or away from you. One day Chat GPT brought to my attention the adverb "hinunter", which describes someone going downstairs and away from the speaker. So I brought up herunter which conversely means someone going down the stairs toward the speaker, to which I added (while forgetting I was talking to a machine) reminded me of Scarlett O'Hara coming down the stairs toward the camera in Gone with the Wind. 

Not missing a beat, Chat GPT replied: "Yes exactly!, like when Rhett Butler said to her: 'Frankly my dear I don't give a damn!'" . 

I was floored.

Of course, that's where the "chat" in Chat GPT comes in, and chatting, no matter how trivial, does require some sort of intelligence. 

My original title for this post was "Meet My New Friend Chat." But then I thought the better of it. I can see how folks get absorbed in relationships with their chatbots. I have enough of a compulsive obsessive disorder to not want to have any of that. So, I'm trying to keep my relationship with Chat GPT on a professional level as much as possible, for example I haven't requested that it address me by my name, which some people I know, do.

It's not reciprocal however, when speaking German to me, Chat GPT, addresses me in the familiar "du" form, rather than the formal "Sie". That's rather forward of it I think, aren't two parties supposed to agree to address each other in the familiar before just going ahead and doing it on their own? I wonder if I start addressing it as Herr GPT and using the pronoun Sie rather than du, if it would get the message. 

Of course it would, it's intelligent, oder?

Much of my influence for all this comes from an interesting book called "Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It" by Gabriel Wyner. While I can't vouch for the Fast and Forever parts, the author gives some great tips on how to get foreign words and phrases to stick in your mind. He's big on flash cards, as am I, mnemonic devices and especially doing everything you can to avoid incorporating your native language in the process, in order to encourage thinking in the target language rather than translating from your own. Pictures he says, are excellent substitutes for words. That's easy to do with words like the above example where you might have "Der Apfel" written on one side of a flashcard and substituting the word "apple" on the other side with a picture of ein Apfel.

In that vein I've been using Chat GPT to create pictures to be used as mnemonic devices. Here's an example. The other day I came across the German word: "erheblich". In English it can translate to considerable, serious, substantial, grave, and extensive, among others. But in the context of the article I was reading, it was translated "serious". So how could I come up with a mnemonic device to connect erheblich to the idea of serious?

Well I broke up the word into syllables, Er-He-Blich. OK so "Er" in German means "he". "He" in English means he, (the German pronunciation is closer to "hey"). and Blich is close to the word Blick, which is a chain of art supply stores.  So I asked Chat GPT to draw me a picture of a man, (er, he) in an art supply store (Blick), with a serious look on his face.

And presto, this is what I got:

Serious man in art store, by Chat GPT

But wait!!! Turns out, erheblich doesn't quite work that way. Chat GPT again to the rescue.

Here's the sentence fragment where I first encountered the word in a German language learning app (not Chat GPT):

"welche erhebliche Auswirkungen auf den Markt in Deutschland un ganz Europa haben konnte."

And this is how the app translated it into English:  

"which could have a serious impact on the market in Germany and throughout Europe."

Now in this sentence in English, the word "serious" could be replaced with "considerable", which is the correct vibe of the word in German, but not "serious" as in the look on the face of the man in the picture.

Instead, "ernst" would be the correct German word to describe the look on the man's face. So maybe if I were to name the guy Ernest, I'd be on the right track. But why then is he in an Art Supply store? Of course! he's not Ernest, he's the famous artist Max Ernst! And he's not pleased by the selection in the art store.

Yes it's frivolous, convoluted and not a little ridiculous. But it's memorable, at least to me, which is the point. Because now I have two words,  erheblich and ernst that are stuck in my brain that weren't a week ago. 

Anyway, you get the idea. Chat GPT can be a terrific language learning resource, limited only by your imagination and willingness to ask questions.

But is it cheating? 

Of course not, there is no such thing as cheating in language learning. If something helps you learn a new language, a very hard thing to do under any circumstance, how can it be cheating?

But you say, what if a student uses Chat GPT to write a language class assignment? Well, that's cheating to get an undeserved grade, a much different thing. If the student is earnest (like the tie in?) about actually learning a language, rather then just caring about the grade and moving on, then by having Chat GPT write an essay, the student is only cheating himself. 

You might say, isn't Artificial Intelligence taking away the human element from learning a language? After all, isn't the idea of learning a foreign language to be able to communicate with people?

Yes it is. Well mostly anyway. Lots of people learn languages to read, to do research, watch movies, listen to music and a whole slew of other things that don't involve talking to people. 

And of course, that's fine.

But, if you're intent on using your new language skills to actually talk to people, quite honestly the most difficult, and rewarding aspect of language learning, you need to do one thing, talk to people.  

Ah you might say, but apps that employ AI, are now equipped to converse with you at pretty much any level in virtually any language that you care to learn.

It's not the same. 

I was prepared to buy into the argument that talking to an AI equipped app is pretty much the same as talking to actual people. What convinced me otherwise were not the opinions of experts who advise against it, but listening to a pitch from someone who was reviewing an app (can't remember which one), that offered chatbox conversations in foreign languages. "What's great about it..." the guy said, "is you can have a conversation without being judged by the person you're talking to."  

