The game of ball is glorious.

Walt Whitman

. . . His almost chosen people . . .



Abraham Lincoln

If you want to see a bunch of happy Americans, go out to opening day at any baseball stadium in the land. Pretty much any day is a good day to go to the ballpark, but that first day of the season is special. It’s spring. The grass is green. Pessimism is impossible, at least until the other team scores. The promise of the season sits before us with all the pristine shine of a new car, the latest vehicle for the secret aspirations we all hold for ourselves. Life will be better, this time. We will be better: smarter, richer, funnier and absolutely better-looking, all in magical correspondence with the home team’s pennant drive. Deep down we know what’s going to happen to our fine new car, all those dingers and scrapes that lie in wait, the hail storms, the exploding batteries, and yet, and yet … Opening day is “the triumph of hope over experience”, as a wise man once said, though he was talking about second marriages, not baseball.



On this opening day at Globe Life Park in Arlington – formerly “The Ballpark in Arlington”, then “Ameriquest Field in Arlington” until the subprime-mortgage bubble burst, then for a while “Rangers Ballpark in Arlington” before Globe Life plunked a reported $50m for name rights, whereupon millions of fans no doubt switched their life insurance over to their new corporate friend – the weather is, to state it plainly, perfect. Literally not a cloud in the sky, which is the brilliant turquoise of a well-chlorinated pool. The temperature is a summery 84F, and while the pollen count is high – not unusual for north Texas, which is a Pandora’s box of seasonal allergens – the air quality index is in the healthy-for-children-and-old-folks range. The outfield grass is a cow’s or pro golfer’s dream – lush, smooth, preternaturally green, with crisscross stripes laid down by artisanal mowings. Curated grass. Heavenly grass. It brings out the dog in me. I want to take off all my clothes and roll around on it.

Globe Life is an earnest, determinedly fan-friendly park, eager to please with its historically referenced quirks – home run porch in right field, whimsically jiggered outfield wall and cozy red-brick and forest-green color scheme. Cognoscenti describe it as “retro jewel box”, in the highly specialized nomenclature of baseball stadia. (Thanks to generations of brainy, obsessive fans, everything about baseball is highly specialized.) Players and coaches assemble along the baselines for the pregame ritual, the Rangers in crisp white uniforms with blue and red trim, the Seattle Mariners somewhat baggier in their subdued blue-gray. Make a body look fast, those Ranger whites. Dozens of scurrying workers unfurl the largest American flag I have ever seen – we’re talking flag acreage here. It practically covers the entire outfield. Then the country singer Neal McCoy stands near the pitcher’s mound and belts out The Star-Spangled Banner. “Now there’s a snappy tune,” Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma (“blind Senator Gore”) used to say to his young grandson Gore Vidal whenever the national anthem was rendered, and McCoy does a creditable job with the song, managing the devilish stadium acoustics like the pro he is. Everyone cheers as the final notes fade away, and a pair of F-16 fighter jets bank low over the stadium.

Texas Rangers second baseman Rougned Odor steals second base in the fifth inning against Seattle Mariners shortstop Ketel Marte at Globe Life Park in Arlington. Photograph: Tim Heitman/USA Today Sports

America, America. The ceremony encourages us, if not to think about the country, at least to be aware of it for a couple of minutes, to allow for a national uplift of spirit. Land of the free, home of the brave, God’s chosen land – the “shining city on a hill”, as Ronald Reagan loved to put it, a formulation that reaches back to the Puritan pioneers, with echoes from the Sermon on the Mount. Transiting from England to the New World on the Arbella in 1630, the Puritan leader John Winthrop preached it thus:

We shall find the God of Israel is among us when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when He shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: ‘The Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

To this day, the Puritan sense of divine mission remains a defining characteristic of the American self-image. The Puritans were chiliasts, firm believers in the millennial prophecies of the Bible: the coming of the antichrist, the Second Advent, Armageddon, the works. It’s worth noting that Winthrop situates his city in a war context, God’s chosen 10 resisting a thousand enemies, and the Puritans viewed their colonies in just such militant terms, absolute good purging the wilderness of absolute evil, clearing the way for God’s kingdom in the New World. And, eventually, beyond. Preaching in Boston some sixty years after Winthrop, Cotton Mather urged his congregation to consider the “great increase” of the colonies, “the blessings of land and sea” bestowed on them in the New World:



Indeed, if we cast up the account and lay all things together, God hath been doing the same thing here that he prophesied of Jacob’s remnant … And we may conclude that he intended some great thing when he planted these heavens, and laid the foundations of this earth. And what should that be if not a scripture-pattern that shall in due time be accomplished the whole world throughout?

America was the chosen land, specially blessed and purposed with a world-changing mission. Thanks to several centuries of refinement and accretion, the doctrine has come down to us with a name, American exceptionalism, and a markedly belligerent history. The millennial aspect has waxed and waned according the temper of the times, but it’s coded in even the more secular incarnations of exceptionalism. America’s missionary zeal to remake the world tends toward the quasi-religious tone: Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, urged US Naval Academy graduates to go forth “on to the seas like adventurers enlisted for the elevation of the spirit of the human race”. John F Kennedy often hit similar notes, at times explicitly invoking the “city upon a hill”.

