Campaign-Trail Quotes From George W. Bush, If He Were Running for President in 1848.

"You robber barons, I consider you my base."

"These Mexican people are guerrillas, OK? They hate our culture. They hate our way of life. And they hate our slavery."

"My opponent wants to let Freemasons decide American foreign policy. I disagree."

"There's an old saying in the Republic of Texas—I know it's in Texas, probably the Oregon Territory, too—that says, 'You can't help but forget, I mean, the Alamo's got to be forgotten.' Always remember that."

"I cannot support the ads from Tippecanoe Veterans for Truth, but there are some doubts raised. I wonder, how much damage did the musket ball truly do to his leg?"

"Literacy is an enormous issue today. That's why we have proposed the No Caucasian Child Left Behind initiative, with a goal of 10 percent literacy by 1860. Because we owe it to our Caucasian children."

"It is simply not true that we lacked support for the Mexican War. Our coalition was joined by Bohemia, the Papal States, and Lombardy. When listing our supporters, my opponent also forgot Schleswig."

"My opponent says he opposed the admission of Kansas into the Union as a slave state, but when he was in the Senate, he championed the Missouri Compromise. He's a flapjacker. That's all there is to it."

"Our intelligence was clear that Santa Anna had the capabilities to produce ironclad ships. We have not found these ironclad ships yet, but the fact remains that the Rio Grande is safer."

"Today I call upon the Congress to promptly pass, and to send to the states for ratification, an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of a white man and white woman as husband and wife."

BASEBALL

Baseball, the other great fall distraction, has removed itself from the stage with its customary clarity and dispatch, but not before revealing itself to be a Lab puppy at heart. The Boston Red Sox, after eighty-six years of dreary or spectacular failure, stand as Champions of the World; the Evil Empire and the St. Louis Cardinals and the Curse of the Bambino have been carried away, one after the other, dead as doornails; and the engrossing anxieties and preposterous turns of fortune that had run up cell-phone charges and damaged sleep up and down the land ever since September—Curt Schilling’s sutured and seeping ankle, A-Rod’s skulky hand-chop, “Who’s Your Daddy?,” and the certified greatest team comeback in history—are gone away, clearing our brains and restoring a vivifying boredom to breakfast. Non-fans can expect relief from the daily clutter of reference and nicknames and “how ’bout that”s, but even the loftiest of them must sense that this time around a professional sport produced something like a unifying jolt of happiness at the end, a national smile.

The Sox, all this while, have personified the rigorous and unbending difficulty of sport, and the grisly details of their ways of losing and the depths of their fans’ suffering have been absorbed not just by eight- or nine-year-old boys and girls growing up in Brockton and Great Barrington but by the rest of us, smug at home on Schadenfreude Lane. Bucky Dent’s homer in ’78, Billy Buckner’s muff in ’86, Johnny Pesky holding onto the ball too long in ’46, Aaron Boone’s eleventh-inning shot into the left-field stands a year ago at Yankee Stadium—who could forget this, or who needed it, if you preferred to think that the Red Sox had not won a championship since 1918 because their owner, Harry Frazee, later sold away their great star, Babe Ruth, to the Yankees, and laid an evil spell on his club forever? “The Curse of the Bambino”—it was the title of a 1990 baseball book by the Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy—was easy to make light of until this spring or early midseason, when adults found themselves being asked by otherwise reliable friends if they put stock in it or thought it would ever go away. Curt Schilling, the ace Sox starter, who won twenty-one games this season, said that he couldn’t believe in the Curse because he was a Christian, but he answered the question in a different way when he beat the Yankees, in the critical sixth game of the American League championships, and then the St. Louis Cardinals, in the second game of the World Series, each time with a right ankle sutured (and resutured) to hold a damaged tendon in place. (His bloodied right sock, glimpsed in television closeups, was seen in reverent replication on the foot of a teen-aged ticket holder going into Fenway Park.)

The Red Sox comeback from a three-game deficit to the Yankees in the championship series was not just unprecedented in the sport but near-unbearable—a five-hour-and-two-minute fourth game, settled in the twelfth inning, was followed, the next day (the same day, actually), by a five-hour-and-forty-nine-minute fifth, in fourteen—and along the lengthy way national audiences became aware of the Sox’ raunchy, joyful élan at the very same time that they began to comprehend the hovering deadly odds against their survival. The mass hug-ups, Johnny Damon’s Bible-movie hair, Pedro’s headbands, Manny Ramirez’s childlike smile and pistol-pointing riff after another hit or goof, and David Ortiz’s dusty hand-clap before he picked up his black bat again and stepped back into the box may have had nothing to do with the glorious Boston outcome, but they charmed you even if you were rooting for the other side, and brought you aboard. Eventually, the baseball gods were charmed as well, and forgave the Red Sox their outrageous four errors in each of the first two World Series games, and then threw a magical torpor over the dangerous Cardinal batters for the remainder of the swift and one-sided sweep. Enough of this suffering, someone had decided: time to lighten up.