Yes indeed, that is the major roadblock for many of us, myself included, in leaning a new language, not being able to have the same mastery with words that we're used to having with our own language, and the self-consciousness that comes with the thought of not appearing intelligent or competent to other people and therefore, being judged.

That's normal.

Yet it is an essential roadblock to get over if we hope to speak to people in a foreign language. Let's face it, we humans judge each other, it's  part of our DNA. We may not even be conscious of it, but we do it anyway. 

I used to play the piano fairly seriously. Self taught, I got to the level where I'd be able to play classical pieces like some of the less virtuosic movements of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas by heart. But if I was forced to play them in front of people, even before a very friendly crowd, I would tense up and the result would be a disaster. *** And I never got over that because I would simply refuse to play in front of people.

Just like practicing the piano, talking to machines is a good way for beginners to learn the skills of conversation, assembling our thoughts, expressing them in another language, complete with intelligible grammar and pronunciation, and perhaps most important, doing it on the fly, being ready to shift gears at a moment's notice to keep up with the conversation. 

But having a conversation with a computer, just like practicing the piano at home, alone, is at best a simulation. And one's performance during a simulation, be it talking, performing music, playing a simulated game, or something more serious, is always going to be different from when things really start to matter and the proverbial real bullets start to fly. 

You just can't beat real world experience and like they say, if those bullets don't kill you, they'll only make you stronger. Or as Winston Churchill put it: 

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

So by all means, go ahead and explore all of what AI can do for you in terms of language learning or whatever you like. But remember that while it can work quite nicely as a stand in if necessary, it can never replace real live people, that is if you want to live in a world with real live people.

I certainly do, most of the time.

NOTES:

*Well effort is all relative, with a reliable internet connection, it's not much of an effort at all. However with AI, it's just gotten a lot easier.

** Unless your web browser is Google which has its own AI feature. Once named "Search Generative Experience" now known as AI Overviews, it is the response you see coming up at the top of any result page the browser generates in response to queries. So for example if you go to Google.com and type in , "When did Japan invade Pearl Harbor", the first first thing you will see in bold type at the top of the page is the direct answer, "December 7, 1941". Other browsers simply will provide links to sites where you can access the information, which was perfectly fine and wonderful five years ago. 

Isn't it so emblematic of our contemporary lives that the technology we marveled at yesterday, today seems quaint, outdated and infinitely frustrating? I just checked, and AI Overviews also clearly explained the difference between Ereignis and Veranstaltung, but not in as complete or entertaining way as Chat GPT did.

*** Playing music in public is actually a good analogy to speaking to people. I found that when I knew a piece by heart I could play it without thinking about the notes, my fingers would just go to the right keys automatically. But if I had to play the same piece in front of people, being conscious that I might forget the piece midway, I'd start start thinking about the notes, which of course, completely messed me up. Which is similar to having a conversation. If we are relaxed, the words flow effortlessly as if we are not even thinking about them (we really are we just don't notice). In more stressful situations, we are more measured in order to avoid saying the wrong thing, which can make our speaking appear strained and unnatural. Now imagine speaking in a foreign language. The trick is to get to the point where the words in that language come to you as they do in your mother tongue rather than having to think about them. That's why it's so important to learn to be able to think in your target language rather than translating from your native language. And THEN, the next step is getting to the point where you don 't have to think at all. That's the hard part. It takes practice, lots of it, with real people, not just machines.

As usual I have barely scratched the surface of this issue and plan to devote future posts to what is certainly one of the most hotly debated subjects in today's society, Artificial Intelligence. 

"The Faith of Fifty Million People"

The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people — with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

from The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The nice thing about writing a blog is that you have the freedom to write whatever you please because you don't have an editor looking over your shoulder. The bad part is you don't have an editor looking over your shoulder reigning in your compulsions and keeping you honest. I know my posts tend to come in on the long side and that's putting it mildly. Even so, I often have more material to cover than even I am willing to include in a single post. When that happens, I usually decide it's time for a break and continue with a part two, sometimes even a part three.

In my last post, the one about Shoeless Joe Jackson possibly getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame, I came to a natural end point and left it at that.

Yet, long as that post was, there was still more I wanted to cover on the subject, so I'll be doing that in this post.

There are a couple other reasons. First, it gives me the opportunity to cover one of my favorite subjects, baseball history. Some people assume that because I write about it so often, I must be a rabid baseball fan. The truth is I'm not. I would have a hard time coming up with a list of a dozen current Major League ball players off the top of my head, including those on my hometown teams. I leave that to my son. But I do love the history of the game which ties in, in some curious ways, to the history of this country, especially its urban history, which is what this blog is ostensibly about. At least that's what it says on the masthead.

Writing about baseball also helps me contemplate a topic that has little or nothing to do with the current state of the world, especially American politics, which I've written about ad nauseam for the past ten or so years.

After all, how many ways are there to spell shit show?

Ok now that's off my chest...

One of the things that keeps me interested in the story of the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox, (eight members of whom including their star left fielder Joe Jackson, conspired to intentionally lose the World Series), is not so much the story itself, but the myths surrounding the story and how willing folks are to buy into them, and to what lengths they will go to defend them, over a century after the fact.