“More than any other people on Earth,” he said in a 1961 speech, “we bear burdens and accept risks unprecedented in their size and duration, not for ourselves alone but for all who wish to be free.” George W Bush termed the war on terror a “crusade”, a descriptor loaded with white-hot millennial connotations, and later declared that Americans “have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom”. Reagan, of course, was a master of the quasi-religious tone. Christian fundamentalists were a crucial part of his base, and Reagan himself had grown up with the millennial world view of the Disciples of Christ. He was striking deep millennial chords in describing the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world”.

Election season in the US has lately become pure carnival for exceptionalist guff, candidates beating each other up with the American exceptionalism stick. It’s the I-Love-America-More-Than-You-Do smackdown: America is and always has been the greatest, ever, at everything, and anyone who disagrees just doesn’t love America enough. But instead of a fantasy, how about this for a more earthbound formulation: America has done very many great and noble things. America has also done many monumentally terrible things, always – always – in the name of doing good. Am I about to be critical of my country? I am, and by the way, the United States was founded on dissent, contrariness, critical thinking; if not for independent thought, we’d still be carrying water for the Brits.



Even a cursory run through American history shows exceptionalism has been used to justify bloodshed, oppression and profit. Cotton Mather saw “the evident hand of God” in the colonists’ wholesale slaughter of Native Americans in King Philip’s war, a genocide that would roll all the way to the Pacific under the quasi-religious doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Over 300 years of slavery were justified on Biblical grounds, as a means of saving African souls, or adherence to a divinely ordained natural order. For invasion and conquest in the name of liberty and democracy, we have the land grabs in Mexico in 1846-48, the Philippines in 1899-1902 and Panama in 1903. For the softer sorts of grabs – ie imperialism – in the early 20th century, the career of Maj Gen Smedley Butler (1881-1940) provides a useful guide to US adventures in Mexico (again), Central America, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and China. A partial list of US-sponsored or actively supported interventions, regime changes and coup d’états for the latter half of the 20th century would include Iran (coup, 1953), Guatemala (coup, 1954), Vietnam (coup, 1963; the war, 1965-1973), Chile (coup, 1973), Argentina (coup, 1976), Nicaragua (war, 1980s), El Salvador (war, 1980s), Panama (invasion, 1989) and Haiti (coup, 1991). Underneath the missionary rhetoric you will usually find the throbbing heart of profit motive. Reflecting on his military career, Butler wrote: “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was … a gangster for capitalism.” For anyone who cares to look, a survey of just three US industries – oil, finance, and bananas – will more than prove the gangster claim.

All this is a way of saying: America is complicated. American history is not clean. Blood and bullshit run through it every bit as robustly as high-minded Puritan principles, the invasion of Iraq being just the latest example. Americans are vulnerable to appeals to our goodness and innocence, as generations of pols and con men have found to their benefit. Exceptionalism is an easy sell in the land of the free, and yet it does contain much that can be called, well, exceptional. The founding of the American republic was truly something new under the sun, a remarkable achievement that can bear the weight of shining-city aspirations. So here’s a working theory: American exceptionalism is a volatile political substance, with as much potential for doing good as wreaking havoc.

Donald Trump named one president, just one out of the entire field of 44, who he felt he couldn’t match for excellence in presidential demeanor – Abraham Lincoln, who also happened to be the most dogged champion of American exceptionalism ever to hold the office. We could do worse than look to Lincoln for guidance.

•••

Walt Whitman, the Brooklyn Eagle, 23 July 1846:

In our sundown perambulations of late through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing “base”, a certain game of ball. We wish such sights were more common among us. In the practice of athletic and manly sports, the young men of nearly all our American cities are very deficient … Clerks are shut up from early morning till nine or ten o’clock at night – apprentices, after their days’ work, either go to bed or lounge about in places where they benefit neither body nor mind – and all classes seem to act as though there were no commendable objects of pursuit in the world except making money …

Even then, we were exceptional workaholics! Surely it speaks to Whitman’s particular genius that he was quick to seize on both the American game and American drudgery, just as he sussed out Lincoln well before the obscure former Congressman was elected president; before he even knew the flesh-and-blood Lincoln existed. In his 1856 essay The Eighteenth Presidency!, Whitman got a load of democratic angst off his chest by describing the current political class as “robbers, pimps … malignants, conspirators, murderers … infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers … monte-dealers, duelists, carriers of concealed weapons, blind men, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with the vile disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains.” Our only hope against this mob, he wrote, was a rough-hewn “Redeemer President” from the west, who in Whitman’s conjury bears a striking resemblance to Lincoln: “some heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman … with the tan all over his face, breast, and arms”.

