The Mooch Invokes DiMaggio and Nobody Knows What He Meant

Anthony Scaramucci quoted a Simon and Garfunkel lyric about Joe DiMaggio in a piece about America turning 250, and I guarantee half the people who read it had to stop and figure out what was actually being said. That gap — between a cultural reference firing in one brain and misfiring completely in another — is where English gets genuinely weird and a little dangerous.

The phrase comes from 'Mrs. Robinson,' 1968. Paul Simon used DiMaggio as a stand-in for lost American dignity, a kind of shorthand for something clean and uncorrupted that had already gone missing. The words were never really about baseball.

I once heard a room full of college graduates discuss that song and argue it was literally about a retired athlete who refused to do commercials. They were not wrong, exactly. That is the brutal beauty of English — the same sentence can carry two completely different freight loads and both arrive at the station technically on time.

Scaramucci knew what he was doing. Whether his readers did is a separate mess entirely. Language is a bet you place on shared history, on the assumption that whoever is reading you grew up close enough to your own references that the words land instead of just