These events brings us straight to the personality of the Reverend Al Sharpton, a man seems perpetually inclined to defend his status as New York's most prominent demagogue. Following the shooting, Sharpton became personal advisor to the Diallo family. While Sharpton's high profile makes him an effective spokesman, his involvement should give any thoughtful observer pause - especially given the inflammatory tenor of his activist past. His role in the Tawana Brawley hoax, an entirely fabricated story of the rape of a young black woman by a white man, earned him a lawsuit for defamation. He was a leader in the protests that swirled around "Freddy's" a Jewish owned store in Harlem, during which Sharpton characterized the storeowner as a "white interloper." Those protests ended in arson, as seven people were consumed in the fire set by one of the protestors.

Fast forward to the Diallo protests and we learn that Sharpton hasn't changed a bit. These protests featured people carrying signs with pictures of Giuliani in Nazi garb, accompanied by the slogans, "Fuhrer Rudy," and "Adolf Giuliani." Surely it was not Sharpton who was holding those signs or chanting those slogans. But he never took the time to denounce those who did, much as he never attempted to quell the anti-Semitic fervor that led to the murder of seven in the "Freddy's" protests. Indeed, Sharpton's involvement has tainted these protests, perhaps beyond repair.

Sharpton's preeminence in the New York black community highlights a key flaw in New York politics, namely, the lack of constructive leaders in the black community. As demonstrated by the mayoralty of David Dinkins, the older generation has proven worthless. During his tenure, racial unrest in the city only increased with both the Crown Heights riots, in which a young Jewish student was murdered and the tormenting of Korean storeowners and their customers in Brooklyn. This leadership void has left Sharpton to speak for the black community.

Sharpton's incompetence speaks for itself, and the resulting leadership gap in the black community has serious repercussions. While many in the black community have called for increased diversity on the police force, blaming the lack of police recruiting in minority neighborhoods, it comes as no surprise that few young blacks want to join a police force so thoroughly demonized by their community leaders. While Sharpton points fingers at ìwhite interlopersî for driving out black businessmen from Harlem, opportunities to draw investment and job creating private businesses to the inner city are squandered.

Ironically enough, it is the crime fighting efforts of Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani which are making black neighborhoods once again palatable to entrepreneurs. This brings us to the issue of Giuliani's actual policies and the substance of the current protests. No one can deny that Giulianiís crime fighting efforts have defied all expectations. Who would have thought that New York could become one of the safest cities in the country? As murders, rapes, and all sorts of violent crime have plummeted to new lows, New York has experienced a renaissance that is the envy of mayors across the country.

To explain those staggeringly lower crime rates one needs look no further that Giuliani's innovative and aggressive policing policy that instructs the police to combat all crimes both large and small. As order has been returned to the city the notion that crime is a normal fact of lie had faded and with it crime has fallen further. Again, Giuliani's critics charge that all this crime fighting has come at the expense of the cities minority groups who are now routinely harassed by an overzealous police force. Yet instances of police shooting have fallen by a third since the beginning of Giuliani's administration. 

So it's nearly impossible to view the Diallo shooting as part of a trend towards aggressive policing in New York City. Critics focus only on the negative, but it is the positive that is really compelling. The drop in crime most benefits New York's minority populations who are the most frequent victims of violent crime. Further, the rapid drops in crime have enticed investors to pour money into the once economically neglected minority communities in Harlem and Brooklyn, thereby providing services and jobs to many of the city's minority residents. 

The Diallo shooting was a ghastly event in the history of New York City policing. But evidence of endemic racism in the NYPD stemming from Giulianiís policies is lacking, while the evidence of economic growth and physical safety provided by those policies is overwhelming. With Al Sharpton at the helm of the black community, one can only hope these facts will not be lost on New York citizens.

