Sunday Bloody Sunday

It happens every so often. You sit down on the couch to cheer your favorite team on, and whoops, it seems as though your favorite team didn't bother to show up. In a vague, physical sense, they are there, but they don't seem to have any kind of vested interest in what is taking place around them. Which is too bad, since there's not much I can do from my couch but sit, slack-jawed, and watch the evisceration take place. That's what happened last Sunday in Denver. The Broncos gave up three touchdowns before I had settled into my proper viewing position. They gave up those three touchdowns to the much detested and loathed Oakland Raiders. I tried, in vain, to get my family interested in sharing my pain. My son looked at the score and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "Dad, I've got better things to do." I watched it all unfold like a slow motion train wreck. How could a group of professionals show up so woefully unprepared? Were these two teams so horribly mismatched that someone should have simply thrown in the towel at halftime?
That's what I'm starting to feel about the Democrats in the upcoming elections. My team seems ill-prepared at best to do what it takes to win the game. Nothing that I have seen or heard makes me think about switching parties or crossing the line to vote Republican, but I keep wondering why it is that my party seems so ready to simply drop back five, and punt. Just two years ago, we won the Super Bowl, right? I understand that repeating that success is a tough road, but the Denver Broncos did it once upon a time. Bill Clinton too. If you're a true fan, you don't just hop on the bandwagon of another team, but maybe you wonder what is going through the coach's head, or where the quarterback might be playing next year. And while you're watching the massacre, you might find yourself wondering the relative competitiveness of the rest of the players on your team. Are they content to play out the string, or will they rise up and give it their best effort when the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys. I don't know where I'll be then Rock, but I'll know about it, and I'll be happy.

Not One Of Us

One of the things that I have always taken solace in is the way certain celebrities have the ability to appear in our world as "just plain folks." The suggestion that Bruce Springsteen drives his kids to school just like any hard-working New Jersey dad helps me make sense of the world. Knowing that the guys from DEVO met in art school and used their collective nerdiness to become one-hit wonders gives me hope for my own collective nerdiness. It is my absurd wish to relate to those in the public eye that keeps me renewing my subscription to Entertainment Weekly.
Then there's the other side of the coin: Katy Perry and Russell Brand were married in a traditional ceremony last Saturday. In India. On a tiger preserve. With horses and sitars and elephants. I remember when I was planning my wedding with my soon-to-be-wife, and for a few minutes, we considered a Disney wedding. Then we realized that we were shopping in a realm that was at least a decimal place higher than we were likely to cough up. So we looked into getting a horse on which she could make her entrance. We finally settled on a Dodge convertible. We skipped the tigers and elephants, too.
Then there's the marriages that have lasted and lasted, like Mick and Keith. They've stayed together for fifty years. For his part, Mister Richards insists that he has been able to maintain his calm in the eye of the hurricane we call fame the old fashioned way: heroin. There were sitars, but there was no word on whether the Brand/Perry reception included any pharmaceuticals.

Batting Cleanup

There was a work day at my son's school this past weekend. I have lost track of all the times I have shown up at various public schools, the one at which I work and the ones my son has attended, on a weekend. Sometimes I fix things. Sometimes I clean things. Sometimes I pull weeds. Most of the time I wonder what I'm doing there.
Five days a week, your traditional work week, I roll my bike into my classroom sometime around seven thirty in the morning. I don't tend to roll it back out until after four in the afternoon. These aren't the ten and twelve hour days that I used to put in when I used to run a book warehouse way back in the twentieth century, but they're full days. Those thirty-five minutes of "duty-free lunch" provide the only quiet moments in what can be best described as a marathon. When Friday afternoon comes, most of us teachers are headed for the door and not looking back.
But not all of us. There are those, myself included, who understand that schools don't magically reconstitute themselves over the weekend. Even the most dedicated custodial staff can't keep up with all the wear and tear that buildings and grounds take over the course of a school year. It takes a little extra help to keep things up and running. That's what parents do. That's what neighborhood volunteers do. That's what teachers do. On the odd weekend when you can round up enough dedicated hands, you can put your school back together again.
That's when my wondering stops. I know why I'm there. It's a public school, and I'm part of the public. Wouldn't Horace Mann be proud.

If You Build It, They Will Come

The deaths of Barbara Billingsley and Tom Bosley marked the passage of an epoch. White America was already given notice that by 2050 they will no longer be in the majority, and now Mom and Dad are dead. Of course we're angry. Angry and afraid. All these foreigners keep showing up on our doorstep, wanting a piece of our apple pie. What little solace we might have taken from the notion that the world would end in 2012 was shattered when we found out that we weren't that good at reading a Mayan calendar after all. Now we're stuck with this ever-churning melting pot, soon to become just another minority.
And so, while the clock continues to tick, we who are Caucasian sit and stew in our own juices. Bitter and frustrated with the way that our country has become a repository of the world's huddled masses. Why should we care if they're yearning to breathe free? It was some chick who stuck that poem on the front of the statue given to us by the French that started all this touchy-feely stuff in the first place. This is our country, after all. We cleared all the Native inhabitants off pretty much all by ourselves, thank you very much and now we'd like to be able to sit around and enjoy it for a couple hundred more years without having to worry about any other languages or religions or cultures beyond the amusing and comfortable mash-up that we've all become familiar with over the years.

Angela Merkel understands. As she told a gathering of the Christian Democratic Union last week in Potsdam, "The approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side by side and to enjoy each other ... has failed, utterly failed." Her sentiments echoed the a study from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation that found more than thirty percent of people believed Germany was "overrun by foreigners" who had come to Germany chiefly for its social benefits. This thirty percent were probably not Germans "of color." The study also found that thirteen percent of Germans would be happy to have a new "Fuhrer" to run the country "with a firm hand." Some sixty percent of Germans would "restrict the practice of Islam," and seventeen percent think Jews have "too much influence," according to the study. The study does not mention whether or not sales of brown shirts have gone up as well.