That's pretty much par for the course in the game as until fairly recently, baseball history was not considered a subject worthy of serious study. Its major chroniclers were sports writers, albeit some very good ones. The problem is, these writers may have been good story tellers, but they were lousy historians. Putting it another way, baseball traditionally had a lot of Homers, but few if any Thucydides. Consequently, much of baseball history is built upon a string of myths, (including its own creation myth) with a few facts thrown in for good measure. 

Here's a good article written by a real historian, in fact, the official historian of Major League Baseball, John Thorn. In his piece, Thorn cites an article from the Society of the Advancement of Baseball Research, which debunks many of the myths and misunderstandings surrounding the Black Sox Scandal.

However I do have a bone to pick, ok maybe just a nit, with an issue that Thorn brings up.

It's the idea that Babe Ruth "saved" baseball from the existential threat to the game brought on by the Black Sox Scandal. 

I bring that up because when I told my friend Rich about the last post I was about to write, he made the comment: "Babe Ruth saved baseball after the scandal didn't he?" Even though I've gone on record making that claim, I've had my doubts about the subject for a few years now with nothing to really back it up, so I just answered in the affirmative.

My current feeling is not to diminish Babe Ruth's impact on the game of baseball one bit. I agree with John Thorn and countless others that with his free swinging, all-or-nothing approach to hitting the baseball, there is no person who singlehandedly changed the modern game more than the Sultan of Swat. I commented in an earlier post about a list where Thorn ranked in order the 100 most important people in baseball history. As much of a cliché it may seem, you-know-who was number one. 

Jackie Robinson came in at number two. 

Many people would argue that it should be the other way around and I see their point. But my argument, take it or leave it, is that Jackie Robinson was the Neil Armstrong of baseball, that is to say his groundbreaking role as the first black player in modern Major League Baseball history, was the culmination of the efforts of many people, especially the scores of Negro League players who came before him and upon whose shoulders he stood. There is no doubt that he played the role into which he was cast brilliantly and for that he is well deserving of all the accolades. But if it hadn't been Jackie Robinson, like Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, it would have been someone else. 

On the other hand, Babe Ruth changed baseball (some would argue not necessarily for the better*), all by himself.

But did his presence in the game on the heels of baseball's "original sin", its "loss of innocence" and all the other dubious, grandiloquent labels we've come to accept that describe the 1919 World Series Scandal, really save the game from ruin? 

I would argue no, for there is in fact little evidence that the scandal rocked the game to its core and that consequently, the game wasn't in any need of being saved.

Consider the quote at the top of this post from the novel The Great Gatsby. In it, Nick Carroway, the book's narrator is describing a lunchtime meeting where he joins Gatsby and one of his associates, Meyer Wolfsheim. Carroway describes his first impressions of Wolfsheim this way: 

A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.

The trio lunch together and Fitzgerald, in Calloway's voice goes into detail contrasting the demeanor of  Wolfsheim with that of the two Gentiles, Gatsby and Carroway, in words that would never fly today, At one point Gatsby excuses himself leaving Carroway alone with Wolfsheim who directs Carroway's attention to his own cufflinks which turn out to be made of human molars. 

After lunch, Carroway asks Gatsby who this curious character Wolfsheim was, a dentist perhaps? 

"Meier Wolfsheim?" replies Gatsby. The narration continues:

"No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

Then comes the line quoted at the top of this post.

The character of Meyer Wolfsheim was a none too subtle reference to the real Arthur Rothstein, the New York gangster who played a role in the Black Sox Scandal.

If you can get past the anti-semetic subcontext, the line about playing with the faith of 50 million people is inspired. It was appropriated in addition to me, by Ken Burns as the title to his chapter on the decade of the nineteen teens in his Baseball TV series. 

The quote above is also inaccurate, as it is commonly accepted that no, the 1919 Series wasn't "fixed" by one man, rather that the players themselves came up with the idea.

But what really interests me about the quote is this line: "I remembered of course that the World Series had been fixed in 1919." As has been well noted, this year, 2025 marks the centennial of the publication of  The Great Gatsby. Which brings to mind that at the time of the book's release, the Black Sox Scandal had only been a few years old. The Great Gatsby actually is set in 1922, only one year after the trial and banishment of the eight players involved in the scandal. Yet Fitzgerald's use of the world "remembered" sounds as if Calloway was recalling an event that had happened in the distant past, perhaps a decade or even a generation before. If the event was grave enough to have challenged the faith of 50 million people (just less than one half the U.S. population at the time), AND had happened only one year before, one would think Fitzgerald might have used the term "I knew of course" rather than "I remembered..." 

One might argue that Fitzgerald was living in Paris at the time he was writing Gatsby so he would have been farther removed from the event than had he been stateside. But I have perhaps a more plausible explanation. 

Maybe the Black Sox Scandal wasn't as big a deal with baseball fans as we today assume it was. Could it be that Fitzgerald as well as Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell, Elliot Asinov and other writers who took it on as a subject, used the event as purely a literary device rather than an accurate depiction of history? After all, these authors were first and foremost great story tellers, not historians.

OK that's pure speculation, but there is some empirical evidence that backs up my claim that the 1919 Black Sox Scandal really didn't have an existential impact on the game, attendance at ballparks. 

