I never liked cod liver oil

So per this dispatch, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is on hard times and looks to have lost a quarter million dollars last year. One problem is that there is a lot less money to go around with the recent gilded age over. Another is that some people involved with the museum have been playing nasty internal politics since Buck O'Neil, the fixed point around which it revolved, died. It seems from here, though, that the main problem is that there just isn't enough public interest to sustain the museum.

That isn't surprising and I'm not sure it's anything to mourn. The Negro Leagues have been dead longer than they were alive and while all right-thinking people disapprove of the American tendency toward cultural amnesia, it actually cheers me up to think that people prefer things that are vibrant and alive to those that passed long ago.

Ken Burns, who would set a pie-eating contest to mournful strings, is quoted as saying that the death of the museum would be 'a cultural tragedy.' This seems not only pretty over the top but an example of what can be offputting about the rhetoric surrounding the museum, which is after all about baseball and can stand only so much solemn piety. There's a spectacular museum in Cooperstown, NY that takes good care of baseball relics and would surely be happy to curate the NLBM's holdings, and there are (tens of? hundreds of?) thousands of people who take too deep an interest in the Negro Leagues to let them be forgotten. What's at stake isn't the legacy and history of independent black baseball, but the future of an institution that was probably sited in the wrong city and whose time may just have passed.

To put this in different terms, you could get upset about the state of 2120 S. Michigan Ave here on the South Side, former home of Chess Records, which was gutted in the 1970s (Two hundred and fifty thousand records hauled off to the landfills! Chainsaws taken to the studios where Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf cut their best sides!) and today houses a pretty uninspiring little museum that on a given day may or may not be open during its listed hours. But how much better to be happy that there's still enough interest to sustain some real blues clubs down here, leave the past to the past, and go get some beers and listen to musicians who have rent to pay in 2010.