Tethered Swimming

“The fact is you don’t have to be able to read to enjoy The Springfield Review of Books.  Just look at these amusing caricatures of Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag.” - Sideshow Bob

Iraq-Vietnam comparisons got Presidential approval last month; then on Wednesday I was reading the 11 October issue of The New York Review of Books and there was an excerpt from the soon to be published (post mortem) book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Journals: 1952-2000.  (Sadly it is not free on their website.)  The following is from an entry dated 21 January 1966 recounting a meeting he and a few other Johnson Administration advisors had with Robert McNamara on the sixth of that month:

McNamara said, as he had before, that he did not regard a military solution as possible.  The military advantages of the bombing, he seemed to feel, were marginal and were out-weighed by the political disadvantages….He seemed deeply oppressed and concerned at the prospect of indefinite escalation.  Our impression was that he feared the resumption of bombing might well put us on the slippery slide.  When I asked whether the North Vietnamese had increased their commitment in response to or independently of American action, he said flatly the first.

He defined his objective in South Vietnam as “withdrawal with honor.”  The establishment of a neutralist government in Saigon would meet that standard.

That was January of 1966(!), two full years before the Tet Offensive and Walter Cronkite’s famous statement that he believed that the war was unwinnable.  At that early date, seven years before the Paris Peace Accords would be signed, no less a figure that the Secretary of Defense had given up on a military solution.  That doesn’t mean that McNamara believed that the war was lost, but it shows that he knew even then that more boys and more bombs were not the answer.

Flash forward almost forty years and here we are.  American troops are caught in the middle of a civil war, the nominal government exists mostly on paper and would swiftly collapse without our military support, and no matter how many whiz-bang weapons and improved tactics we employ, tangible progress remains just out of reach.  Sitting on some hard drive somewhere there are probably comments by high ranking defense officials (military and civilian) that bear a striking resemblance to those of McNamara.

Robert Gates, General David Petraeus, Admiral William Fallon, and others in similar positions may or may not feel that way about the Iraq War.  We won’t find out until long after the fact, if ever.  They cannot be stupid though, they have succeeded at too many difficult tasks to be mistaken for idiots.  It is simply the way of the world that we cannot always say in public what we say in private, I respect and understand that.  But when there are lives on the line, thousands of still beating human hearts, it seems like honesty ought to count for more than decorum.

We fought most of the Vietnam War with our government knowing it was a doomed project.  Other than death and dismemberment the only lasting effect of our military engagement was to delay the eventual political settlement.  As it was then it is now.  As Slim Charles said, “We fight on that lie.”

“No Peter, it’s perfectly normal to siphon jet fuel from an active runway with the intention of flying a pickup truck.” - Glen Quagmire

I watch a lot of football on weekends.  Consequently, I watch a lot of pickup truck commercials and I’d like to briefly deliver some bad news to the advertising folks at Chevy, Ford, Nissan and Toyota.  No only will I not be buying a pickup truck any time soon, but I’ve lost the ability to tell the truck ads apart.  Specifically, I’m referring to the Ford, Toyota and, I think, Nissan commercials that have been unavoidable for the first couple of weeks of the season.

The Chevy ads with the Mellencamp song are repeated too often but at least the song, tiresome as it becomes, is distinct.  Americana shots of wheat fields, children and big cities backup the patriotic lyrics and it’s endearing in the same way a six-year-old’s Fourth of July crayon masterpiece is endearing.  The flag only has four stripes and about nine stars but it’s so hopelessly sincere that it can be charming - at least at first.  (Here’s a horrifying thought: Chevy used Seger’s “Like a Rock” for about fifteen years, does that mean that we’ve got another decade and change of “Our Country” to look forward to?)  The extreme truck ads, on the other hand, blur together.

Showing cars and trucks doing inane things is nothing new.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen small tree stumps ripped out of the ground with tow chains and snow banks exploded by truck grills.[1]  Those were just precursors for what we have now though.  In case you’ve missed them, these ads consist of demonstrations of over the top truck-ness such as braking a landing cargo plane on landing and hauling a shipping container up over the lip of a cliff.  The ads are narrated by men with voices so deep and raspy that they sound like power tools and the appeal seems to be that if your truck can do these extraordinary feats then it must be able to do all the big, manly chores that you (yes you!) need a truck to do.

