“Yogi: It Ain’t Over” by Yogi Berra

Life During War Time All Over Again: What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." From Francis Bacon's essay Of Truth

I didn’t say, “It’s déjà vu all over again,” and I didn’t say, “always go to other people’s funerals; otherwise, they won’t go to yours.” But I did get a phone call from William Safire, the New York Times columnist, asking if I had. He didn’t seem disappointed when I told him no. That made me like him even though we had never met.

In 1998 “The Yogi Book” was published by Berra to present a collection of authentic Yogiisms. He included a version of the déjà vu saying and stated that he spoke it when he witnessed teammates Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris both hit homeruns. The two sluggers were adjacent in the batting order, and Berra had seen this powerful combination on several occasions in the past.

I simply wish to entertain myself in the human comedy and so absent money I seek it out on line. Of course alongside my entertainment is my opinion which I admit now and then is speculation founded upon facts and not Qua Truth. Not that in our time we can really accept all alone, on our lonesome, Qua Truth as a higher and more exact absolute aloneness among men in general who prefer a socially useable truth of expedient means in the situation.

Yogi Berra found that his myth was expedient and he enjoyed it and went with the flow the media narrative carved out for his life river. A baseball man after all, the all American sport and he an all American baseball manager, behaving like a baseball guy digging his legend. And why not, he is saying to himself “I’m such a lucky guy to have career like this. Out of all the baseball managers in the world the media chose me.” So then frame our time with the innocence of a Yogi Berra.

It’s 2024 and the mind fuckers play hardball like the Yankees.

Myth is upheld as Qua Truth but it is the Big Lie Myth, Pilate’s myth. Fauci’s tall tales and CDC fables and the yarns of Tedros from WHO. Everyday I see masked people outside, in cars, cabs, stores, on foot, at the Ocean, on my bus routes and in Botanical Gardens. All ages. No limit to youth or age. Seeing is believing and though I am quite nearsighted see I do. I believe. I have no other option left. I joke that I see the train headlight coming down the track from the radiant Red future. A dystopian fate since anger and other emotions forge a sentiment of “Get Back”

Richard Wright saw this Red future and thought it right. A good future as did other poets of the 20’s and 30’s:

I am black and I have seen black hands
Raised in fists of revolt, side by side with the white fists of white workers,
And some day—and it is only this which sustains me—
Some day there shall be millions and millions of them,
On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!

Communism is the secular Second Coming. Salvation by our idols, our machines, our Technique, by the constant struggle sessions for the leader who is like Prophet and guides our labor.

I Have Seen Black Hands

by Richard Wright

I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions of them—
Out of millions of bundles of wool and flannel tiny black fingers have reached restlessly and hungrily for life.
Reached out for the black nipples at the black breasts of black mothers,
And they've held red, green, blue, yellow, orange, white, and purple toys in the childish grips of possession,
And chocolate drops, peppermint sticks, lollypops, wineballs, ice cream cones, and sugared cookies in fingers sticky and gummy,
And they've held balls and bats and gloves and marbles and jack-knives and sling-shots and spinning tops in the thrill of sport and play
And pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters and sometimes on New Year's, Easter, Lincoln's Birthday, May Day, a brand new green dollar bill,
They've held pens and rulers and maps and tablets and books in palms spotted and smeared with ink,
And they've held dice and cards and half-pint flasks and cue sticks and cigars and cigarettes in the pride of new maturity . . .

II

I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions of them—
They were tired and awkward and calloused and grimy and covered with hangnails,
And they were caught in the fast-moving belts of machines and snagged and smashed and crushed,
And they jerked up and down at the throbbing machines massing taller and taller the heaps of gold in the banks of bosses,
And they piled higher and higher the steel, iron, the lumber, wheat, rye, the oats, corn, the cotton, the wool, the oil, the coal, the meat, the fruit, the glass, and the stone until there was too much to be used,
And they grabbed guns and slung them on their shoulders and marched and groped in trenches and fought and killed and conquered nations who were customers for the goods black hands had made.
And again black hands stacked goods higher and higher until there was too much to be used,
And then the black hands held trembling at the factory gates the dreaded lay-off slip,
And the black hands hung idle and swung empty and grew soft and got weak and bony from unemployment and starvation,
And they grew nervous and sweaty, and opened and shut in anguish and doubt and hesitation and irresolution . . .

III

I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions of them—
Reaching hesitantly out of days of slow death for the goods they had made, but the bosses warned that the goods were private and did not belong to them,
And the black hands struck desperately out in defence of life and there was blood, but the enraged bosses decreed that this too was wrong,
And the black hands felt the cold steel bars of the prison they had made, in despair tested their strength and found that they could neither bend nor break them,
And the black hands fought and scratched and held back but a thousand white hands took them and tied them,
And the black hands lifted palms in mute and futile supplication to the sodden faces of mobs wild in the revelries of sadism,
And the black hands strained and clawed and struggled in vain at the noose that tightened about the black throat,
And the black hands waved and beat fearfully at the tall flames that cooked and charred the black flesh . . .

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