American Dream Tableau

In Little Leagues or Bigs, baseball fields are places to celebrate our national ideals--individual skills as part of a team effort where everyone knows the boundaries and plays hard to win but respects the rules.

This weekend, when we needed it more than ever, there was a tableau in Kansas City to bring tears to the most hardened observer of American life. A 22-year-old named Joba Chamberlain stepped out on the mound and began throwing 100-mile-an-hour pitches for the New York Yankees.

But the real drama was in the grandstands where his father, Harlan, in a wheelchair, surrounded by neighbors from Lincoln, Neb. was seeing his son in the Major Leagues for the first time.

The elder Chamberlain, afflicted by polio when he was nine months old, was born on a reservation of the Winnebago American Indian tribe and left with little use of his left arm, a severe limp and deafness in his left ear.

Nonetheless, as a single father supporting his family, he played catch with his son while sitting in the wheelchair until his hand stung so much he couldn’t stand it. "If it wasn't blowing or a million degrees below zero, we were out there," Harlan Chamberlain recalls.

Joba, born Justin, is now a sensation in the American League after pitching in eleven games without giving up a run. But his father was not watching with statistics in mind.

“I just want to reach out to my son and touch him,” he said. "I just want to hold him for a few minutes."

Gonzales' Father's Best Days

Throughout his ordeals of the past months and again yesterday at the climax, our outgoing Attorney General kept repeating the mantra, “Even my worst days have been better than my father’s best days.”

In clinging so fiercely to his own achievement of the American Dream, Gonzales was unwittingly evoking one of the nightmares of the Administration he served--reversing two centuries of constant upward progress from one generation to the next.

This spring, the “American Mobility Report” showed young men today worse off financially than their fathers were at the same age, a reversal of the generational advances that have made the “Land of Opportunity” a reality from the start.

In March, three out of every four Americans in a Pew Research Center poll said they believed that “the rich just get richer while the poor just get poorer.”

Gonzales’ benefactor George Bush made it possible for him to outdo his immigrant laborer father but, by widening the gap between rich and poor, has been pulling up the drawbridge for new generations still mired in poverty.

It seems to have escaped the Attorney General’s notice that he was faithfully serving a President who has been busy denying the possibilities that were open to him to millions like him who followed.