There are deeper issues to make fun of here, penile insecurity and general feelings of unmanliness for emasculated suburbanites to name but two.  Those insecurities are at the immortal heart of advertising though and I wouldn’t want to quarrel with them.  But there really is only one logical conclusion for these ads: trucks slamming head on into one another at sixty miles an hour.  Whichever one suffers less damage wins.  The only other thing I can think of that would compare is chaining two of them together and seeing which bumper, hitch or drawbar falls off first, but that lacks the exciting violence of a head on collision.

The Super Bowl is only four months away, fellas.  Let’s see some flying glass and crumpled steel!

(As a brief aside I’d love to meet the guys who stage these ads.  No matter how silly it is to make a truck to do something like haul concrete up and down a two hundred foot ramp for no reason, anyone who is both crazy enough to attempt this crap and smart enough to pull it off has to be fun.)

---

[1] Snow banks don’t actually explode when hit by a truck and tree stumps…well, there’s a reason they use dynamite to get rid of them.  Either the chain will break (if you’re lucky) or the truck will (if you’re not).

“Chef, we’re in a repeat.” - Stan Marsh

“A repeat?” - Chef

“Cartman was visited by aliens again last night, and now it’s like we’re living a repeat of a previous day.” - Kyle Broflovski

“Ah dude, I hate repeats.” - Eric Cartman

What a difference a couple of weeks can make.  We went from certain Democratic capitulation (which could still happen), to a possible muddled compromise (which could also still happen), back to stalemate (which is untenable).  Bodies are still coming home from the land between the rivers though, so something needs to be done.  The onus is on the Legislature because given his druthers the Executive would gladly stay until we’re reduced to sending Cub Scouts to patrol Haifa Street.  The smart money and conventional wisdom are on some kind of mild Democratic capitulation that allows the war to continue with some strings attached, but the field of possibilities is wide open.

The best case scenario for Bush the Younger is unfettered funding passed in both houses by a small majority comprised of the Republicans plus a few useful-idiot type Democrats.  The key variable here is time relative to next November.  The less time the funds will last the more palatable it will be to those Democrats who haven’t totally given up on the war.  Four months would put us through January, more or less the anniversary of the, ahem, surge.  (That’s also going to be the height of primary season for the Presidential candidates, some of whom would find an expiration of funding at that moment useful, some of whom would not.)  Six months would get us through March, which would coincide with the fifth anniversary of the war and the April troop withdrawals that are basically mandated by the rotation schedule.  A Democratic Congress, even a divided one, funding the war for more than six months just doesn’t seem plausible.

The problem with this scenario is that it amounts to little more than kicking the can down the road.  Worse yet, the exact same Congress (minus the odd scandal plagued Senator or Representative) will have to take it up again - in an election year.  In effect both sides would be doubling down on the wager they made this spring.  The pro-war side hopes for some kind of improvement while anxiously watching the calendar flip closer to January ‘09; the anti-war side hopes that a few more months of the grim realities of Iraq might finally provide enough Congressional support to pass something that mandates an end to the war.

Meanwhile, the best case scenario for the Democrats is that someone of influence on the Republican side firmly and publicly breaks with the Administration and takes enough votes with him to pass war funding with meaningful limits.  After a round or three of vetoes the Administration caves (or declares some insignificant legislative or military change a victory and then caves).  The war doesn’t end overnight, but is put on a firm track to ending sometime in ‘08 or early ‘09.

The problem with this scenario is that it depends on a serious Republican defection which at this point seems about as likely as Reagan rising from the grave to denounce Bush the Younger.  Nevertheless it is possible.  Republicans can read poll numbers like these just as well as anyone else and they have to be nervous.  Efforts to pass restrictions on the war stalled in the Senate this week but the pressure on Congress to act decisively won’t fully bear on either side until the money actually runs out.

Politics being the art of the possible I have to believe there’s some kind of compromise here.  Maybe it’s another war progress report, with some kind of bite, due in January.  General Petraeus’ credibility is shot with the left so it would have to be outside the current military.  Perhaps a panel of retired generals under the auspices of the Government Accountability Office?  How about passing funding for eight months with the last four being voided if certain, ahem, benchmarks aren’t met?  I don’t know, I’m not a legislator, but there has to be something that’s politically palatable in that it a) pays for the war and b) gives the anti-war crowd a more concrete assurance that the end is coming.