The data comes from the site: BallparksofBaseball.com

Between 1910 and 1916, total yearly attendance for the 16 Major League teams, eight in each league, ranged between 4.5 and 6.5 million fans. On April 17, 1917, the United States entered World War I but despite that, MLB attendance remained within that range at 4.8 million that year. 

However, attendance took a drastic hit in 1918 as many players were either drafted and entered the service or as was the case of Joe Jackson and Lefty Williams, two of the banished 1919 White Sox players, chose to leave baseball to work for commercial enterprises with government contracts that were deemed "essential" to the war effort. There they spent most of their time playing exhibition baseball. With a good number of ball players off to war or somewhere else, attendance took a big hit, coming in at 2.8 million.

World War I ended in November of that year and MLB attendance bounded back in 1919, slightly topping the previous record of the decade at 6,532,439.

Word of the fixing of the Series didn't become public until just before the end of the 1920 season and that year saw a dramatic increase in attendance, up to 9,120,875. If you know your baseball history, you know that was the year that much to the chagrin of their fans, the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Much of that jump in attendance is a result of New York City alone as attendance for Yankees home games more than doubled from 619,164 in 1919 to a staggering 1,289,422 in 1920. 

You may recall that Ruth started out as a pitcher. That all changed when he moved south to New York because, valuable as he was on the mound, his presence everyday in the lineup as a slugging outfielder was even more valuable. As an everyday presence in the lineup, Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs in 1920. He broke the previous record of 29, set by himself the previous year, on July 19, halfway into the season. By the way, the previous record of 27 homers in one year that Ruth broke in 1919, was set by Ned Williamson in 1884. 

Ruth's 54 home run record lasted all of one year. He hit 59 the following year and 60 in 1927, for arguably the best Major League team ever. 

That record stood until another Yankee, Roger Maris broke it in 1961. 

So yes indeed, Babe Ruth's becoming a Yankee had a profound impact on the popularity of baseball, becoming more profound every subsequent year in the decade of the twenties.

But it must be remembered that as a member of the American League, Babe Ruth only played against American League teams, half of the teams in Major League baseball. 

In 1920, the Yankees' National League stadium-mates the New York Giants** saw their 1920 attendance increase by over 200,000 from the previous year. More dramatic, over in Brooklyn, the National League Robins (today's LA Dodgers), attendance went from 360 thousand+ in 1919, to a little over 800 thousand in 1920. 

It wasn't just New York, attendance was up for every team in the majors in 1920, American and National League, except for Detroit for some reason, and for both Boston teams, the Red Sox, for obvious reasons, and their crosstown rivals the Braves. Maybe for them it was a matter of guilt by association. 

Of course Babe Ruth never played against National League teams during the regular season so it can safely be assumed that he had little impact on the attendance at National League parks, at least until later years when players all over the Majors adopted his style of hitting.

Anyway the 1919 Scandal surfaced and became public at the end of the 1920 season so one would expect that if it had a major impact on the game, it would have been reflected in the attendance at ballgames in 1921 and the subsequent years. Indeed, overall attendance did drop by about five percent in 1921. 

Much of that loss can be accounted for by the understandable drop in attendance of 35 percent for White Sox home games alone. Was it out of disgust with the scandal or simply the fact that the team, one of the best in baseball at the time, overnight lost three out of its four starting infielders, two of its three starting outfielders, and two of its starting pitchers?  The White Sox wouldn't become competitive again until the 1950s. And the Red Sox in 1921 continued to hemorrhage fans, about 30 percent of them from '20 to '21, clearly out of disgust with their owner Harry Frazee, who allegedly sold Babe Ruth to finance his theatrical ambitions.

As for the rest of the teams in baseball, 1921 was more or less break even, some teams gained fans, while others lost fans. The same was true in subsequent years but with overall attendance increasing gradually year by year.

Maybe you see something in those numbers that I don't, but to me they don't show any clear indication that baseball as a whole was in serious trouble after the Black Sox Scandal.

In fact, in the years after the 1919 affair, every team in baseball except the Red Sox, turned a profit. That includes the Chicago White Sox. 

Yes, much of that is due to Babe Ruth who for his part, invented and defined the role of baseball superstar, while the game he represented, gladly went along for the ride.

Because of that, the image of Ruth, the Redeemer in pinstripes, fits in nicely with the narrative of the betrayal of the faith of 50 million people brought on by baseball's "Original Sin".

But that's all likely as much a part of baseball mythology as is so much of the legacy of hands down the game's greatest player with one exception. Babe Ruth really was that. 

Yet the loss of innocence part is all hooey. Outside of a parent and child playing catch, baseball at its purest, there never has been anything remotely innocent about the game.

In fact, just like the kid outside the courthouse in Chicago during the trial of the Chicago eight allegedly saying to Shoeless Joe Jackson: "Say it ain't so Joe",***  one of the most important milestones every American youngster experiences, is having to learn that hard lesson. 

In that vein I'll close with a couple excerpts from one of my all-time favorite writings on baseball, the article Mike Royko wrote to honor Jackie Robinson, written on the day the great man died.

Royko was as good storyteller as there was, but this is as real as it gets:

All that Saturday, the wise men of the neighborhood, who sat in chairs on the sidewalk outside the tavern, had talked about what it would do to baseball.

