Leaving Fenway Park after game two of the 2004 World Series and crossing Kenmore Square to retrieve my car, it was hard to ignore the young man selling tee shirts on which was written that vulgar slogan about how bad was the New York team vanquished a week earlier. My college age daughter was warning against the odd cockiness that had come over a lifelong Red Sox fan with a 2-0 lead in the Series, but I could not help but ask why the tee shirt salesman was still obsessed with That Team, since the Cardinals were the team at issue and he told me that nothing was more important than how bad was that team from New York.

All of that came to mind several times this week, as did the clever title of Thomas Boswell's book from some years back: "How Life Imitates the World Series". Boswell was the Washington Post reporter who told CBS News as the post season began in 1988 that one of the so called "Bash Brothers" leading the Oakland Athletics, Jose Canseco, was "the most conspicuous example of a player who has made himself great with steroids."
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Red Sox fans chanted "ster-oids" at Canseco each time he came to bat in the ALCS that year but, with his manager Tony LaRussa (a law school graduate) standing behind Canseco's denials if steroid use, he hit key home runs as the A's swept the Red Sox, 4 games to none. Many years later, after the other Bash Brother, Mark McGwire, having joined LaRussa in St. Louis, broke the single season home run record, Canseco wrote a book claiming that steroid use was rampant in baseball, admitted that he himself was a user (with LaRussa telling 60 Minutes that he knew it all along) and the rest, including the unmasking of McGwire, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez and now Manny Ramirez, among others, has become a widely accepted example of a game gone horribly wrong.

So what a week. Fortunately the Boston Globe survived it show statistics showing how much better the Dodger Ramirez was when compared to the nonetheless great statistics complied by the Cleveland/Boston Ramirez. He was ostensibly injured during the 2008 season with mysterious ailments and punched out a traveling secretary. After another refusal to play that causes the Red Sox to threaten to suspend him, he is traded to LA and, suddenly healthy, plays as if he is Babe Ruth reincarnated. Another mystery solved.

Both baseball and the rest of the country have decided that the way to respond to gross errors of the sort that have tainted the legitimacy of these games, and the reputation of the United States of America as a beacon of justice in a world which desperately needs such an example is to simply draw a line, say that those mistakes will never happen again and simply move on.

It cannot work that way. Baseball loves to alter history to claim that it first became aware of the use of performance enhancing drugs in the middle of this decade whereupon it promptly took action. It is a ridiculous claim which is made with the knowledge that most fans will overlook any allegations about their own team, so long as the player who is cheating does a good job.

That is precisely the same mistake a nation, deeply enamored of its new president (for good reason), with regard to the pure evil of the prior administration. I do not necessarily advocate criminal prosecution of those who were importuned, in one way or the other, to look the other way, or otherwise support some of the worst abuses of the prior eight years, as discussed in a post that attracted not just a few claims that I supported torture, but, as I have tried to say, I am not against them either.

More important, though, is some sort of national reckoning. When I say that the nation is, as a whole, responsible for those eight years, I obviously (not so obviously, I guess), do not mean individually every single person. Many opposed that lawless administration, but others looked the other way and sufficient numbers of people voted for continuing them in office in 2004 that some of the worst of what was being done in our name was enabled as the electorate empowered the President with what we considered to be a mandate who earned what he described as "political capital."

That is the reckoning we need. Yes, we were frightened, first by the attack of 9/11, then by a government that tried to take advantage of our fears, but that does not let anyone off the hook. We know---most of us do anyway---that we live in a republic, not a monarchy---but we talked about a president "taking us to war" as if he had powers to do so that we were powerless to contain. We allowed him to impose his religious views on national policy and acted as if that was what a president gets to do. Our opposition party knew that the President and his cronies were dragging our country into the gutter, yet it was afraid to do anything about it because (and, frankly, I believe they were correct in this) to do so would bring electoral defeat on Democratic candidates who would be seen to be disloyal.

By the end of World War II, with a better understanding of what racism and panic can do to a country from watching what happened in Germany, Italy and Japan between the wars, many Americans knew that the Palmer raids and the "red baiting" of a quarter century earlier was wrong, yet Joe McCarthy was able to repeat the same shame again, and to make Palmer look tepid. It is not enough to say that something was wrong. It must be exposed as wrong and the lesson learned repeated over and over.

Prosecuting people would not absolve the shame of those eight years any more than censuring Joseph McCarthy made up for what he wrought, and what he was allowed to do. It is something, and maybe worth doing, but it does not add up to the national soul searching and commitment to the law and to what we are supposed to stand for in the world, that cannot be accomplished simply by the election of the best president we have seen since at least 1969.

Most people knew what they were getting when they elected Nixon that year, yet even after he was exposed, it took an actual tape recording of him ordering the obstruction of justice to rid ourselves of him. Yet after four years of a Democratic president (at least one who was nominated by that party) all was forgiven, and the party that gave us Nixon was allowed to take the White House again.

Manny Ramirez was unmasked in the same week that we learned our second baseman cum neighborhood broadcaster, Jerry Remy, is recovering from cancer and we lost the gentleman Dominic DiMaggio, forever mourning his replacement in centerfield in the seventh game of the 1946 World Series and what that wrought. The pain to those of who love baseball over the failure of the sport to recognize the damage they have done to the integrity of the game by an attitude toward what everyone knew to be taking place, but which could be ignored in the excitement of records being broken is of a type, if less important, to that felt by those who love our country by the failure to come to terms with what fear did to us and what it could do to us again unless we see what happened and firmly resolve for it to never happen again