Halftime

I remember when Ronald Regan told us all that it was "morning in America." He wanted us to know it was time to push the reset button. In his run to become the fortieth president of the United States, he was letting us all know that he was there to usher in a new era. He may have been doing the metaphorical version of shaking us awake.
Of course, it's not like we had been asleep, exactly. We had all been hoping that the Vietnam War and Watergate followed by massive inflation and recession was merely a bad dream. That was the strength of the grandfatherly assertion that a new day was dawning and everything was going to be all right again. Thirty-two years ago.
This past weekend, another voice of quiet authority: "This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again, and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines. Yeah, it’s halftime in America, and our second half is about to begin." This wasn't Grandpa Reagan. It was your cranky old uncle, Clint Eastwood. He may have been talking about our great nation, but he was referencing one city in particular: Detroit. He wasn't running for office. He was selling cars. He was selling cars to a country that was watching a football game when he said, America “knows how to come from behind to win.” Then, the New York Giants did just that. It would have been more amazingly impressive had it been the Detroit Lions who made that last-minute comeback, but with all that red, white and blue on the field, it couldn't have been any more quintessentially American.
And as the confetti rained down, Eli Manning stood on the podium and received the keys to a brand new Corvette. Not a Chrysler product. Don't tell Clint.