William C. Newman, The Daily Record Newswire
I miss Yogi Berra.
A signed photograph of him, a Father's Day gift from my wife, Dale, hangs on a wall in my office, close to the one of Mickey Mantle, above the one of Bobby Kennedy, near the one of my late dad and our daughter Jo laughing together.
The Yogi photograph captures him in full catcher's regalia: his cap on backwards, flying forward about six inches above the ground, arms extended, his catcher's glove in his left hand, the ball in his right, about to tag Ted Williams, who is sliding hard for home with dirt flying from his spikes.
Yogi's recent death should not have shocked me. He was 90 after all. But it kind of did - probably because Yogi has been part of my life since I was old enough to read the sports section of the newspaper, and also because I had just researched an aphorism from Yogi to use at a talk at the Wellfleet library.
There, Easthampton author Ellen Meeropol and I presented a program titled "Disappeared in America: Imagination and Fact." Ellen spoke first, about her novel "On Hurricane Island," a harrowing tale about interrogations and survival at a secret domestic detention facility located on a spit of land off the coast of Maine. My talk focused on black site prisons across the globe, the secret police lock-up in Chicago, and witness-protection programs in America - ways our government makes people in prison vanish from view.
I began with a rhetorical question: "What will happen to civil liberties in America if we suffer another terrorist attack?" I answered, with thanks to Yogi for giving us this bit of wisdom, "It's tough to make predictions, particularly about the future."
Yogi Berra, who won the Most Valuable Player award three times, played in 18 All Star games and 14 World Series (in which the Yankees won 10), in recent decades became as famous for his malapropisms and paradoxical quotes as he was for his prodigious baseball skills.
During the early years of Yogi's major league career, the only person you suspected might be eavesdropping when you used the phone was the lady at the telephone exchange who dialed the number for you. For some years after that you still needed the operator to place a long-distance call.
But times change. In response to 9/11, Congress enacted the USA Patriot Act, and the government began widespread wiretapping, eavesdropping, unauthorized data collection and surveillance of all of us. The government also instituted programs of extraordinary rendition and extrajudicial killings, mostly by drones, routinely tortured detainees, and constructed a maximum security prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for people never charged with a crime.
Most frightening, perhaps, the government convinced many Americans that the Orwellian world it was creating was both justified and necessary and should be accepted as the new norm.
In 1958, while Dwight Eisenhower was president, Berra caught 88 games and didn't make an error. The year before, the Russians had launched sputnik into orbit, but the president, who in 1953 unforgivably failed to commute the death sentences of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, understood that the satellite did not pose a national security threat, and he encouraged Americans to calm down. When he left the Oval Office, Ike also urged us to beware of the dangers of the military-industrial complex.
In October 1963, Yogi played in his last World Series during which the Dodgers, relying on the brilliant starting pitching of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and Johnny Podres, swept the Yankees four straight.
The following month the first push-button, non-rotary phones were offered by Bell Telephone. Less than a week after that, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and a generation lost its innocence.
J. Edgar Hoover's illegal surveillance, his secret files, Cointelpro and the FBI's efforts to destroy the civil rights movement and its leaders were still to be revealed, mostly in 1975 at the Church Committee hearings, more formally known as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities. What struck us then as appalling invasions of privacy would barely register now on the scale of governmental unwarranted surveillance.
Yogi epitomized decency. He conjures feelings of a bygone era, a simpler one, remembrances that come back to me when I glance at the baseball cards taped to the wall across from my desk - the ones of Moose Skowron, Whitey Ford, Bobby Richardson and, of course, The Mick.
Today, in contrast, because we have failed to control the technology that can monitor our every movement and record our every utterance, the future for liberty and privacy looks precarious indeed. As Yogi put it, "The future ain't what it used to be."
Rest in peace, Yogi.
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William C. Newman is director of the western regional office of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and author of "When the War Came Home."
Published: Mon, Oct 26, 2015
