The now-late Yogi Berra said something worth noting for almost
any occasion, and although he won’t be here for the 2016 election,
he once said something apropos to this unusual campaign cycle,
to wit, “It gets late early out there.”
As a baseball fan and a writer, I don’t know which Yogi I will miss
more, the Yankee Hall of Fame catcher or the linguistic philosopher.
But his earthy pronouncements, I am convinced, might last longer
than those by certain once-celebrated academic existentialists,
phenomenologists and postmodernists.
In any event, Yogi’s observation about how late early can be fits
2016 quite well so far. Presidential campaigns seemed to begin
earlier and earlier a few cycles ago, but this cycle has certainly
aged prematurely as both major party tickets go through many
unpredicatable developments long before the first primaries and
caucuses.
The opposite of Yogi’s aphorism might also become applicable to
2016, that is, ‘It gets early late out out there.” This Prairie Editor
variation does not claim the profundity of Yogi’s dictum, but it
does suggest what I have been hinting at for some time, that is,
the outcome of the next presidential race might develop its final
form late in the campaign season, perhaps (amazingly) at the
national conventions next July.
We will not likely see a Yogi Berra again soon, if ever. Long after
his playing days, he entertained and instructed us as no other
major league baseball player ever did. May his memory be a
legacy to the sport he loved so well, and to the language he so
disarmingly reinvented.
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Copyright (c) 2015 by Barry Casselman. All rights reserved.
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