{"id":2415,"date":"2026-06-28T09:43:28","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T09:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2415"},"modified":"2026-06-28T09:43:28","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T09:43:28","slug":"anthony-scaramucci-on-america-250-where-have-you-gone-joe-dimaggio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=2415","title":{"rendered":"Anthony Scaramucci on America 250: where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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That was the deal America offered, and as we hit the country\u2019s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, the question I keep asking is whether we still believe that we\u2019re in the business of honoring it.<\/p>\n

Read more Even Apple supply chain maestro Tim Cook couldn\u2019t dodge the memory chip \u2018RAM-ageddon\u2019 crisis. Here\u2019s why PC prices are soaring this summer<\/a><\/p>\n

Striving Brought Us Together<\/h2>\n

Hemingway, who championed self-mastery, gave the old fisherman in his novella exactly one consolation out there alone in the Gulf Stream, the thought of the great DiMaggio, who did everything perfectly even with the bone spur in his heel. Hemingway had it right.<\/p>\n

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Real grace is discipline so deep it stops looking like discipline; it looks natural. But let\u2019s be honest with ourselves, we\u2019ve lost our taste for it in recent years. We reward the loud grievance now. We reward the guy who tells you at length how hard he\u2019s trying. We forgot that dignity used to mean the opposite, doing the hard thing without narrating it.<\/p>\n

Now look at who else was rising in those same crowded decades, every one of them in a unique style, every one of them carrying an old country\u2019s accent into the new one. Hank Greenberg, the Jew from the Bronx, hitting home runs while across the ocean his people were being marched toward the ovens. Joe Louis, a sharecropper\u2019s grandson, dropped Schmeling to the canvas and carried a whole race in a nation that had not yet decided to honor it. The Pole in the steel mill, the Irish cop walking a beat, the Italian girl learning shorthand at night.<\/p>\n

None of them were promised anything. All of them were convinced the door was open if you pushed hard enough. Here\u2019s the thing that gets me. They didn\u2019t push together. They pushed alone, each in their own language, toward their own version of the prize, and the sum of all that separate striving became a country.<\/p>\n

They didn\u2019t pretend the differences away, and they didn\u2019t make a religion out of them either. The differences were the raw material. The striving was the shared faith.<\/p>\n

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And the striving didn\u2019t stay on the ballfield or in the ring. It went into the factory, the laboratory, the classroom, the back of the garage, and beyond. The same immigrant nerve and faith put a fisherman\u2019s son in center field and put a Scotsman\u2019s telephone and a Serb\u2019s alternating current and a Russian Jew\u2019s television into the bloodstream of the country.<\/p>\n

A Nation with Nerve<\/h2>\n

I\u2019ve spent my whole career around capital, and I\u2019ll tell you what I\u2019ve learned. Money follows nerve, and nerve goes where it\u2019s welcome.<\/p>\n

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America was the one place on earth that didn\u2019t ask where your grandfather was buried before it let you build. Carnegie came over in steerage and poured the steel that became our skylines. Kids whose families had been chased out of half of Europe started the picture studios, the scrap yards that became fortunes, and eventually the software companies that created a whole new world of ones and zeros.<\/p>\n

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Risk wasn\u2019t shameful and failure wasn\u2019t final here. I\u2019ve failed publicly, spectacularly, on the front page, and this country still let me get back up. That\u2019s not a small thing; it is a core tenet of the American promise. The country did not decide who was allowed to win and it let everybody try. That disposition compounded into the richest, most inventive society the world has ever seen.<\/p>\n

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There was an innocence in that age, and we shouldn\u2019t be too sophisticated to say so. Not the innocence of ignorance. It was the innocence of belief, a working faith that effort got answered, that the rules, however imperfect, applied to everyone, that a man was measured by his actions above all else.<\/p>\n

That generation didn\u2019t flatter the country and didn\u2019t despise it. They got up in the morning and went to work.<\/p>\n

Read more The retired college professor fighting a $313 trespassing ticket in Wisconsin thinks he\u2019s part of a national struggle<\/a><\/p>\n

Loving an Imperfect Nation<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the division eating at us now, two hundred and fifty years in. We\u2019ve split into one camp that flatters America past all reason and another that despises it past all fairness. Both camps have walked away from the harder middle ground that DiMaggio\u2019s generation lived on, which was loving the country precisely because you could see its faults and were trying, in your own lane, however small, to fix them.<\/p>\n

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You can hold both of those at once. My father held both every day of his working life. Somebody convinced us we have to choose, and somebody was wrong.<\/p>\n

DiMaggio married the most luminous woman in America and couldn\u2019t hold her, and that belongs in the story too, because the country he embodied was always better at producing excellence than protecting tenderness. When Paul Simon asked where Joe DiMaggio had gone, he wasn\u2019t asking about a ballplayer; he was asking about a vanished idea of public conduct, the idea that a famous man owed the public his dignity and owed himself his silence, and that both debts could be paid at the same time.<\/p>\n

\u201cJoltin\u2019 Joe has left and gone away,\u201d\u00a0the song answered, and the leaving felt bigger than one man\u2019s retirement.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re not mourning a simpler time, because the time wasn\u2019t simple. So, what\u2019s the lesson, with the candles lit on the long birthday cake?<\/p>\n

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Not that the past was better. It jailed and excluded and lynched, and plenty of people striving in their lanes weren\u2019t allowed into the same race, and we\u2019re not wrong to have learned that catalogue. The lesson is narrower and more useful, and it should concentrate the mind of everyone reading\u00a0this.<\/p>\n

What We Owe the Next 250<\/h2>\n

A country doesn\u2019t stay rich and inventive because of its resources. It stays rich and inventive because it keeps the door open to the person with nothing but nerve and an idea, and because it keeps believing that person might build something great. That\u2019s a trade I\u2019d make every single time, and for two hundred and fifty years it\u2019s been the best trade in human history.<\/p>\n

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On certain summer evenings, when the light runs long across an outfield, it\u2019s worth remembering that there was once a man who faced the hardest thing in the world with grace, and a country that produced him and thousands like him, each rising in his own right. For one brief, improbable moment in the middle of the century, the arrangement very nearly worked.<\/p>\n

At two hundred and fifty, the job is not to mourn it. The job is to keep the door open for the next generation, to honor the risk-taker and the newcomer, and build it again. My grandfather\u2019s generation did it with nets, cranes, and shovels. Ours gets to do it with technology beyond that generation\u2019s wildest dreams. No more excuses. Let\u2019s build it together.<\/p>\n

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The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of <\/em>Fortune.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more \u2018I\u2019ll listen to \u2018Only the Young\u2019 at home on my own\u2019: Zohran doesn\u2019t know about a Swift-Kelce wedding at MSG, but he\u2019s not going<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u00a0split into one camp that flatters the country past all reason and another that despises it past all fairness. 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