The Daily Beast piece about Mariano Rivera - some thoughts

I'm late to the game on chiming in on this - Hank Berrian at the Daily Wire, Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media, Guy Benson at Townhall, and David Harsanyi at The Federalist have all covered it commendably and in a timely fashion - but I'm still compelled to remark.

The original piece, by Robert Silverman, has in common with the New York Times editorial and the piece in The Nation about the moon-landing anniversary, the postmodern leftist zeal for imbuing those rare opportunities for post-Americans to celebrate innocuous yet momentous achievements with an ideological charge. The moon landing can't be commemorated without talking about aerospace research facilities crowding indigenous people in the Southern Hemisphere off their land, or how the USSR showed up the dearth of diversity among US astronauts. Similarly, Rivera's unanimous selection for the Baseball Hall of Fame has to be found to have some kind of taint, and - ah! - there it is! He's a sound-doctrine Christian!

No matter that Mariano is universally well-regarded and that his story, a Panamanian fisherman discovered by a Yankees scout who was playing in the World Series seven years later, is a classic tale of the nexus of fortune and fortitude.

But by the third paragraph of his piece, Silverman has to tie Mariano to Trump, which gives Silverman the opportunity to do what he really wanted to do with the project: express his disgust for Trump, for Israel's present administration, and for utterly uncontroversial Christian doctrine in the most throbbingly vitriolic terms at his disposal:

To this day, he is held up as the ideal athlete, bestowed with endless grace and an unflappable demeanor on the mound that belied a burning competitive desire. Rivera represents a nearly unbroken succession of Yankee greatness that stretches all the way back to the 1920s, from Ruth and Gehrig to DiMaggio and Mantle, and then Reggie Jackson and Derek Jeter. 

And over the past three years, he’s also served at the pleasure of a racist president, taken part in thinly veiled propaganda on behalf of a far-right government in Israel, and gotten chummy with outright bigots and apocalyptic loons. None of this will be inscribed on his Hall of Fame plaque. It should, even if much of the sports world would very much like to pretend none of it exists.

Harsanyi makes short work of addressing that "served at the pleasure" business:

. . . the piece offers no evidence that Mariano has “served at the pleasure” of the Trump administration—even if you accept the debatable contention that the administration is racist.

Rivera didn’t join the pinstriped Sturmtruppen, he merely accepted a nomination to the Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. He signed onto the Opioid Drug Abuse Commission. He went to the White House as a delegate for the Special Olympics. He took “friendly photo op” as part of an interfaith conference in Israel with the U.S. ambassador to Israel. These days, I guess all of this qualifies as extremism. 

And Kruiser summarizes what all this adds up to:

Recapping Rivera's offenses according to Robert Silverman:

1. Wants to keep people off drugs.
2. Wants American kids to exercise and have fun.
3. Is Christian.
4. Staunchly supports one of the staunchest allies the United States has.

Basically a portrait of history's greatest monster right there.

Later in his piece, Silverman examines the context in which Mariano's positions and faith play out:

Even now, during a time when athlete activism is considered the norm, Bryant said questioning Israel’s policies or advocating on behalf of Palestinians remains political “dynamite.” When 500 civilians were killed by an extensive bombing campaign in 2014, former NBA players Dwight Howard and Amar’e Stoudemire offered tame support for Palestinian human rights. (Howard tweeted #FreePalestine, and Stoudemire posted an image on Instagram of an Israeli and Palestinian child with their arms wrapped around one another with the text “Pray for palestine” [sic] above their heads.) Both athletes were roundly criticized and deleted the posts. Howard then apologized at length.

Of course, as Benson points out, Silverman has nothing to say about

 . . . the context in which those deaths [along with other deaths Silverman mentions later in the piece] occurred, the violent agitation stirred up by the internationally-recognized terrorist organization that runs Gaza, the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians by Hamas and Hezbollah, and the great lengths to which Israel goes to avoid unnecessary civilian deaths. The point of the story is that Israel is bad, as is Mariano Rivera, by extension. Any information that might cut against this ignorant narrative is simply omitted. 

Silverman is the kind of permanently infuriated post-American who sees civilizational hills to die on in soda straws, sexually normal actors playing transgenders, and NBA team owners being called what  they are.

He's also morally warped to a hideous degree.

His odious screed only merits oxygen as yet one more case study in the sum total of indicators of Western civilization's dire state of spiritual health.