THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 9, 1996 TAG: 9605090006
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A16 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 54 lines
So Adolf Hitler started out as a good guy and erred by letting things go ``too far?''
Maybe in the same way that the bubonic plague was once an innocent little bacteria that ran amuck.
What was Marge Schott thinking?
The point, of course, is that the owner of the Cincinnati Reds wasn't. Isn't. Doesn't.
Schott's latest outrage is her claim regarding Hitler: ``Everybody knows he was good at the beginning, but he just went too far.''
Apoplectic baseball officials are wringing their mitts over what to do with Schott. Once tolerated as an eccentric oddity in baseball circles, she has long since passed into the realm of the unbearable. Even a season's suspension in 1993 for racial and ethnic slurs has not muffled her outrages.
Phil Baum, the executive director of the American Jewish Congress, summed her up as ``a crude and thoughtless woman (who) has now reached a new low.'' He is right.
But how to contain crudeness and thoughtlessness in people who also are rich enough to own baseball teams?
One suggestion is a second suspension for Schott. Another is a fan boycott of the Reds. Earlier this year Schott decided to cancel a service providing scores on out-of-town games. She relented when the customers protested her decision.
``Why do they care about one game when they're watching another?'' Schott initially asked. But she seemed to have no problem understanding that grumbling could lead to lower ticket sales. A boycott might send the same message.
Another suggestion is that acting baseball Commissioner Bud Selig appoint a committee to find a buyer for the Reds. That's a great idea, so long as Schott doesn't wind up being enriched by her excesses.
One way or another, she should be sent packing. And her going-away gift might be two volumes: Hitler's Mein Kampf and Elie Wiesel's Night.
Written in 1924, nine years before he came to power, Mein Kampf is proof that Hitler was never an innocent. Long before he had the means to accomplish his goals, the goals were set: German dominance of the world and the elimination of outsiders from the master race.
Night, the story of Wiesel's boyhood in concentration camps, should disabuse Schott of the notion that Hitler simply went too far. Madonna or Howard Stern go too far. Schott herself goes too far. Hitler went to a space beyond the bounds of human civilization. by CNB