Anthony Scaramucci on America 250: where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Joe Di Maggio came out of the fog of San Francisco’s North Beach, the eighth of nine kids born to a Sicilian fisherman who couldn’t read English and couldn’t understand why his boy wouldn’t take the boat out. The father wanted nets and the smell of the wharf. The son wanted center field. That quarrel, between an immigrant’s caution and his kid’s ambition, played out in a hundred thousand homes across this country, mine included, and it is the whole American story in miniature. The fisherman’s son ended up standing in Yankee Stadium with fifty thousand people chanting his name, and the old man finally understood why the boy wouldn’t fish. That was the deal America offered, and as we hit the country’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, the question I keep asking is whether we still believe that we’re in the business of honoring it. Striving Brought Us Together Hemingway, who championed self-mastery, gave the old fisherman in his novella exactly one consolation out there alone in the Gulf Stream, the thought of the great DiMaggio, who did everything perfectly even with the bone spur in his heel. Hemingway had it right. Real grace is discipline so deep it stops looking like discipline; it looks natural. But let’s be honest with ourselves, we’ve lost our taste for it in recent years. We reward the loud grievance now. We reward the guy who tells you at length how hard he’s trying. We forgot that dignity used to mean the opposite, doing the hard thing without narrating it. Now look at who else was rising in those same crowded decades, every one of them in a unique style, every one of them carrying an old country’s accent into the new one. Hank Greenberg, the Jew from the Bronx, hitting home runs while across the ocean his people were being marched toward the ovens. Joe Louis, a sharecropper’s grandson, dropped Schmeling to the canvas and carried a whole race in a nation that had not ye