Spectator A.M. #2101

The Jackson 1

Troy Jackson—the Dabney Coleman to Graham Platner’s Gene Hackman, the Webster to Platner’s Diff’rent Strokes, the Whitesnake to his Led Zeppelin—officially won the Democratic Party nomination for the U.S. Senate in Maine on Saturday. He’s the he’s-a-lumberjack-and-he’s-okay candidate. One senses that Maine Democrats, just like the lumberjack’s best girlie, come November exclaim: “Oh, Bevis! And I thought you were so rugged!” Oh, Bevis? Oh, Troy? Six of one, half a dozen of the other.  

I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar (in a Baritone Voice)

Oxford University Press spiked his book on gender. Scores of MIT professors characterized as “simply unconscionable” his decision to sit on a Trump Administration panel that pondered, among other questions, transgender participation in youth sports. A pitchfork-and-torches academic mob at Harvard drove his wife to consider suicide and to ultimately leave the university. And University of Toronto Professor Jonathan Weisberg calls him a “smug and condescending d---head.” MIT philosopher Alex Byrne explains in a fascinating interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education: “It’s hard to say this without laughing, but my most controversial paper appeared in 2020. It’s called ‘Are Women Adult Human Females?’ The answer is yes.”

The Hidden History of the Spanish Civil War

The late, great Herb Romerstein referred to the Spanish Civil War as the most discussed but least understood small war of the 20th Century. Part of my pilgrimage to Spain involved an attempt to better understand this misunderstood war. To that end, I visited the site of the most dramatic siege of the war and the ruins of a church destroyed by the Communists. George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Ernest Hemingway, and other of the 20th Century’s great minds traveled to Spain to help the left-wing government through sword or pen. How could they be so idiotic and, yes, evil? Watch my @RightWingWildnerness discussion that takes us to Toledo, Malaga, and Madrid to uncover the hidden history of the Spanish Civil War.

Scorched Earth

I noticed a large plume of smoke in the distance from the tarmac in Madrid on Thursday. For a moment I selfishly thought, “Oh, no, this better not delay my flight.” I thought nothing of it until Saturday back in the United States. It turns out that both Spain and France fight wildfires. “About 220,000 people have been evacuated in France, while more than 75,000 ⁠people in Spain have been evacuated from their homes and around 30,000 more ordered to shelter in place, according to authorities,” NBC News reports. Two stops on my travels—the old capital Toledo and the new capital Madrid—sit in the path of these wildfires. The only precipitation I sensed during my nine days in Spain occurred when I fell asleep to three-hour YouTube videos of rainfall. The Spaghetti Western landscape appeared especially parched. Unfortunately, the first drink arrives in the form of fire hoses and water dropped from aircraft.

The Botton for Topps

Greg Maresca describes baseball cards as the currency of boyhood in an article @ The American Spectator. It certainly was for me. I recall a baseball-card summit of sorts with this larger kid with a high-pitched voice nicknamed “Weave.” In a quiet field, we traded a Wade Boggs for a Don Mattingly. Who got the Boggs? Who got the Mattingly? I do not remember. I collected Carlton Fisk, Lou Brock, Joe Rudi, and Bruce Sutter cards, to name a few. I liked the design of the 1975 Topps run the best. “For many of us Topps wasn’t just a corporation,” Maresca writes of the leading card company when I traded with Weave. “It was a companion. It was the smell of a pack of new cards emerging from its wax packaging. It was the thrill of landing an all-star. It was the colors that determined your fortune in the schoolyard.” Donruss and Fleer competed with Topps during the 1980s. More recently, as Maresca’s article focuses on, Fanatics overtook it. But really other sports overtook baseball. On summer Saturdays during the 1980s, boys watched Johnny Bench host The Baseball Bunch followed by Mel Allen’s unforgettable voice narrating This Week in Baseball to a more unforgettable soundtrack. Baseball does little to promote itself to kids in 2026. Beyond this, the adults ruined the boyhood pastime of baseball card collection. It became professionalized, with cards treated as an investment no different from high art or short-term bonds. One prefers even the kids who stuck Rod Carews in the spokes of their bikes to make motorcycle noises to the oh-so-serious, 46-year-old, baseball-card collector. Baseball, a sport of numbers more than any I know (as the back of the card attests), became a victim of numbers—or at least baseball cards did. Like tulips and dot-coms, baseball cards endure inflationary bubbles, too.