Otherwise neither side budges and that’s bad for everybody.  If the growing number of Republican retirements is anything to go by, they may be willing to fight to the last bullet between now and next November, dump the mess on the newly elected Democrats in ‘09, and come storming back in 2010.  On a purely tactical level I find that admirably cynical, but it’s an awfully big risk.  The fact that the Blues screwed the pooch ‘93-94 is no guarantee that they’ll do it again.  In the meantime they’d be signing their own electoral death warrants in exchange for…what exactly?  A few more months of awkward posturing from Democrats and the schadenfreude of seeing anti-war liberals tear out a little more of their hair?  Seems like a bad deal.

Personally, I don’t think the Republicans are that stupid.  They know that the public is done with the war and that we’re not likely to change our mind anytime soon.  Iraq may be on the front burner right now, but the knob is still set to simmer.  It will point closer and closer to boil as the money runs out and we get through September and into October.  My hunch is that a compromise exists in there somewhere, though we’re a long way from it at the moment.

“I think I know why your son beat you.  Apparently you’re a, you’re a twelve year old pre-pubescent girl, which is good cuz I finally have someone to give this training bra to.” - Peter Griffin

Football has been back amongst us for a few weeks now and I’ve already been reminded countless times how much I missed it.  One of the nice little bonuses of watching football, either at the stadium or on television, is that once or twice a game you get a debatable fourth down.  It can happen early or late but when it comes up you’ve got anywhere from thirty seconds to about two minutes to hash it out.

I’m not talking about the end of the game when one side is desperate and has to go for it; I’m talking about when it’s arguable in both directions.  Early in the game a good looking drive might have stalled on something fluky; or the offense might be in that nebulous zone where it’s sorta too long for a field goal and sorta too short for a punt; or you might have something weird like fourth and two from the three yard line.  Do you go, knowing that you need only two yards for a first down and three for a real score, or do you lay up and take the three measly points?

That, in a nutshell, is what the argument usually comes down to: aggression versus patience.  In a sport that drips testosterone kicking on a debatable fourth down will always seem passive and unmanly.  Of course, it might also be the right thing to do.  Whether or not it works and who wins the game will determine if the coach looks smart or stupid.

For us mere fans though, either at home or in the stands, those few seconds between the end of third down and the snap on fourth provide a sweet little window of risk free football argument.  It consists of two parts, first, do you want to go for it or not, and second, your justification for doing so.

The first part is almost instinctual.  You don’t have a whole lot of time to make up your mind (and you may have been drinking) so this one usually comes from the gut.  The general disposition of most crowds means that when the quarterback trots back onto the field a cheer goes up and the sight of the kicker elicits boos, but individuals are free to pick the other side.

Once you’ve stated a position you pretty much have to stick with it.  Since your answer will have no bearing on what actually happens, it’s just poor form to think out loud and waffle once you’ve come down for or against.  In other life decisions taking a moment to think and maybe going back and forth a few times to see which is more comfortable can be useful.  For fourth down arguments though, it’s just egotism.

After you’ve chosen a side you’ve got two or three sentences, at most, to make your case.  Here is a partial list of your options:

Football Acumen/Snobbery - Describe the type of play that should be called and a couple of reasons why.  This one can work especially well if you know the name of a defender who might be picked on for whatever reason; dropping the name of a lineman or two will also help your credibility.

Example:  “Run Maroney off tackle, Castillo and Williams haven’t had a breather in awhile.”

Loudness - If alcohol has clouded your mind you can always just try being louder and letting the volume of your voice make your argument.  This is what passes for discourse on television and it can work in real life as well.

Example:  “GO FOR IT!”

Precedent - Remember situation Y in game X?  This can be something involving your team or their opponent, or just a random game with a similar score, field position or time remaining.  You get bonus points if it’s a game other people remember but didn’t bring up.

Example:  “This is just like last year during the Tony Romo Game when Seattle went for it twice in one drive, made it, and then couldn’t convert at the goal line later.”

