World Wide

 I consider myself a sports fan. Not unreasonable, but fixated on the outcome of certain games being played by grown men and women for which I have a "rooting interest." I don't gamble on the final score or any of the other mathematical or statistical threads that could become a concern. I do participate in a "friendly" fantasy football league whose prize at the end of the season is primarily bragging rights for the following year. 

This being said, I know that I do not appreciate sports, or rather a sport, like the football fans across the globe who are currently immersed in the contest we now embrace as The World Cup. Far from the somewhat ridiculous exclusivity of Major League Baseball's "World Series" which is comprised entirely of teams from North America, FIFA brings together a truly international group of competitors. This event is, according to John Oliver, the way that Americans learn about geography. Each one of these teams has its own fan base which instantly reveals my "passion" for certain franchises to be a passing fancy. 

I learned just how tepid my own concerns were last weekend when my wife began to notice the sounds emenating from up and down the houses and apartment buildings on our street. Mexico and England were locked in a tense match, and each shot on goal or offsides was met with a roar coming from inside and out of neighbors' homes. As we walked up the street for dinner, we took notice of how still the rest of the neighborhood was outside of these periodic eruptions. It made me think of Super Bowl Sundays when "everyone" was settled onto their couches, staring at the uniquely American "football" spectacle.

Or at least the commercials. 

I was reminded of the 1970s. Back when we in the United States began to tense and surrender for the adoption of the metric system. It was right about this time that initial rumblings began to occur about how we should also brace ourselves for the next big wave of international influence: Soccer. Boys and girls began to organize teams that allowed them to move the ball only with their feet. 

How could this be? 

Most of us are still waiting for this domination to usurp our use of the term "football." But as I made my way down my street in Oakland, I was reminded of the multiculture in which I teach. On any given day there is a basket ball game, or some American football being tossed around, but by far the most regular attraction on our playground is the soccer pitch. Boys and girls from five to twelve are all kicking and screaming to their hearts' content, fully aware of the rules of the game if not the subtle techniques of the players they have grown up idolizing. Seeing this throng of children playing a game with such fervor reminds me of the melting pot in which I live. It makes me understand the World just a little better. 

Monuments

 Fifteen years ago, my family made a trip to Washington DC. It was kind of a make good on the trip that my son didn't go on when he was in middle school. We spent a few days getting to know our nation's capital, seeing the sights and soaking up the patriotism. We took public transit into the city from our friends' house where we were staying and when we came up into the Union Station stop, I took in the view that Jefferson Smith beheld upon his arrival in the 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. My wife and I sometimes talk about my "Jimmy Stewart moments," those times when I am feeling especially earnest. This was one of those times. 

We were there ostensibly to fill in the void in my son's patriotism, but we ended up filling my red, white and blue bucket as well. Standing outside the gates of the White House, with the mild certainty that across that lawn inside was the man to whom I gave my vote twice to be President of the United States, gave me a satisfaction that I can barely describe. It felt right. 

As we meandered around the museums and monuments, I took full measure of the sights I was witnessing. I had made a similar trip when I was much younger with my brothers and parents, but my post-Watergate cynicism kept me from fully appreciating the grandeur I was seeing. After two terms of hope and change, I was ready to pay tribute. 

The following day, we set ourselves the task of the Smithsonian Institute, but first I declared that we needed to stop by the National Archives to see what all the fuss was about this Declaration of Independence. My wife and son and I spent the early afternoon of July 4 that year standing in line for just a quick glimpse. As the day wore on, we found ourselves walking out onto the National Mall just about dusk. We sat down on the grass and proceeded to watch a fireworks display like I can't recall ever seeing before or since, with the Washington Monument in the background. 

Which made me feel all the worse for those tourists who found themselves in a similar place this past weekend but came away with a much different experience. The magic that swept up Jimmy Stewart and yours truly wasn't available this Fourth of July, partly because of climate change and perhaps the gods anger with the way things are these days. 

I hope for all of our sakes that it is not gone forever. 

Lessons Learned

 Where did we go wrong? Did we, as a nation, take the metaphorical "left toin at Albequokie" that Bugs Bunny warned us about? Certainly my fellow travellers would agree with Bugs that this ain't Pismo Beach. No, I think we left the track toward the American Dream some time ago. 