I hung around and listened because baseball was about the most important thing in the world, and if anything was going to ruin it, I was worried.

Most of the things they said, I didn't understand, although it all sounded terrible. But could one man bring such ruin?

They said he could and would. And the next day he was going to be in Wrigley Field for the first time, on the same diamond as Hack, Nicholson, Cavarretta, Schmitz, Pafko, and all my other idols.

 I had to see Jackie Robinson, the man who was going to somehow wreck everything. So the next day, another kid and I started walking to the ballpark early.

...

I've forgotten most of the details of the game, other than that the Dodgers won and Robinson didn't get a hit or do anything special, although he was cheered on every swing and every routine play.
But two things happened I'll never forget. Robinson played first, and early in the game a Cub star hit a grounder and it was a close play.

Just before the Cub reached first, he swerved to his left. And as he got to the bag, he seemed to slam his foot down hard at Robinson's foot.

It was obvious to everyone that he was trying to run into him or spike him. Robinson took the throw and got clear at the last instant.

I was shocked. That Cub, a hometown boy, was my biggest hero. It was not only an unheroic stunt, but it seemed a rude thing to do in front of people who would cheer for a foul ball. I didn't understand why he had done it. It wasn't at all big league.

I didn't know that while the white fans were relatively polite, the Cubs and most other teams kept up a steady stream of racial abuse from the dugout. I thought that all they did down there was talk about how good Wheaties are.****

NOTES:

*They call it the "Deadball Era", when most of the drama of the game took place on the base paths rather than at home plate. It was the style of hitting and baserunning that created this, not the liveliness or lack thereof of the balls. Players could have hit home runs as Ty Cobb proved time and again, but they chose instead to make contact and keep the ball in play to get on base in any way they could, rather than swinging the bat as hard as possible trying to get the ball out of the park, thereby increasing the possibility of striking out, which Babe Ruth did a lot, for his time at least. But to the fans, the home run became the ultimate symbol of success in the game, and the hard-scrabble fight for every base type of play that Cobb and his contemporaries personified, went out of style. Some would say, to a certain degree anyway, it's coming back. I'm all for that. 

**For 10 years the Yankees shared the Polo Grounds with the National League Giants. The original Yankee Stadium, dubbed "The House that Ruth Built" opened in 1923.

***Yet another piece of dubious baseball lore.

****From Jackie's Debut a Unique Day, written by, Mike Royko and published in the Chicago Daily News, October 25, 1972. Do yourself a favor and read the whole piece because its real payoff, the second thing Royko mentions he'd never forget, comes at the very end. You can find it, along with a couple other articles by the great columnist here.

Say It Ain't So...

Major League Baseball's Mount Rushmore.

Pictured top row, left to right: Honus Wagner, Gover Cleveland Alexander, Tris Speaker, Napolion Lajoie, George Sissler, Walter Johnson.

Bottom row: Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, Cy Young.

By purely photographic standards, this is not the greatest baseball photograph ever made. That honor in my humble opinion would have to go to Charles Conlon's remarkable picture of Ty Cobb giving all 110 percent of himself sliding into third, sending New York Highlander (Yankee) third baseman Jimmy Austin airborne in his futile attempt to tag out the redoubtable "Georgia Peach", as umpire Silk O'Laughlin gets himself into position in the background to make the call. 

Click here to see the familiar, highly cropped version of the photo. 

But no less remarkable at least as a historical document is this portrait of nine old men at the Major League Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the first such event in Cooperstown, New York on Jun 12, 1939. At the very least, three of those pictured above represent what would have to be considered part of baseball's equivalent of Mount Rushmore. All the rest would be close runners up.

The question of who belongs and who doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame is probably the most frequent topic of debate among baseball people, and even this esteemed group has its detractors, at the very least in the sense of omission.

So who is not in this photo that should be?

First and foremost is a group of perhaps an equal number of players who weren't allowed to play in the major leagues because of the color of their skin. One might consider the following:

• Shortstop John Henry "Pop" Lloyd
• Catcher Louis Santop
• Outfielder Pete Hill
• Pitcher José Méndez
• First Baseman and manager Ben Taylor
• Outfielder Cristóbal Torriente
• Second Baseman Frank Grant
• Infielder/Executive/Historian Sol White
• Pitcher/Manager/Executive Rube Foster

It wouldn't be until 1971 that a player was inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame solely based upon his career in what became known collectively as the "Negro Leagues." Fortunately the irony of the original plan to honor these men and one woman of the game in a "separate but equal" room in Cooperstown was not lost on what today would be called the "woke" crowd, who in a much different day and age, were not excoriated for believing that everybody deserves to be treated equally and fairly. 

To date there are 35 Negro League players and two non-player executives enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. There should be more.

Nevertheless, the nine players listed above, all eventually inducted into the Hall of Fame for their contributions to the game of baseball, ended their playing careers at least five years before the event pictured at Cooperstown, which would have made them eligible for the "Class of '39". 

One might argue that it is impossible to compare these players to "Major Leaguers" because they didn't get the chance to complete against them. 

