Eisenhower once told a story about being a small boy in Kansas, fishing with a friend. "I told him," Ike recalled, "I wanted to be a real Major League baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish." Fifty years and nine U.S. presidents later, baseball still has a place in presidential folklore. Soon after Florida was decided in Bush's favor in 2000, Little League Baseball sent their congrats in the form of a proposed joint partnership. The relationship was consummated on Sunday, May 7, 2001 with "Tee Ball on the South Lawn," an event which saw Bush, in the words of the press secretary, "inviting and welcoming to the South Lawn children from disadvantaged areas and bringing them to that beautiful lawn to play tee-ball." ¹

It's only a game--if only it were. While Barbara Bush received her photo-op with the Little League mascot Dugout--not half as surreal as the image of Nancy Reagan sitting in the lap of Mr. T, I'm sorry to say²--and be-jerseyed tee-balling youngsters graced the front-pages of every major newspaper from The New York Times to the Washington Post, the White House Office of Communications was really the one umpiring this game.³ Not the game of tee ball, mind you, but the game of public relations--which in its Soviet guise we were wont to call propaganda. If you feel the point is hard pressed, you are invited to join in on a recitation of the Little League pledge. Hand on heart, repeat these words: "I love my God/I love my country/And will respect its laws/I will play fair/And strive to win/But win or lose/I will always/Do my best." Not unlike the television commercial of the early 1990s which informed the viewer that one word is known in all languages, Coca-Cola, so are these words universally known as American (not English) for faith-based patriotic values ("I love my god . . . my country"), free markets and rugged individualism ("win or lose/I will always/Do my best").

Is baseball really presidential folklore--or just the lore folk need to hear to settle for the state this country is in? Take that hand off your heart and give it to me, I'll take you back to the 1950s--that golden decade from which Bush often summons his supposed presidential values--and introduce you to the German intellectual Theodor Adorno. As a philosopher with at least a foot in Marxism and his mind on the vapid consumerist storm of the era in which he found himself, Adorno was less likely to refer to "propaganda" and more to something larger at work in society: he fingered capitalism. Of sport, he had this to say: "The rules of the game resemble those of the market, equal chances and fair play for all, but only as the struggle of all against all."⁴

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