Obviously any country that would elect a slumlord to the highest office in the land, we may have needed course correction, and certainly repeating that mistake eight years later suggests that we haven't learned our lesson. 

But I do not believe that the United States was completely well long before the election of 2016. Some might argue that somewhere around the time we began to embrace the currency issued by our Treasury more than the values printed on it. "Out of Many, One." "In God We Trust." Back in 1987, Oliver Stone directed a movie that offhandedly reminded us that "greed is good." I don't believe that Oliver was making an overt statement in Wall Street, but rather reminding us of the perils that awaited us all if we forgot the working class and embraced corporations as our gods. He certainly wouldn't be the first artist who unwittingly created a snuff film for those who viewed it more as an instructional video rather than the fable for which it was intended. 

Of course if we had already been lost in the woods, this story never would have been necessary. I can just skip past Watergate, since Richard Nixon assured us so very many times that he was not a crook. Instead, I will place the blame squarely at the feet of Lizzie Maggie. If that name doesn't ring a bell, you may have played her game: Monopoly. You know, where you buy up real estate and try to run all your friends and family out of business as you attempt to own everything. It even includes what was the precursor to the pardon, the Get Out Of Jail Free card. Not unlike Oliver Stone, Ms. Maggie was attempting, as she developed her game, to create something that would give us all a lesson in greed. 

All these years later, it would seem that the lesson she intended is not the one we learned. I don't know about you, but I can remember plenty of times when the kid down the street was caught cheating while we were playing Monopoly. 

I'm just a little surprised that he didn't go into politics. 

Mad Dogs And Englishmen

 If you're anything like me, and if you're not why the heck aren't you, then you probably spent a chunk of the past weekend trying to determine how you were going to spend your hard-earned fun coupons celebrating our nation's birthday. I was intrigued as ever by the nightly flurries of aerial shells with showers of sparks and loud reports in our neighborhood. The ones that began in mid-June and will continue to disrupt our quiet nights for the next couple of weeks are a mystery to me. 

It was a few years back when my wife and I traveled north to Oregon to celebrate the anticipation of our anniversary right around the Fourth of July. Crossing the border into a state where fireworks of all sorts were legal and available for sale, we pulled over to one of the many tents pitched by the side of the road and began inspecting all the possible ways that gunpowder and sulfur could be ignited and dispersed into the sky. Eventually we settled on one particular product with the intriguing sobriquet, Mad Dog. We also purchased a few odds and ends like sparklers and smoke bombs and glow worms with the notion that we might find someplace safe and sane that we could share those less than explosive ordnance. When our friendly fireworks salesperson tallied up our purchases, they came to just under fifty dollars, with the Mad Dog being by far the big ticket item. 

We tucked these items in with our luggage and continued on up to Portland. 

We never did find a time or place to make a lot of noise and smoke on our visit north. We retuned to Oakland with our contraband without having fired a single shot in anger or fun. It simply never seemed like the right time or place. 

New Years Eve came and went, and though we were sorely tempted to carry out our barrage, neither my wife nor I could get up the gumption to set fire to the sky. Not when we had so much help from all those houses up and down the streets surrounding us. 

Somewhere in there we decided to give up our Mad Dog. We handed it over to our son, who we figured would find a clever or subversive use for pyrotechnics. 

I remembered all those trips I used to make with my brother when we were young, across the border to Wyoming where they sold beer on Sundays and fireworks were the best reason to make that drive. On one of those excursions, I purchased enough pop bottle rockets that I was able to parse them out over the next several years, bringing some of them along with me when I moved to California. 

They're gone now, much to the chagrin of my son to whom I taught the simple rule: Light and run away. These days there isn't much good running will do. We are surrounded each summer for three to four weeks by things that go boom in the night. 

How can they afford it? 

Born At Or Near The USA

 The convicted felon and adjudicated rapist masquerading as a leader of the Free World is considering a ban on visitors to our country who happen to be pregnant. This was the somewhat ridiculous and draconian response he arrived at after the Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution was, in fact, already settled business. Section 1 reads: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Looking for the gray area? This is "birthright citizenship," and this is the reason for the Second Trumpreich to keep pregnant tourists from visiting the land of the free and home of the brave. Apparently we are currently experiencing a freedom and bravery deficit and we just don't want to run out. "Birth tourism" is a rare enough occurrence, but since we are having a particular challenge staying free and brave here in the moderately United States, 

A couple years ago, the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist wanted us all to be afraid of the murderers and rapists being unleashed on our shores by other countries. 