Sarcasm - I’m not sure this merits its own category, but you can always make your argument sarcastic, this works particularly well if your team sucks and everyone knows it.

Example:  “Oh no, [derogatory nickname for the coach]’s going for it!  We’re doomed, doomed I tells ya!”

Situational - This is the coldly logical one.  You’ll need to describe the pros and cons of going for it or not and mention the relative odds of each happening.

Example:  “If we go right up the gut we probably make it and either score or set ourselves up from the one.  If we don’t make it we’ve still got the lead and they have to go the whole field.”

Testicular Fortitude - The purest form of the argument, and it only works for one side: going for it on fourth down.  This is where you say, implicitly or explicitly, that if they don’t go for it they aren’t worthy of calling themselves a football team.

Example:  “Fuck kicking, you gotta go for this!”

Fourth down conversions are another one of those little moments of combat that sprinkle themselves throughout a football game.  The offense can convert it, keep the defense on the field and make a real statement.  Or the defense can come up big, shut down a ballsy call and swing the momentum their way.  Either way, you gotta love it.

“I don’t think they’re giving you enough information Dad.” - Lisa Simpson

“I’ll figure it out.  I’m gonna to use all the power of my brain.” - Homer Simpson

It was a great week if you’re prone to despair about the Iraq War.  Starting on Monday, during the lecture that General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker gave to the House, there was an avalanche of stories on-line and in print about how positive the spin was going to be and how hapless the Democratic attempts to knock down the success stories would be.  It didn’t let up on Tuesday, even as Messrs Petraeus and Crocker faced sharp questions from Republican and Democratic Senators the overall story arc was that the White House had pulled it off once more, Petraeus had done his public relations snow job brilliantly.  Thursday night was the capper as the President weighed in on primetime television to promise military homecomings and more success.  But in the end it was all just media masturbation; the fight is this week and it’s awfully premature to declare winner.

No one, not seasoned Congressional observers, journalistic titans or even the actual politicians know how the debate is going to play out.  There have been a lot of proposals floated and a lot of anonymous quotes but no definite plans of action have taken shape.  There are certainly hard blocs of pro and anti war sentiment in Congress, but there are a lot of question marks strewn across the middle.  We know there is Democratic unease with forcing a showdown just as we know there is Republican discontent with the White House.  What we don’t know are the specifics about what kind of proposals and compromises are going to emerge.  There is a lot of area for give and take on both sides and there is still plenty of opportunity for the White House or Congress to torpedo their own agenda through stupidity.  Nothing is set.

Consequently I find news analysis pieces, from professionals and amateurs alike, highly suspect.  Proclamations of doom or victory from either side have to be taken with a grain of salt.  These are politicians we’re talking about; they are puffing themselves up because they know that hard negotiations lie ahead.  Trying to discern any actual meaning from statements, television appearances, and press releases is a fool’s errand.  The compulsive nature of the twenty-four hour news cycle demands that it be done, but that doesn’t make it any less foolish.

So sit back, relax, and let’s watch the story unfold.  War opponents: don’t give up and start plotting electoral vengeance in aught eight just yet.  War supporters: don’t be too pleased with the media victories of last week, they might mean everything in the world or they might have been written on the wind.  Don’t crow and don’t despair.  Anyone who tells you that they know what’s really going on is probably selling something.

I don’t know what’s going to happen.  Neither does anyone else.  We’ll find out soon enough and while I am of the opinion that the war should be brought to as swift a conclusion as possible, others disagree.  None of us are likely to be super happy with whatever Congress barfs up at the end of the month, but if the war gets nudged a little more toward an ending, be it known as “success”, “withdrawal”, “victory”, “drawdown”, or any other word, that should be good enough for us all.

“Dad is taking this in a less than heroic fashion.” - Lisa Simpson

Yesterday saw a lot of memorials, moments of silence and, “What does it all mean six years later” type articles.  Today, the anniversary of the day after the attacks, deserves some reflection as well.  Even though most of us didn’t know anyone killed six years ago it was right and proper for us to mourn the dead yesterday; the September 11th attacks were a national trauma and deserve to be remembered.  But the world we live in now, and the world we will be living in five, ten, twenty years in the future is more important than memorials and our future depends more on the twelfth than the eleventh.