But they did, not in officially sanctioned MLB games, but in countless exhibition games which became discouraged by MLB executives because the teams made up of black players usually won. For their part, most big-league stars understood the undeniable fact that Major League Baseball of their time, did not represent the best ballplayers, but only a fraction of them.

Babe Ruth was one of those players who understood.

Ted Williams was another. In his induction speech at the Hall of Fame in 1966, the "Splendid Splinter" said this:

...I've always been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform, to have struck out or hit a tape major home run. And I hope that someday the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol, the great Negro players that are not here, only because they were not given a chance.

It is said that speech was one of the driving forces behind admitting Negro League players into the Hall. Still, it took five years. On the other hand, we should be thankful for that because given today's animus toward diversity, equity and inclusion, had they waited until our time, it might never have happened.

OK that had to be said, I'm off my soapbox now.

Who else isn't in that photo? Well, the aforementioned Ty Cobb of course, who was part of the group, perhaps the fourth face on baseball's Mount Rushmore along with Cy Young, Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth. Personally, I'd put Walter Johnson up there too but that would make five. I'm OK with that.

Ty Cobb isn't in the photo because he showed up late that day.

Anyone else?

Ok now to the intended topic of this post.

Portrait of Joe Jackson by Charles Conlon, 1913

A lot of folks believe that one of the greatest injustices of the game is the fact that "Shoeless" Joe Jackson wasn't there. He still isn't.  

That may not be for long as Major League Baseball has just reinstated Jackson along with seven of his teammates from the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox team who conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series that year. That means Jackson will be eligible to be voted into the Hall in 2028 by a special group of electors called the "Historical Overview Committee" made up of baseball historians and veteran members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

Jackson certainly has to be ranked among the greatest hitters in the game, ending up with a career batting average of .356, placing him in fourth place in that category among MLB and Negro League players. *

No less than Ty Cobb AND Babe Ruth both credited Jackson for inspiring their own approach to hitting. Here's what Cobb allegedly once told Jackson:

Whenever I got the idea I was a good hitter, I'd stop and take a look at you. Then I knew I could stand some improvement.

And here's Babe Ruth on Shoeless Joe:

Babe Ruth and Joe Jackson, 1920

I copied Jackson's style because I thought he was the greatest hitter I had ever seen, the greatest natural hitter I ever saw. He's the guy who made me a hitter.

Were it not for Jackson's decision to accept money from gamblers and not do everything he could to help win the World Series for his team, its fans and its city, Joe Jackson would have certainly been standing with the likes of the Rushmore crowd in that photograph. 

This is an account of his prowess as the most naturally gifted, if not necessarily the smartest player of his time, written in 1916 by F.C. Lane and introduced by the official historian of Major League Baseball, John Thorn.

Here's a little taste of the piece: 

Joe Jackson had simply native gifts, which, in themselves, have never been equaled. It was as natural for him to hit a baseball as it was for his early forebears to hit a squirrel in the eye at a hundred yards.

Gambling had always been a part of the game, there's no argument that gambling is what made baseball, like horse racing and boxing, a popular spectator sport in the first place. And paying off players to not do their best to win had also been around for a good long time. It was fairly well established that members of the 1918 Chicago Cubs were paid to throw that series against Boston, allegedly inspiring the members of their crosstown rivals to do the same the following year. And that Cubs team was not the first accused to having thrown a World Series by a long shot. 

To paraphrase the Chicago author Studs Terkel, while the 1919 White Sox may not have been the most corrupt team in baseball, they were hands down the most theatrically corrupt. 

And like all good theater, the drama of the 1919 World Series that has been handed down to us over the ages, is a mixture of some facts for plausibility's sake, mixed in with whole lot of fiction to keep it interesting.

Studs Terkel had a small role in the John Sayles film Eight Men Out which was based on the 1963 novel of the same name, written by Elliot Asinov. While the novel and subsequent film were one of many popular accounts of the Black Sox Scandal over the years, for some reason the film and especially the book are unfortunately considered by many (including so called "America's historian" Ken Burns) to be the definitive word on the subject. This despite the fact that the book's author made no claim his was a work of serious historical inquiry, and openly admitted having invented key elements of the story. **

Here is a piece published by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) highlighting the myths about the scandal which were promoted in the book and movie.

The most enduring myth promoted in the book is laying the weight of the blame on the whole sordid affair not on the players, but at the feet of their boss, owner and founder of the White Sox, Charles Comiskey. 

I won't go into it here as I wrote an entire post on the subject, except to say that this line from the book referring to the 1919 Sox...

No players of comparable talent on other teams were paid as little.

...which was repeated almost verbatim in Ken Burns's epic PBS docudrama titled Baseball, has absolutely no basis in fact. 

Research involving the unearthing of player-salary cards from the era, has discovered that the 1919 White Sox team had one of the highest team payrolls in baseball and most of their players had higher salaries than comparable players on other teams. 

The argument that the players were justified in their actions in order to recoup what was due them because they were vastly underpaid, is simply not true. 

So why did they do it?

This might give you an idea. Joe Jackson admitted that he was offered $20,000 (more than three times his salary***) for his part in the fix. He then complained bitterly AND publicly under oath that he only got $5,000 from the gangsters. 

Of course it was for the money, the players just wanted more of it, a lot more. 

