Kingdom Come
Four
Tonight instead of watching the State of the Union address I looked for my father and for Jerry Morales’s basket catch. First I skimmed some of the emails my father sent me, each including a few words from him at most and then a link to sobering news. Sometimes it was just a link. I didn’t read the whole articles tonight, just as I hadn’t when he’d first sent them to me. Still, fragments lodged somewhere in my brain.
. . . rate of climate change now may be as fast as any extended warming period over the past 65 million years, and it is projected to accelerate in the coming decades . . .
. . . abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes in the earth’s climate system with massively disruptive impacts . ..
. . . the continuing acidification of the oceans (killing off the basis of the food web: coral, phytoplankton and shellfish) and more climate disruptions, an increased number of hotter days and extreme weather events . . .
. . . loss of polar ice, leading to sea level rise . . . will threaten the existence of low-lying island nations as well as major cities . . .
. . . mass extinctions . . .
I turned to a search for Jerry Morales’s basket catch. It’s what he was known for. He’s not the only player to ever use the basket catch—two immortals, Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente, also used it, for example—but Jerry Morales doesn’t have a whole lot else to fix him in time, so it seems like a bigger deal for him. I figured that everything is available now, digitally, that nothing is ever fully blown to kingdom come, but the truth is some things are just gone. All there is are some words, some memories.
There are no photos or videos of Jerry Morales making a basket catch, at least not that I could find. I took a few different angles in my search, Googling various combinations of his name and “basket catch.” At some point, I Googled Jerry Morales’s hometown, Yabucoa, and “baseball.” I learned that Yabucoa was hit the hardest of any place in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. I found a before and after photo of the Yabucoa baseball stadium. I gave up on Jerry Morales’s basket catch and turned back to searching for my father. I read some of a note he scrawled with a pen in tiny handwriting on note paper and folded into a book he was reading.
It is clear that the capitalist world system is coming to an end. The only question is whether the transformation to another system can be realized through a collectively democratic, pragmatic, gradual process resulting finally in the constitution of a democratic world system or in catastrophic destruction, possibly leading to the end of humanity.
Cardboard Gods 
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