The great tragedy of this hapless and wasteful Administration will probably be the war in Iraq, with all the embarrassments of the, ahem, war on terror (torture, illegal surveillance, suborning everything to politics) thrown in for good measure.  Of equal importance is the utter destruction of the spirit of September 12th.  I am by no means the first person to point this out, but it is so easily lost and forgotten amid the daily carnival of political bullshit that it merits mention under almost any circumstances.

Our initial reaction to the attacks of that terrible Tuesday (and the anthrax attacks of the subsequent months) was one of resolve and unity.  It wasn’t just us either; countries around the globe stood with us and offered us all but unconditional support.  Most famously epitomized by the headline in Le Monde, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains” it may have been the greatest moment of global solidarity ever.

It was pissed away so quickly and thoroughly that six years later we can barely remember it.  The chest thumping nationalist rhetoric that made up the campaign for war on Iraq (”old Europe”, “freedom fries”, Americans are from Mars Europeans are from Venus, etc) trashed it and the invasion, a scant eighteen months after the attacks, finished it once and for all.  A moment of national and global unity like that could never be expected to last, people being people we were bound to go back to squabbling sooner or later, but it’s utter destruction was unnecessary and tragic.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that what Republicans used to say about us not being a global cop is true.  There are not enough American spies, analysts or troops to police the world and while there is a certain macho attraction to the idea that is better to be feared than liked, if we lack the will and strength to be the former we’d better work our asses off at being the latter.  Failing at both, as we have done the last six years, is unconscionable.

Domestically we can see the destruction the Administration has wrought front and center in the form of the Congressional testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker.  On a day we should be united in remembering the victims of the greatest mass murder in American history our memorials are tainted overtly by politics and charges of dishonor from both sides.  It’s nothing new, but that doesn’t make it any less regrettable.

“I’m sick of you people, you’re nothing but a pack of fickle mush heads.” - Mayor Quimby

“He’s right.” - Springfield Woman

“Give us hell, Quimby!” Springfield Man

Today the 2007 NFL season really gets going, thirteen games in eleven hours.  We are also gearing up for what could be a major debate on the Iraq War.  Watching these twin spectacles will take up the majority of my leisure time over the coming month.  Of the two the NFL will last longer but the war debate is more immediately important.  I’m looking forward to both of them because internecine American combat is always the most fascinating kind.  We’re still obsessed by the Civil War almost a hundred and fifty years later, there’s a reason.

This is a big country and a lot of our politics derives from the fact that citizenship is the only thing a lot of us have in common.  I’m not just talking about the obvious Boston vs. Crawford, liberal vs conservative, Democrat vs Republican stuff.  Even people that live in the same community can have almost nothing in common but their ZIP code.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.  The myth of Our Town is just that, a myth.  There were small farming communities where everyone knew everyone else.  Hell, there still are such places.  But they haven’t comprised a majority of Americans in a very long time, if they ever did.  Grover’s Corners, Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show and romantic notions of virtuous frontier life exist as collective Americana (at least for white people), long on nostalgia and short on detail.  It wasn’t quite like that; we’ve always been a society of strangers.

There is another profound American notion that we all love and it’s almost the opposite idea; fortunately, this one is true: you can always move to a new place and start over.  No matter who you are or where you are, if you put your mind to it, in six months you can be someone else in a completely new place.  I’m not even talking about something illegal like faking your death or forging social security numbers.  You can always keep moving, find something better or get away from your past.  It’s not easy, but it can be done.

We don’t want to have a whole lot in common with most of our fellow citizens.  That’s one of the deepest things to love about this country.  The vegan lesbian couple living near Coit Tower has just as much claim to being American as the soy farmer and his wife in Kansas.  America is a country where everyone can do their own thing.

That’s why the NFL is important in a way that pretty much any other cultural institution we have is not.  It is the most popular thing you can talk about without straying into the dangerous realms of religion or politics, movies, television, other sports, nothing else comes close.  I find this tremendously comforting.