All baseball is local, and what this historic surcease means to lifelong Red Sox rooters was expressed by a friend, a newspaper man in his late fifties, who called the morning after the Series ended and said, “I’m so elated. I’m surprised at how happy I am. It’s not like anything else I can remember—or maybe not since the birth of my son. I thought of him, and then I thought about my mother and my grandfather. The baseball genes in my family all come down from those two. He was a retired Brookline cop who lived upstairs from us on Nottinghill Road, in Brighton, and his whole life was the Red Sox and White Owl cigars. If my brother or I messed up, he would say, ‘Error, error.’ He was a big fan of the old manager Joe Cronin—he’d met him somewhere and shaken his hand. My mother was the same way. You’d hear her ironing and listening to the game in the next room, and you could tell if the Sox were losing by the way she slammed the iron around.”

The friend interrupted his train of thought, anticipating a question. “Of course, I’ve been worried about the loss of innocence and involvement,” he went on. “But now we Sox guys will just be regular fans—and what’s wrong with that? We won’t need the superstition and suffering anymore.”

Baseball is the only game that’s played every day, which is why its season often seems endless, right up to the inning and the out—the little toss over to first base—when, wow, it ends. Politics should be so lucky. Perhaps there was a time when a close and angry election like this one could be expected to produce some easy joy and a rough, semi-polite unanimity when it was over, and a little space when the candidates and the pollsters and the focus groups and the voters went home and thought about what it was that first hooked them on such passion, but it does not come quickly to mind. Now the imminent world, with its round-the-clock, round-the-hour schedule of crises and casualties and unfolding disasters, does not permit even a two-minute timeout. What we all could use right now is fifteen weeks till pitchers and catchers.



MOVIES

Ray

Swaying from side to side at the piano, his back arched almost to the point of snapping, his head reaching for unseen lights, Jamie Foxx, as Ray Charles in “Ray,” seems pulled upward to the heavens and downward to the keys at the same time. Watching this vibrantly intelligent and tough-minded bio-pic, which was written by James L. White and Taylor Hackford and directed by Hackford, we can’t always make out how much of Charles’s full-body attack at the piano is spasmodic and involuntary and how much is a consciously chosen style. But that’s all right—we don’t need to know. This movie tells us a lot about Ray Charles, who died earlier this year, at the age of seventy-three, but it doesn’t tell us everything. Though properly awed by Charles’s talent, “Ray” refuses to get chummy or possessive; it allows the man more than a few dark corners.

The movie picks up Charles’s story in the late forties, when he’s a tense, wary, ambitious but imitative teen-age musician, and carries him through his musical discoveries and his personal pleasures and torments until 1964, when he’s both a world-famous artist and a miserable heroin addict. The episode of Ray kicking the drug, with overhead shots of him rolling around in agony, is all too reminiscent of inspirational movies from the fifties like “I Want to Live!” The rest of “Ray” is infinitely better. The sepia-tinted club scenes are redolent of bourbon and cigarettes, mentholated gents’ rooms, and the exhausted exhilaration of very late nights. We hear the musicians’ muttered jokes and complaints, their sexual banter with women who stay after the last set, and we know that the excitement of performing is real, and that the frustration of obscurity is as painful as an empty stomach. A musician’s life on the road has never been conveyed with such acrid and enticing detail. In this world, in which everyone seems to have an angle, Charles survives by cunning and by the hyper-cultivation of his hearing and touch. And he’s a charmer. Fleshy young women in silk dresses step forward to let him stroke their wrists and forearms. That was the way he decided if they were “pretty” enough to go to bed with.

The movie depicts him as a not very nice man, but it also makes it clear that he wouldn’t have become so extraordinary a success if he had been a more equable fellow. The flashbacks to his childhood on a Florida dirt farm, photographed in supersaturated colors, with orange-red earth and dark-green grass (that, presumably, was the way he remembered color from the days before he went blind, at eight), don’t ease into anything like nostalgia. When young Ray trips and falls, his determined mother (Sharon Warren) helps him only so much—in the future, she wants him to demand the respect owed to a man, not settle for the pity offered to a “cripple.” He grows into a hard-shelled, hidden, and devious man and artist, a dauntless money-maker always afraid (not unjustifiably) that someone is stealing from him. He lies to women, whose adoration he requires, and shows little gratitude to friends and associates, dismissing them when he no longer needs them. Taylor Hackford struggled for seventeen years to get this movie made, and during that time he consulted with Charles, and then he screened the finished film for him, so the complex and manipulative man onscreen is apparently a portrayal that Charles accepted, even desired.

Jamie Foxx revels in Charles’s strength as well as his talent. He lip-synchs the songs but speaks in Charles’s nervous, off-rhythm way, saving up words and then expelling them in a way that no one wanted to argue with. An actor’s most expressive tool is his eyes, but Foxx acts behind dark glasses or with his eyes shut, and he doesn’t shrink from an element of the grotesque in Charles’s stiff-gaited walk. Sometimes, when his Charles gets angry, people recoil for a second; they need a moment’s reassurance that he’s still human. There’s something demonic about this guy, an insatiable energy that fuelled his personal life as well as such innovations as his insistence on driving soul and country sounds into the beats of R. & B. For many older people in the audience, the sound of Ray Charles’s impassioned music is inseparable from memories of dating, dancing, lovemaking, and loss. “Ray” has the bold good grace to honor the enraptured kids they once were and the sterner but still hungry grownups they have become.