-Moshe Spinowitz, Circulation Manager
 

And baseball. The not-so-promising Boston Red Sox are challenging the even more diminutive Pittsburgh Pirates in the Pirates' last home-away-from-home game of spring training. Thousands have come to Bradenton's McKechnie Field to see this less-than-epic clash of mediocrities. Then again, Bradentonians have watched the Pirates spring practices and games since 1969. In a climate with nearly indistinguishable seasons (winter + a few degrees and some humidity = summer), baseball's annual migration lends a comfortable, rolling periodicity to life.

George Will - columnist, baseball fan, and visiting lecturer at Harvard earlier this year - finds this daily and yearly repitition at the root of baseball, and at the foundation of its virtue. Will has written previously that "baseball's seasons, coming one after another and comprising a nearly seamless web, are deeply satisfying to one's sense of social transmission. It is the sense of society changing somewhat but always having as its primary business the passing along of slowly accumulated customs, mores, and techniques." He expands on this theme in his most recent collection of columns and short essays, Bunts.

Will ascribes to a classical conception of sport: a "religious and civic, in a word, a moral  undertaking. Seeing people compete courageously helps emancipate the individual and educate his passions." Those under baseball's tutelage are especially blessed, as baseball's soothing repetition drills an especially valuable virtue.

Will writes of the "serious side of baseball": "the relentless and successful pursuit of excellence." Baseball becomes a "craft," a "vocation". Of course, vocations are based neither in luck - by Will "there is a direct correlation [within baseball] between the amount of luck you have and the amount of work you do" - nor on natural ability. In Men at Work, Will's first baseball book, he decries attribution of athletic success solely to God-given talent a "false and pernicious myth" because "for an athlete to fulfill his or her potential a remarkable degree of mental and moral discipline is required." What matters, then, is passionate devotion to a task such that all of ones life is oriented towards success at that task. Thus, Will's moral imperative: "be as intelligent as you can be at whatever you are doing." In other words: "specialize."

Will admires those who immerse themselves in the game. He sketches Cal Ripken's streak of games without sitting out as indicative of the deep "reservoirs of Americaís everyday decency." Tony Gwynn is admirable because he succeeds through a scrupulous attention to detail; he knows that "he can contribute most to winning by doing what he does best, consistently." These, then are the twin poles of Will's baseball virtue: passionate devotion to excellence and consistency.

Will's heroes are quite unique. They are at once exemplars of virtue and specialists, both aristocrats and craftsmen, ancient and modern. In the most enjoyable exchange in Bunts, Will draws the ire of Yale Professor Donald Kagan for this apparent discrepancy. Kagan calls Will "democratically modern" insofar as Will identifies a virtue accessible to decidedly unheroic masses. Will replies pointedly: "I have been called many things, but rarely, if ever, democrat or modern. This mudslinging must cease."

Of course, no democrat would write that "baseball must not be a plaything of that turbulent, hydra-headed monster, the mob," and "democracy is fine in its place, but baseball, like religion, should be beyond the reach of majorities, not blown about by the whims of the unwashed." Will also argues that, in fact, his species of passionate devotion is quite rare, and thus may be considered a heroic virtue. "Not every major league player has the heroic willfulness to pull himself above the common major league herd of the merely gifted." However, Will's baseball virtue is democratic in one very important sense.

Unlike the brilliant heroism - replete with courage, suffering, and sacrifice - heralded by Kagan, Will's baseball virtue is both admirable and estimable. Martial daring is indeed praiseworhty, but for the commoner such courage is the stuff of fancy. Passionate, order-giving devotion to consistent excellence in a vocation, while rare in its finest vintage, is relevent to the droll everyday life of the unwashed. Will's baseball virtue, then, succeeds in fulfilling the classic role of sport: educating the passions of its spectators.

In Bradenton, thousands of eager pupils watched the Red Sox drub the Pirates to end their spring season. At the end of the game, it was all too evident that the season had waned again, and summer was fast approaching. Even the aforementioned tourists seemed dismayed. But for them the spring game was little more than a spectacle; for Bradentonians it was, and will continue to be, a ritual - a mark of passed time, and a valuable lesson in excellence. Indeed, a lesson in the peculiar virtue of baseball.

- Hugh Liebert, Publisher