The Big Picture - 
By Glynn Wilson –

The scariest thing about this Halloween is that Donald Trump is still president.

The good news on Thursday is that the Washington Nationals stunned the betting favorite Houston Astros in game seven of the World Series Wednesday night, bringing home a maiden national championship to the nation’s capital city.

I was there in 2004 and 2005 when the Lerner family negotiated a deal to bring the Nats to Washington from Montreal, working in a little newsroom on Pennsylvania Avenue a couple of blocks from the White House, and became a fan, switching my baseball loyalty from the Atlanta Braves.

Growing up and coming of age in the South in the 1960s and ’70s, the Braves were the only team we had. From the east side of Birmingham, it was an easy two and a half hour drive to the Atlanta stadium in those days, where my dad used to take me to watch Hank Aaron hit home runs.

I was teaching journalism in Georgia in 1995 and got to see the Braves bring home the teams’ only World Series championship that fall.

Baseball used to be called America’s national sport and “pastime,” before football took over the television ratings and the advertising money wars, corrupting our society in the process. It is my empirical, objective observation that the football culture is part of our political problem.

Football is the modern equivalent of the gladiators in Rome. We all know about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

Donald Trump only took off as a presidential candidate when he started holding rallies in football stadiums. Football fans flocked to the stadiums to see the reality TeeVee star spout nonsensical promises, starting in Mobile, Alabama, the home town of then-Senator Jeff Sessions.

Of course we all know what happened to Sessions when he did the honorable thing and recused himself from the Russia investigation due to his role in the Trump campaign. Trump castigated him on Twitter and television and fired him. Sessions has launched a trial balloon saying he may toss his hat into the ring to regain his old seat. But Mobile Congressman and Trump sycophant Bradly Byrne is having none of it, indicating he will use Trump’s words against Sessions if he decides to run.

Even Democrat Doug Jones, who now holds Sessions’ old seat, has joked in the past that if Sessions were to decide to run, Trump’s tweets about him would end up on billboards all over the state.

As political prognosticators, the editors of the New American Journal saw working people flocking to Ladd–Peebles Stadium in 2015 and 2016 wearing their Crimson Alabama football jerseys and MAGA caps and predicted that Trump could win the presidency when none of the national pollsters gave him a chance.

Of course you won’t find that out in the New York Times, the Washington Post, on television news, cable TeeVee or even Rolling Stone magazine, although they will give celebrity gadfly filmmaker Michael Moore credit even though he’s not a journalist or an expert in public opinion survey research.

They also won’t tell you that football is part of the problem, or that baseball might be part of the solution.

There is some honor in baseball. Not much in football.

Players hit each other constantly in football. Head injuries are rampant and more and more recognized as a problem, especially for children who play the game.

Baseball is far less dangerous, although games are too long now, mainly due to television advertising breaks. Also, most games are not free on broadcast television anymore. People have to pay for cable or satellite TV to watch, and that fee no longer gets rid of the ads.

Patience and humility are honored in baseball. Machismo is more apparent in football.

I could go on and on, but you get the point.

Here’s one more thing the mainstream media won’t necessarily tell you about, since they don’t mix sports reporting with political reporting.

Many of the people who booed Trump at Sunday night’s game in Washington are civil servants who work for the federal government or are related to or know people who do. The audience for the Nationals are those who live in and work in and around the nation’s capital city, many in metro Virginia and Maryland. These are the people who Trump derides as “swamp” creatures or those who work for the “Deep State.”

In reality, the merit-based civil service was created to fight the old “spoils system” in politics so federal agencies could operate effectively and efficiently.

Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush brought the spoils system back with them to Washington. President Obama tried to bring merit back to the job, but Trump has exploded that in a destructive way we have never seen before.

Don’t just believe me. Read this.

“A merit-based system for hiring federal employees was created in reaction to the rampant corruption of the Gilded Age.”

The ‘Deep State’ Exists to Battle People Like Trump

My friends in Washington don’t watch or support the Washington Redskins anymore. They won’t even utter their name. They just refer to them as “that team with the racial slur for a name.”

Now if we could get more people around the country to stop supporting football and go back to baseball — and to support politicians who favor merit over spoils — we might save this country yet.