I’d rather talk baseball — Bryce Harper over Rashida Tlaib
I’d rather talk baseball — Bryce Harper over Rashida Tlaib

I’d rather talk baseball.

Spare me the Weltschmerz, please.

Roughly translated as world weariness, but Weltschmerz (to me) means we’re in America; the pursuit of happiness is what we do.

So, leave us alone with your Old-World prejudices and don’t weary us with your Medieval tribulations. We’re here to escape all that, and it’s been so since the Pilgrims, up to Bryce Harper. What’s with him? The most expensive player in baseball, purchased by the Phillies for many millions, and he keeps failing. You don’t know?

You should know that here we save our worries for Mom, baseball, apple pie and how the home team is doing.

I would imagine that of the two Weltschmerz Sisters, the one named Tlaib, the home team would be Detroit. After all, she was voted in, I suspect, to represent the Michigan people and not the “Palestinian people,” and yet these are the people she keeps talking about. Maybe she’s confused.

Or maybe I’m confused to think that people come here to assimilate as Americans.

You would expect her focus to be on the crime in her district, rather than on Israel and the Jews, who can do without so much attention.

Thanks, but we don’t need your honey or your sting.

You would assume that her pain, her Weltschmerz, would be on the Tigers, who are off to a miserable start this season.

The Michigan people need someone to commiserate on that, and keep hands off the Holocaust, which is not what Detroit thinks about when it’s time to pay the rent.

Yet for some people, it is always time to think about the Jews, Israel and the Holocaust, to which I say, thanks again, but we’ll take it from here and handle it ourselves.

On the Holocaust in particular, in our own time we do our mourning, and we do not need outsiders to revisit the nightmare with deceit in their hearts.

Like the other Weltschmerz Sister, Omar from Minnesota, who remembers 9/11 with casualness, as “some people did something.”

So too the casualness on the Holocaust from Tlaib. HER people suffered.

Does Omar know that the Minnesota Twins are tops in their division? 
Either of them, do they know that, as we hear it from culture historian Jacques Barzun, to know America, you must know baseball?
From out of nowhere, a topic no one asked for, not from her, and strange isn’t it, that they keep bringing it up, and then accuse us of too much focus on the Holocaust.

Yes, I am a writer, like this, who once in a while would rather talk baseball, at least as a distraction against so much in life that is unbearable, but they always pull me back in.

Does Omar know that the Minnesota Twins are tops in their division?

Does she know baseball? Either of them, do they know that, as we hear it from culture historian Jacques Barzun, to know America, you must know baseball?

If not, somebody got on the wrong boat, or got off on the wrong country.

People are supposed to change when they come to America, get with the program, the land of second chances, where we say goodbye to Old World garbage and filthy laundry.

Anti-Semitism is not natural to America. Well, it wasn’t, until some people came along, who have no idea what it means to say Jackie Robinson, Hank Greenberg, or Sandy Koufax.

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His latest is the newsroom drama “News Anchor Sweetheart.”  His Inside Journalism thriller, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” is being prepared for the movies. Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com