Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A power-mad leader gradually strips positioning and comfort away from his opponents over the course of years until his opposition has no choice but to defend themselves from the final act of aggression, at which point that leader decides to say to the world that his opponents are the problem — flagrantly in the face of redoubtable skepticism — and then proceeds to attack them outright under those obviously false pretenses.
The opposition shows unusually-steely resolve where few thought it existed, the aggressors routinely trip over themselves, fail to consider logistics and optics, put obviously false reports into compliant media outlets. Meanwhile, those opponents survive through this fateful weekend, at which point the aggressors, under continued nakedly bad faith pretenses, decide to hold talks on Monday. This defiance and survival against an overwhelming foe inspires the world to rally behind their cause, a crystallization of noble defense against craven, calculated, crazy self-importance.
Here’s the problem. I’m not talking about Russia’s bumbling, bullying invasion of Ukraine. I’m talking about Rob Manfred and Major League Baseball’s highly-visible pants-pooping over the last months and years, culminating in this past week’s comedy of errors.
Of course, I offer the corollary with the full knowledge that what is happening in Eastern Europe right now is an atrocity and that full-scale war against a smaller country with limited resources — that happens to be doing almost exactly what my Finnish brothers and sisters did in 1939; SISU and SUOMI forever, I might add — is in no way equivalent to a labor squabble initiated by the Keystone Kops running MLB. But, when one boils it down, leaders of both attacking parties have lost their ability to speak any language other than power.
In the geopolitical arena, let’s be clear, that guy never knew any other tongue. In the current mess reaching its day zero in Florida, Manfred should know better.
And now, both Russia and MLB owners have magnanimously decided that 11th hour talks are essential to peace. Never mind the rockets or the cheapskate bad faith offers that have brought us to this moment. At this point, both overlords managed to make themselves look that much more terrible, and they know the world is watching. They do the tap dance of cowards, their bluff called by those of us who know they are unable to dance at all.
Again, when we’re talking about leaders drunk on power and unmoored from reality, the language they speak is universal, even if ambitions are vastly different.
The world is at the brink, held back for now only by about a quarter-million troops, and these clowns running baseball want to cling to their sizable bank accounts.
Are Putin and Manfred the same person? No, but they do have similar hairlines. (Zing!) But when your optics are such that you can (not entirely irrationally!) be likened to a soulless, ruthless autocrat with a reputation to uphold, currently engaged in exercises that could lead to a third World War, perhaps that might act as a reality check that protecting self-interest doesn’t affect the amount of sand in the hourglass.
We want peace in Ukraine. We also want baseball. In no way should any of us view these as equal outcomes, but that’s not up to us. And that is precisely the problem.