The American poet Walt Whitman. Photograph: Stock Montage/Getty Images

Lincoln’s supporters at the 1860 Republican convention presented him as “the rail-splitter”, a man of the people who’d done his share of sweat-hog work. Well before he rose to national prominence, Lincoln was proclaiming – preaching would be closer to the point – the gospel of American exceptionalism. He grounded his version of the gospel in the Declaration of Independence, specifically the clause stating the “self-evident” truth “that all men are created equal”. Later, at the Gettysburg battlefield, he would employ a consciously Biblical idiom in stating his case: “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” But he’d been hammering the “proposition” for years, usually stirring the same Biblical echoes as Winthrop and Mather. And the “proposition” wasn’t limited to the US, as he emphasized while en route to Washington in 1861 to take the oath of office:

[The revolutionary war] was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the motherland, but [of] that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence, which gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.

Lincoln’s exceptionalism gospel was as vehement as that of any blowhard politician in 2016, but several essential qualities in the Lincoln version are worth pointing out. Immigrants were included in the American proposition with just as much right as if they’d arrived in America by accident of birth. Speaking in 1857, Lincoln said:

When [immigrants] look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that the moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.

Even more striking is the insistent humility of Lincoln’s exceptionalism. His was very much a self-doubting, self-examining exceptionalism: he believed in the American mission with religious fervor, but maintained a healthy skepticism toward its mortal agents. Throughout his presidency, Lincoln stressed human fallibility, both individual and collective, and even in the midst of a horrifically bloody civil war – in the midst of what you might call partisanship run amok – he refused to vilify or demonize the south. Slavery was a national, not exclusively southern, sin, and he was insistent about reminding the north of its complicity and profit in the slave economy. Even the Gettysburg address, delivered at the site of the north’s greatest victory, is about as far from triumphant as one can imagine. No “Mission Accomplished” banners for Lincoln. No thumping chants of U-S-A! U-S-A!



An official portrait of Abraham Lincoln by George PA Healy, 1869. Photograph: GraphicaArtis/Getty Images

“Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!” wrote Delmore Schwartz in a poem from the 1950s, and one could probably construct a decent argument that Lincoln’s private suffering was part of what made him a genuine hero. He understood pain, loss, guilt; in the Bible he found the language to express this dark side of experience and bring it into the political realm. It was the language of reflection; the language of atonement. Lincoln’s gospel of American exceptionalism depended in large degree on recognizing just how flawed and morally susceptible are the human vessels charged with fulfilling the mission. The Declaration may have stated the truth of equality, “the standard maxim for a free society”, but “[e]nforcement” of the maxim would be a continual and messy process, “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.”

The law, of course, is the means by which equality would be enforced – the constitution, judicial decisions, statutory and common law. The goal, “constantly labored for”, was (and surely continues to be) just laws, justly and fairly enforced. As early in his career as 1838, Lincoln was preaching “reverence for the laws” as “the political religion of the nation”, which helps to explain why the “exemptionalism” championed during the George W Bush administration, and continued in many respects by Obama, is so corrupting, so blatantly un-American. You could call exemptionalism the doppelgänger of exceptionalism; it’s the idea that America is so unique, so righteous, so divinely inspired that it’s exempted from its own and international law whenever its government deems fit. Exemptionalism bears more than a passing resemblance to “reason of state”, the 16th-century doctrine asserting the right of rulers to ignore the law in order to serve an alleged need of the state – by virtue of which the ruler becomes the law, in effect. For the past 15 years, exemptionalism has given us undeclared wars, torture, indefinite detention, wholesale surveillance and spying, and extrajudicial executions of American citizens, all of which tend to render the objects of these attentions rather less than equal. We have laws about this sort of stuff, and it’s those laws that distinguish the US from monarchies and dictatorships. The law does provide for making a person “less equal” – for depriving him or her of property, liberty or even life. It’s called due process and it’s in the constitution.

For Lincoln, it wasn’t enough to save the Union – it had to be worth saving, true to the “Declaration principle” of equality. “If this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle – I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot” – he was in Philadelphia, en route to his inauguration – “than to surrender it.” Post-September 11, American leadership has proved all too willing to surrender it, but even Saint Lincoln wasn’t perfect. For long periods during the war he suspended habeas corpus, that venerable bulwark of due process. He declared the slaves of the south free, but left slavery intact in the border states that remained loyal to the Union. There are reasons why you can’t join the saints till you die.

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This opening day is a happy one for the home team. The weather stays fair, nobody gets hurt, and the Rangers squeak out a 3-2 win on the strength of Prince Fielder’s mighty bloop single. The Dallas Morning News will report tomorrow that history was made on this opening day: according to the Elias Sports Bureau, the Rangers are the only team since 1900 to win their season opener with fewer than two hits. (See what I mean? Highly specialized.)

“Well – it’s our game; that’s the chief fact in connection with it,” Walt Whitman said of baseball. “America’s game; it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere.” Whitman took great pleasure in the sight of Americans doing things together, especially outdoor things, muscular things. “America, her athletic Democracy,” he called it, and he urged us to aspire to “adhesiveness”, the generous affection between citizens that’s the crucial binding agent of democracy. In 2016, it seems fair to say that baseball in America is alive and well. As for adhesiveness, it remains to be seen whether the necessary affection will endure amid vast inequalities of income and opportunity, and a political culture so toxic with partisan flatulence that poor Flint continues to drink its daily water from bottles, and the supreme court soldiers on with an empty seat.