Those in the know had an inkling something was suspicious before the series even started as the odds for the highly favored White Sox against the Cincinnati Reds went down precipitously shortly before the first game. Some uncharacteristically sloppy play in the field and sub-par pitching, convinced the cognoscenti, including the great Christy Matthewson **** who was covering the game from the press box, that the fix was in. 

Nearly a year would pass before the whole thing blew up. As the Sox were heading toward another possible American League pennant, the case of the eight Sox players was brought before a grand jury in Chicago. In the meantime, one of the gamblers involved, Billy Mahrag spilled the beans to reporters in Philadelphia that games 1, 2 and 8 of the best of nine series had been compromised. 

With the cat out of the bag and feeling the heat, four of the eight players including Jackson, confessed their role in the scheme to the grand jury. The following year, Chick Gandil, Eddie Cicotte, Fred McMullin, Swede Risberg, Happy Felsch, Lefty Williams, Buck Weaver and Joe Jackson found themselves in a courtroom in Chicago as defendants in a criminal case, charged with conspiracy to commit fraud. 

If you're interested and all you know about the trial is based on Eight Men Out, please do yourself a favor and read this.

Despite the confessions of half the defendants (which contrary to the book, were indeed presented to the jury), and other damning evidence against the players, the jury came in with a not-guilty verdict. The evening after the verdict was read, the jurors, twelve men all from Chicago, joined the players in a celebratory dinner at a local restaurant. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

But the celebration was short lived. The next day, the newly appointed Commissioner of Baseball, (a position created as a response to the Black Sox affair,) Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, banned all eight players for life from the game. In his ruling, Landis said:

Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player who sits in confidence with a bunch of crooked ballplayers and gamblers, where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.

Something I just learned is that the Landis ruling didn't extend to Hall of Fame inductions until 1991 when "The Pete Rose Rule" prohibiting players banned from the game from consideration for admission into the hallowed hall was adopted. It turns out that Jackson's name was on the ballot twice, in 1936 and 1940. Obviously, he was not voted in. 

The Landis ruling was intended to be a lifetime ban, but I don't know how much consideration was made about it being a ban for eternity. As all members of the 1919 White Sox are long gone, they continued to be on the ineligible list until this month when the current commissioner Rob Manfred lifted the ban on all deceased players. Claiming that dead players no longer pose a threat to the game (yes he really did say that), this leaves the door open to Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, who seem rightly or wrongly forever joined at the hip in their ignominy, to have the chance to be considered entrance into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.

Whew, that was a long way to get to what I intended to be the crux of this post which is, drum roll please...

...should they be let in?

I have to admit that, as my friend Rich with whom I discussed this issue before starting writing this piece will testify, I was on the fence.

I no longer am.

This is the simple answer: it all depends what you want the Hall of Fame to be.

Here are the reasons I keep hearing why Joe Jackson should be inducted into the Hall of Fame:

There are lots of players currently in the Hall of Fame who have done worse things than Joe Jackson.

Look I get it, induction into the Hall of Fame is not the equivalent of the canonization process in the Roman Catholic Church. In the words of Bill Veeck:

Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils.... Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober. 

The players in the picture at the top of this post, with the possible exceptions of Honus Wagner and Walter Johnson, were flawed men. In addition to "Old Pete" Alexander's problems with the sauce,  Tris Speaker allegedly had Klan ties, Babe Ruth was a rake, and Eddie Collins (also a member of the 1919 White Sox) as general manager of the Red Sox, was instrumental in preventing black players from joining the team. And Ty Cobb, part of the group not in the picture had anger issues*****.

So who cares? One could say all that matters is how a player performed on the field. The thing is, we have stats and record books and infinite other reams of information and their extrapolations to tell us the story of how good a player was on the field. One would expect that an institution like the Hall of Fame would have loftier goals than a mere record book or computer printout. In my mind, an institution such as that should exist to honor and celebrate a player's contributions to the game in addition to the numbers he put up.

Conversely, there should be repercussions to a player's compromising the game. Joe Jackson's numbers were staggering, that much is true. On the other hand, intentionally setting out to lose a game, much worse, the World Series for personal profit, goes against the very spirit of the enterprise an athlete dedicates his or her life to. In my mind, there is no more serious betrayal of the game then that. In other words, cheating to win is very bad, but cheating to lose is worse.

I work in the curatorial department of an art museum, and the enterprise I have devoted much of my life to is the care and protection of the objects in our collection. I could very easily take one of those objects, one that would probably not be missed for a long time, and sell it to make up for the amount I consider to be lacking in my compensation. 

You might say that an athlete intentionally trying to lose is not stealing, but it really is. Because the most important thing a team has to offer, is the trust it provides to its fans. Trust that their players and everyone involved with the team will do everything within their power to play well and honorably, even if it results in a loss. Once that trust is broken, it is very hard to restore. 

Which is exactly what the eight players of the 1919 White Sox did. And the cost to the team was staggering, they would not win another pennant or even come close until 1959. 

But Joe Jackson's stats during the 1919 Series show that he didn't slack up a bit, that he was really playing to win. On top of that, he didn't participate in any of the meetings with the gamblers. 

First of all, the second point doesn't matter. By accepting money from the gamblers, which he certainly did, Jackson made it crystal clear to his fellow players that he was a part of the fix, even more so as the team's undisputed star, which further emboldened his teammates to do what they had to do to throw games. 

