In game three of this year’s World Series, Houston Astros infielder Yuli Gurriel celebrated after hitting a homerun against Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish of the Los Angeles Dodgers by making a gesture to his teammates in the dugout that involved pulling back his eyelids like an Asian person.
After the game, the pitcher’s snowflake feelings were hurt and sports writers and fans rushed to virtue signal, howling for fines and suspensions. Conspicuous among them was Jeff Passan, snowflake extraordinaire and lead writer for Yahoo Sports. According to Passan, Major League Baseball (MLB) had to fine and suspend Gurriel for his racist gesture in order to promote “social responsibility and inclusion.”
Predictably, MLB succumbed to the Politically Correct (PC) Twitter mob- that infantile, joy-killing, left-wing thought police- and announced that Gurriel would be fined and suspended for five games, albeit with the munificence of allowing his suspension to take effect at the start of next season and not during the World Series.
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Gurriel, it should be noted, defected in 2016 from his native Cuba, a country still ruled by a corrupt, murderous, totalitarian regime that sucks the life out of its citizens and imprisons those who speak out against its brutal methods. The United States, on the other hand, offered Gurriel freedom and, as a result, the opportunities to develop his talents, succeed, and prosper far beyond what any ordinary Cuban can expect under the Castro dictatorship.
Gurriel, however, is now learning that, due to a suffocating politically correct (PC) culture, sometimes the supposedly free U.S. sucks as much as Cuba. According to legions of fragile fans and sports writers on the internet, Gurriel is not permitted to think, say, or gesture in ways that might offend the self-appointed leftist dictators of the U.S., id est, the snowflakes.
In this case, however, destiny took the side of sanity. MLB’s respite allowed Gurriel to show that he is a gentleman and that his boyish gesture mocking Darvish was a triviality blown out of proportions to stratospheric levels. In game 7 of the World Series, once he approached home plate in order to bat once again against Darvish, Gurriel tipped his helmet toward the pitcher, making a gesture clearly meant as an apology for any offense caused or imagined.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkNZWyTHADY
Darvish, however, got demolished again in the final game of the World Series. At home, before a crowd of sympathetic Los Angeles snowflakes, he gave up as many runs as he got outs: 5. One could almost feel sorry for Mr. Darvish, almost. He’ll be wanting more cheese with the rest of his whine. But, again, he’s hardly the principal problem. It’s the media who promote this kind of hooey.
Behind the media, however, there are the legions of lefty academics who have created an American industry out of pushing race, gender, and class hysterics down the throats of gullible students in their late teens and early twenties, many of whom eventually become hacks at places like the New York Times or Yahoo Sports.
Instead of teaching the great books of the Western tradition (or those of any other serious culture for that matter) or engaging in the hard sciences, thousands of academics and university administrators have decided that their main concern should be to encourage students to pull down Confederate statues or to ensure the inoffensiveness of Halloween costumes. After decades of brain washing at virtually all US academic institutions, many Americans now believe that life only attains meaning when they wallow in guilt and fret about everyone’s feelings.
.@HoustonTX says about 1M people attended the @astros parade! HPD chief @ArtAcevedo thanked everyone for being "classy and respectful" pic.twitter.com/iaI0eGUNB6
— ABC13 Houston (@abc13houston) November 4, 2017
The funny thing, of course, is that American academics actually believe that they’re not racists, ignoring the fact that they themselves express their open contempt for certain groups, like white, working class Trump voters. Worse still, bien-pensant academics think that the politically incorrect hoi polloi can be improved upon through a proper (or rather politically correct) education. Is this not just an effort to turn everyone into “good racists” according to the hypocritical model of behavior of modern academics?
Snowflakes prone to call out others on their racism while concealing their own are particularly insidious because of their collectivist mindset. The U.S. has a history of this. The 1956 science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers echoes the creepy tribal instinct in Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). Instead of burning witches at the stake, today’s silly, toxic puritans take to Yahoo Sports to bemoan a Cuban immigrant mocking a Japanese immigrant, both of whom play baseball for a living.
In truth, however, nobody should be surprised by Gurriel’s gesture. Centuries before anyone heard of locker room culture- and baseball players spend much of their time in locker rooms- Montesquieu noted that Spaniards are racists (and all Cubans were Spaniards as recently as 1898). As lefties, who thought no Hispanic would vote for a candidate who made anti-Mexican comments, learned to their dismay, many US Latinos felt an affinity with Trump during his campaign due to his open displays of machismo.
Montesquieu, however, also noted that commerce is an efficient social palliative which allows people to get along in order to get what they want. I suspect the real reason the left wants to suppress commerce is because they know that by debilitating such an effective mechanism for avoiding society’s natural conflicts, they will increase the relative value of virtue signaling. And lefties, who have usurped the hyper-moral power of the clergy that Montesquieu’s Enlightenment once toppled, are the self-appointed high priests of virtue signaling.
.@HoustonTX says about 1M people attended the @astros parade! HPD chief @ArtAcevedo thanked everyone for being "classy and respectful" pic.twitter.com/iaI0eGUNB6
— ABC13 Houston (@abc13houston) November 4, 2017
Back to sanity and destiny: despite all the nonsensical cries of “racist!” the PC Los Angeles team lost the World Series. It was a quite fitting result given that we are in the first year of the Trump administration. And looking back, Houston won it all by emerging from Hurricane Harvey and beating the three teams from the most politically correct media markets on the planet: Los Angeles, New York, and Boston.
Texas poetic translation: tyrannical communism in Cuba is a far worse problem than whatever shadow of racism remains in the U.S.