In the second grade, when I was seven, I joined a baseball team. This was in the spring of 1960, year fifteen, give or take, of the American ascendancy. I was a Brownie. There were Bisons and Lions and Bears in the Pee Wee League, but a Brownie is what I was. Our uniforms were white T-shirts decorated with the brown picture of a diminutive fellow with a turned-up nose, turned-up toes, turned-up tapered fingers, and a turned-down cap festooned with a bell. We were, according to our team song, “the pride of the Pee Wee League.”

The song…