Very afraid. 

Now we are being asked to be afraid of pregnant women who happen to find themselves within our borders, especially when they're obviously here simply to land a sponge here that will soak up all those glorious resources we offer all our rightly born American babies. Stephen "Nosferatu" Miller made his terror be known to Jesse "Holdyer" Watters on Faux News: "So, you have mothers that come in fully pregnant, have a baby, go home, and that baby gets Medicaid and that baby gets welfare and that baby gets cash assistance. They'll leave the baby with a cousin, a relative, whatever, then send welfare checks back home. You can support a whole family in the third world."

Since "birth tourism" is already illegal, the fright described by the undead minion of the convicted felon is already covered. And since it has been the policy of the Second Trumpreich to kick children and families off any and all kinds of assistance programs anyway, this just serves as one more egregious effort to make us all believe that the United States doesn't have enough money to take care of its children. 

Which may go a long way toward explaining how we ended up bombing that girls school in Iran. 

Happy News

 In the midst of all the ugly news that gets run past us on a daily basis, I figured that I should shine a light on the Supreme Court decision to uphold birthright citizenship. If you were born here, you're an American. 

And that's that. 

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, "Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”

Who would have thought that the same court that outlawed transgender athletes in school sports would act so compassionately? Could it be that there was no big push for transgender rights during the framing of our Constitution? Are civil rights limited to those who conform to the very limited spectrum of pronouns that existed back in the eighteenth century? 

Whoops. Sorry. I was highlighting happy news: Birthright citizenship. Now the ICE goons can get busy setting free all those folks in detention camps that were born here. Presuming they can find them.

And that they're still alive. 

Oops. Did it again, didn't I? 

It's a little like the Supreme Court made it clear that the convicted felon is an adjudicated rapist, but that doesn't mean that he has to leave office. Or the country. Or stop defacing our nation's capital by hosting poorly attended spectacles at all of our expense. If the thought occurred to me to go to the big America 250 sale-a-bration in Washington, I would have to figure out how to finance the fuel it would take to get me there. 

Sorry: Birthright citizenship. It's a good thing. If you're born here, you get to stay here. Which currently doesn't seem quite like the cool deal it probably should. 

Yay

 Just a reminder as you're taping those red, white and blue streamers to your front porch and preparing to feast on the grilled hot dogs you could afford to buy instead of the steak that you wanted for the bit Fourth of July barbecue: The forty-fifth and forty-seventh President of the United State is an adjudicated rapist. 

Yay. 

This ruling was essentially upheld this past week when the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the convicted felon's appeal to overturn the decision that said that he had sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll. Oh, and the forty-fifth and forty-seventh President of the United States is a convicted felon, which I believe we covered just a moment ago. 

Perhaps I should also clarify that the forty-fifth and forty-seventh President of the United States is the same "person." The same convicted felon and adjudicated rapist who says that he does not think about your financial situation. And he loves inflation. 

Same guy who threw a party for himself on the front lawn of the ruins of the White House. Same guy whose name appears more than thirty-eight thousand times in the Epstein Files. To give you just a little flavor for that last number, Jesus's name appears approximately one thousand two hundred times in the bible. 

Yay. 

This convicted felon and adjudicated rapist whose name appears more than thirty-eight thousand times in the Epstein Files started a war with Iran, he says, because his son-in-law who is a real estate agent told him it would be a good idea. You know: location, location, location. 

Or distraction, distraction, distraction. 

In an effort to celebrate himself rather than the country for which he was nominally elected to lead he has painted things gold and blue and attempted to get anyone but himself to pay for it. Like the people who he was nominally elected to lead. He's going to have McDonald's for lunch on the Fourth of July because he doesn't have to pay for it. You're going to have to pay for it. Yours and his. 

Meanwhile the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist is committing war crimes and getting rich on insider trades while the rest of us are just trying to live out a sliver of the American Dream left to us: The part where we no longer have to worry about an adjudicated rapist in the White House. 

Yay.