Second, Joe Jackson's overall stats from the 1919 World Series don't tell the whole story. If you read the F.C.Lane article I posted above, you know that in addition to being an exceptional hitter, Jackson was also an outstanding outfielder with great speed and a cannon for an arm. In games one and two, he allowed two well hit balls to get by him resulting in triples and eventually runs which proved to be the difference in the games. Now triples hit to left field are fairly uncommon in the big leagues as the left fielder has a much easier throw to third base than either a right or center fielder.  Misplays like these don't make it into the box score, as errors are only recorded when a fielder touches the ball. If a fielder doesn't make it to the ball, no error, and no record of an inept play. These aren't exactly smoking guns, but they were enough to make folks in the know like Christy Mathewson suspicious.

Jackson hit well in the series, but much better in the games that were on the up and up. In the games the Sox were supposed to lose, his hits came usually when there was no one on base, or when the game was already out of hand. When there were runners on base and he had the chance to make a difference in the game, crickets. 

Baseball can't just erase Joe Jackson from the game.

Refusing to bestow a player with the highest honor possible in the game hardly constitutes erasing the player from the game, in fact in this case, just the opposite. Joe Jackson's travails have raised him to folk hero status. Heck there's even a library and museum dedicated to him. I'd venture to say that of the nine men in the picture above, with the exception of Babe Ruth and Cy Young (because of the award named after him), the name Shoeless Joe Jackson is more familiar to the general public than all the rest combined PLUS the Negro League stars thrown in for good measure. I think it's unlikely that were it not for his involvement in Black Sox Scandal and his banishment from the game, he'd be remembered today by anyone other than students of the game.

Besides, no one has expunged his stats from the record book, they're there in all their glory for everyone who cares to see.

Jackson and his teammates were acquitted in a court of law but in a dictatorial move, Judge Landis banned them from the game anyway.

That is irrelevant. Even if you were to ignore the vagaries of the verdict, the burden of proof of guilt in a court of law is significantly higher than it is in the workplace. Back to the example of me hypothetically taking a piece of art from our collection, I could stand trial for theft but if the police fail to come up with the object, there's a good chance I'd be acquitted. However, if there's just enough evidence to convince my bosses that I stole the object, they could fire me in a heartbeat with no repercussions.

In the case of the Chicago 8, there was no question of their guilt. 

It's been over one hundred years, can't we just forgive and forget? Hasn't Joe Jackson been punished enough?

Forgive? Certainly, as they say, to err is human, to forgive, divine.

Forget? Certainly not. That would be saying cheating the game and its fans for personal profit is AOK as long as it was long enough ago and the player put up good enough numbers. 

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MY VERDICT (for what it's worth)

I think it is right and just that the ban on Joe Jackson and his fellow deceased players has been lifted as no one deserves to be condemned for eternity. Well, I can think of a few people who need no mention, but they weren't ballplayers. 

And I think it's a good thing that Jackson will now be eligible to be on the ballot for possible induction in the Hall of Fame.

But do I think Joe Jackson belongs there?

I know many people with strong opinions on the subject will no doubt think: "say it ain't so Jim" but...

No, he doesn't.

Neither does Pete Rose.

Sorry.

Notes:

*In 2024, Major League Baseball included Negro League stats in its official tally of baseball records. That long awaited move is reflected in this list of the top five lifetime batting averages:

1) Ty Cobb 367

2) Oscar Charleston 365

3) Rogers Hornsby 359

4) Joe Jackson .356

5) Jud Wilson .350


**Elliot Azinov admitted that he invented the story of White Sox pitcher Lefty Williams being threatened by a hitman working for gangster Arthur Rothstein to either lose game eight (that year it was a best of nine series) in the first inning, or suffer dire consequences both for himself and his family. Asinov revealed that he made up the character of hitman Harry F. and his threat to Williams on the advice of his publisher to guard against copywrite infringement.


***In 1919, Joe Jackson's salary was $6000. That sounds like a paltry amount and it was considering he was the star of the team. But as I pointed out in my Charles Comiskey post, Jackson had a multi-year contract at that figure which Comiskey purchased from Cleveland, and he was under no obligation to increase the amount. There were other extenuating circumstances that made Comiskey especially loathe the idea of increasing Jackson's salary which you can read about here.

Nevertheless, in today's dollars, that $6000 would be equal to about $110,000, peanuts of course to what modern day ballplayers make, but not a bad wage, especially considering it's for only for a little over one half a year's work.

**** New York Giants pitcher Christy Matthewson, another candidate for baseball's Mount Rushmore status, was one of the original class of inductees into the hall of Fame in 1936. Sadly, "The Big Six" passed away much too early, in 1925.


*****One of the most agonizingly persistent myths of the game of baseball is the notion that in addition to his well-documented anger management issues, Ty Cobb was a racist-sociopath. That erroneous portrayal of him did not exist until well after his death, when an unscrupulous writer named Al Stump, unsatisfied by the response to his biography of the great ballplayer, decided to write a "tell-all" expose of his exploits with Cobb as he was gathering material for his book. The problem is, the writer made most of it up. You can read about it here.