And the Germans are not alone. Last year, the Swiss voted to ban the construction of minarets in their country. The French may have missed the boat on the whole Coalition of the Willing thing, but they have been more than happy to get on board with banning headscarves and other "conspicuous" religious symbols in their schools. I assume that means they won't be getting any visits from the Pope anytime soon. We're building a big wall on our southern border. No word on whether we will call in any German architects for consultation on that one.

In the meantime, we can sit in our bunkers, having fever dreams about the Beav's little friend from Mexico, Chuey, and how Arnold's was really owned by Mister Miyagi.

The Color Scheme Of Things

What are the chances that I would end up living in the heart of the "Black Hole?" Born and raised a Denver Broncos fan, I am surrounded throughout the year by silver and black reminders of what I learned from infancy was, plain and simple, evil. The Oakland Raiders were the bad guys, and there were simply no two ways about it. And yet, here I am, sitting in a house that I bought just scant miles from the center of all this vileness. The chances of all of that occurring are currently standing at one hundred percent.
Maybe it has something to do with the way that the colors blue and orange find themselves on the opposite sides of a color wheel, creating harmony. Those are the colors of my team, while the combination of silver and black seems to be just asking for trouble. But my experience suggests that's the way a Raider fan would want it. They are the ones who mined this image with the tag line: "Just Win, Baby." Take no prisoners. That one takes precedence over the more pompous "Commitment To Excellence." It doesn't scan as well on a bumper sticker.
My most excellent and revered Bronco Bud won himself a Tivo way back when they were just starting up by writing an essay that suggested that the best use for a digital video recorder was that it would allow him to slow down or freeze broadcasts of Raiders games to keep track of how much they were cheating. Considering that corporate headquarters for Tivo are located just a little over thirty minutes down highway 880 from where the Raiders play their home games, there must be something to that. And most inhabitants of the Raider Nation probably won't put up much of an argument about that.
Now here's the weird thing: It never occurred to me, back in the day, that I was moving into enemy territory. I fell in love and moved out to California. It was only when football season began that I became excruciatingly aware of just how this choice was going to affect my life. Love is blind, after all, or perhaps only color blind. And so my wife and son will huddle together one more time this afternoon to watch yet another chapter of the AFC West rivalry unfold. Neither team seems to be particularly dominant this year, so it should provide some mild entertainment, giving us one more shot at bragging rights for the season. One more chance to be complementary.

Love On The Rocks, I Know It Well

I sat in the front room of my house and watched a couple walking down the street. To be more precise, I watched them start and stop walking down the street. It took them several minutes to make their collective way past our front gate. They were deep in conversation, or what appeared to be conversation. It was very intense. It wasn't loud, which was a feature of many of the discussions that have taken place on our street over the years. I watched the man reach for the woman's hand, as if to beg her indulgence. She shrugged and pulled away. He stomped away for a few steps, then returned, hands on hips. There was another brief exchange before he threw his arms up in the air and retreated back down the sidewalk.
As this dance continued, I tried not to stare from my window. There have been occasions when these interactions have not worked out quite as politely. There have been times when a call to the police has been necessary to keep the relative calm. Something about being out on the street must make people imagine that they are somehow invisible, not unlike the illusion created by getting into your car: no one can see you picking your nose or singing along to ABBA at the top of your lungs. When you take your relationship problems out into the world, everyone can see and hear it.
I know this because I have been there myself. I have succumbed to the tunnel vision of male/female discord on a number of occasions. It was only now, as I watched the sad couple in front of my house that it ever occurred to me what I might have looked like in that same predicament. No one ever called the cops on me. Maybe they should have. I have been plenty loud, even when I'm getting along with my mate. As the anxious couple continued on past our house, I wondered if I might see them again. Only this time they would be strolling hand in hand, not saying a word.

Blessed Are The Yellow People

I don't know how my son will react to this news about his favorite show: The official Vatican newspaper has declared that beer-swilling, doughnut-loving Homer Simpson and son Bart are Catholics. This kind of revelation might seem more appropriate for a clan like the Ewings or the Cleavers, It seems a little out of place for a TV family whose patriarch once announced, "You know, the one with all the well-meaning rules that don't work in real life - uh, Christianity."
That's just the tip of the theological iceberg in the Simpson household, but it doesn't keep the Osservatore Romano newspaper from claiming the yellow brood as their own. They assert that the Simpsons are "among the few TV programs for kids in which Christian faith, religion and questions about God are recurrent themes." While that may be true, this is also a father who has proudly insisted, "In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" Homer, it would seem, is every bit as dedicated to the good book as he is to the textbook.
Maybe they were focusing on the Homer moment when he was confronting convenience store proprietor and Hindu, Apu Nahaasapeemapetilon: "You make people miserable and there's nothing they can do about it, just like god. No offence Apu, but when they were handing out religions, you musta been out taking a whizz." Is it that kind of tolerance that the Catholic church hopes their followers to embrace, or is that just a "tea-party moment?"
Or maybe it's as simple as this: "The Simpsons" air every Sunday evening, football and baseball permitting, on Fox. They've been there since 1987. They are, by television standards, an institution. At this point, I imagine that the Pope is getting a little tired of trying to find fault with this "tender and irreverent, scandalous and ironic, boisterous and profound, philosophical and sometimes even theological, nutty synthesis of pop culture and of the lukewarm and nihilistic American middle class." I guess they'd rather switch than fight.