The Chris Moeller Archives

The waning days of the Mark McGwire Highway

The Missouri State Senate voted unanimously Monday to rename the Mark McGwire Highway, a stretch of Interstate 70 that passes through St. Louis and St. Louis County. The roadway has been designated in honor of McGwire, the Cardinals' firstbaseman who swatted 70 home runs in a single-season, since 1999.

Like the decision to name the thoroughfare after the home run champ in the first place, the politicians know a popular cause when they see one. The name suggests steroids now, but during the historic baseball summer of 1998, lawmakers were chasing hard after that Big Mac bandwagon. In the state's gubernatorial race that year, Democrat Jay Nixon, acting in his capacity at the time as Attorney General, announced a mid-summer crackdown on con artists that were forging McGwire's signature on baseball memorabilia. This announcement required that Nixon pose for pictures standing next to the Cardinals slugger.

Nixon's Republican opponent in the race, Christopher "Kit" Bond, the first elected official to champion the McGwire name on the road, incidentally, also tried to piggyback on the Great Home Run Race of '98 by firing off an angry, public letter to the Internal Revenue Service. One of the muckety-mucks at the IRS had just had the gall to suggest that the fan who came up with the swatted baseball as souvenir after an historic McGwire clout would have to pay a gift tax if he or she returned the sphere to McGwire. There were no photo ops available with this Bond maneuver, however, so he promoted his courageous showdown with the tax collectors again during a televised debate.

What does McGwire, the Cardinals new hitting coach, have to say about the latest name change? "If it turns out they do," he said this week, "I was honored to have it for 10 years." He called it "a cool honor" to have the highway named for him at all, but one gets the impression he never cared much one way or the other. It's got to be a kick in the pants to have an honor like that to fall back on for posterity's sake, but I doubt that John Kennedy would be racing right out to visit his airport in New York City if he came back to life today.

If the measure to rename now passes the Missouri House, the roadway will return to its previous moniker, "The Mark Twain Expressway," but something tells me Twain wouldn't give a flying fig about this either. He'd certainly find the humor in the politicians' dedication and overheated efforts toward a road that most people just refer to as "Interstate 70.". As Twain's literary alter ego, Huckleberry Finn, expressed 125 years ago, "H'aint we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority for any town." So let's just take a moment instead to taste the delicious irony of the Show-Me State's elected Moral Guardians reinstalling the honor on behalf of Twain, the most prominent atheist in Missouri history. Expect the next uproar from the state's ministers, or maybe that dust-up has faded.

Sadly, we still struggle to see people and accept them for their human limitations. We can celebrate the successes, sure-- overcelebrate them, but eventually the individual must be torn down for his or her failings. As Huck Finn also said, "Human beings can be awful cruel to one another."

posted by CM @ 3:12 PM