IS KAMALA HARRIS THE HORSE WHO PLAYED BASEBALL?
My father told me the following story in the summer of 1948 when we lived at Hillcrest Courts on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. I was five years old . . .
IS KAMALA HARRIS THE HORSE WHO PLAYED BASEBALL?
My father told me the following story in the summer of 1948 when we lived at Hillcrest Courts on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. I was five years old.
In 1934 a failed Kentucky thoroughbred named Pandora who had finished out of the money in all its races approached Casey Stengel, then manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, to ask him for a tryout with the baseball team.
It didn’t surprise Stengel that the horse could talk. He had seen bums and rats in the bowery bickering with one another as they scoured garbage cans for food together. It did surprise him that the horse could speak English, because what he heard on the streets of Brooklyn hardly reached the level of spoken language. But if you live long enough you will end up seeing and hearing everything.
Stengel gave the horse a try out, and it turned out that Pander (a nickname given by its teammates) could play every position and hit every pitch. Stengel decided to give the horse a contract. If the fans and players would accept a horse playing baseball, then maybe he could in the future reach down into the Negro leagues for the abundant talent found there.
The season began with Pander in center field. Soon the fans got past the novelty of a horse playing baseball. Pander proved that he could play the whole outfield, and when he came to the plate, the opposing teams had to accept either giving him a free pass to first base or watch the ball being hit over the wall.
Pander caused the Dodgers to have the greatest year in its history. The team cruised through the National League all the way to meeting the hated Yankees in the World Series. The Yankees, though they didn’t have a horse who played baseball, had bullied their way through the regular season, and now the two teams split the first six games of the World Series.
Stengel already had enough on his mind before the seventh game, but the horse appeared on the outfield without his hat—the only concession he made to human clothing. Then players came to Casey saying the horse refused to warm up. A murmur went through the crowd as fans began to notice the horse grazing in center field instead of shagging fly balls.
Stengel walked out to center field to ask his star what was going on.
“Hey Pander we have a big game here—the biggest. What’s going on?
The horse ignored Stengel and continued to munch on the grass.
“Hey! It’s the big game. You’re my center fielder. Get a leg on.”
The Horse raised its head to look straight at Stengel and stopped chewing a mouthful of grass long enough to say: “Coach, who ever heard of a horse who played baseball?”
I laughed without quite understanding, and asked my father what it meant.
He said it was a shaggy dog story, and that was all he said. What is a shaggy dog story?
A shaggy dog story or yarn is a long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of irrelevant incidents that ends in an anticlimax. In other words, it is an amusing long story that has an intentionally silly or meaningless ending.
I must first confess that regardless of my confusion about meaning, I found it satisfying. And I have had seventy-six years to work on the meaning. So, I must answer the question: Is Kamala Harris the horse who played baseball?
Obviously, the story is about exclusion and inclusion. Horses don’t play baseball, but the horse who does is the best baseball player the world has ever seen. The same horse proclaims that horses don’t play baseball.
The buried truths of fairy tales lie close to the surface. We didn’t need Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs to unlock the meaning of Little Red Riding Hood. But other fairy tales like Hansel & Gretel might conceal a whole world of disaster and tragedy lying behind the grim surface story.
For decades I sought the meaning and finally concluded that the horse stands for women. The story isn’t about capability—the horse was the best baseball player in the world. The story was about who belongs where, and the horse didn’t belong.
Which brings us to Kamala Harris, the Democrat candidate for President of the United States. Her pathway to the nomination was unique in American history. She bypassed the whole primary process, and the horse auditioned in the major leagues.
A horse seems uniquely unsuited to play baseball, and we are never told how he accomplished it. In Kamala’s case, she took three giant steps from DA to Attorney General to Senator by some magical process that can’t be explained to anyone living outside of California, and stinks like the open sewer-city of San Francisco even to Californians. One can’t find in her any specific talent or accomplishment like knowledge, reasoning, shared compassion, some indication of wisdom, or skill in speaking.
Kamala is good at only one thing, and that is being Kamala—which must be the flavor of the 21st century, because Joe Biden chose her as his running mate in 2020. He said he would choose a black woman, and chose Kamala. Coming in first in a race where the overwhelming percentage of possible opponents have been eliminated by race or sex doesn’t seem much of an accomplishment.
The baffling commitment of the Democrat party to mathematical parity as though God had stated an 11th commandment demanding such is also beyond understanding. The grubby Democrat party’s fondness for buying votes—“I’ll fix all your traffic tickets,” the alderman said in our front room—based on racial quotas is surely going to result in selling the votes of those who can’t make the most-favored-minority cut. Trying to identify the most deserving, persecuted minority is a trying business. A new group pops up every day.
The punchline for a Harvard University student joke from the school’s better days identified the most deserving minority as pregnant, lesbian Eskimos.
To answer the question in the headline: Kamala Harris is not the horse who played baseball for two reasons:
1. The horse could play baseball—Kamala can’t function at any level of the political spectrum, and it is a miracle equal to the Miracle of Fatima that she has from meager beginnings failed up the ladder and now runs for President without a single vote being recorded in her favor;
2. The horse knew to quit. Kamala doesn’t.