No matter how deluded the Bush administration gets (and it will likely get worse before it gets better) the America Shield will still go up across the land on autumnal Sunday afternoons.  That’s one of the biggest reasons I always thought those liberal doomsday scenarios about permanent Republican majorities and nationalist tyranny were overblown.  Even in the darkest of dark days following the 2004 election, when a mere pair of quote marks around “values” and “political capital” couldn’t do justice to the amount of times they were said and printed, it was all silly overreaction.

The same can be said of the last Republican apocalypse, in the mid-seventies.  Nixon resigned; Gerald Ford had who knows how many vetoes overridden, and a liberal dystopia was on the horizon.  Yet the Republic survived, the economy grew and the 1980 hockey team beat the Soviets.  The John Birch Society still isn’t happy, but neither is Greenpeace.  That is a good thing, on both counts.

This country is not populated by crazy people, which is not to say that there are no crazy people who live here.  There have been crazy people in every society since the dawn of time, but they do not constitute even a significant minority.  It’s easy to lose sight of that precisely because it seems like we have so little in common with each other.  Plus the really crazy people tend to be loud (Ms. Coulter, please stand up).  But crazy is as crazy does, as Forrest Gump might say, and in the end we are all Americans.

There is an old George Carlin joke in which he points out that there are only two kinds of drivers on the road: idiots going slower than you and maniacs going faster than you.  Like all the best of Carlin it is as true as it is funny and the gag is on all of us.  We love football, we love our kids and, my sappy political ecumenicalism aside, when the chips are truly down we will all come together.

“What could be more exciting than the savage ballet that is pro football?” - Lisa Simpson

Tomorrow night the great spectacle of the National Football League will once again begin to cut its annual swath of destruction through the culture and attention of America.  Football is the American sport; it is ours in a way that other sports are not and that is reflected in its near universal popularity.  Its highest expression, the NFL, is the lingua franca of the United States.  Anywhere you are in America you can walk into a bar, or a post office, or a grocery store and have a conversation about professional football.  The Xs and Os acumen of the conversation is going to vary, but everyone knows about the league in at least some basic way.

The American hunger for football can never be sated; airwaves, newspapers and websites are filled with season previews and prognostications because it has been 213 days since the Super Bowl and we are a nation starved.  Basketball and baseball have been our chief exports to the sporting world, but it is football that captivates us and baffles everyone else.

Only in America can organized football find its proper expression.  For one thing, it’s an expensive sport that requires enormous amounts of equipment even on its most childish levels.  The same can be said for hockey and baseball, but those cannot be played year round at any sub-Arctic latitude.  It also helps the sport’s popularity that is has grown more litigious over the years.  The number of rules required to govern a game this fast, violent and chaotic is mind numbing, but no one cares.  Hell, we want the contest to be as fair as possible and if that means referee signals that even hard core fans and announcers are unsure of, so be it.

We love this game enough that its absurdities have come to seem endearing.  Take the chain measurement for example.  The referee spots the ball as accurately he can, but it’s not humanly possible to make it precise to within a blade of grass of where the ball was when the runner went down.  Nevertheless, once it’s on the ground if even the tiniest slice of the ball noses past the marker it’s a first down, and if need be they’ll measure it with lasers.  It doesn’t make any sense, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

And, of course, football is the most martial of games.  War metaphors abound, they were briefly banished after Week 1 of the 2001 season (remember that?), but they returned quickly and with good reason.  Detailed preparation goes into every piece of action, every situation must be thought out in advance.  Middle school teams have playbooks so thick and complex they could be mistaken for invasion plans and that’s not a coincidence.  Playing football, getting the right eleven guys on the field in the right configuration, requires military levels of organization and preparation.  All that talent, training and preparation collide on the field, and a whole season can be decided in a fraction of a second by margins of less than an inch.

Unlike war though, football ends when scheduled to do so.  It has a shorter season than all the other major sports leagues and each individual game really matters, something no other league can say.  If your favorite baseball, basketball or hockey team wins or loses on any given night there isn’t much at stake.  Even a game against a division rival or a marquee superstar doesn’t really matter all that much.  If your NFL team loses just one game, that’s the equivalent of a ten game losing streak in baseball and a five game losing streak in basketball or hockey, and if they drop two or three in a row you can all but write off the campaign.

To end the season the NFL celebrates with the biggest possible orgy of Americana: Super Bowl week.  Every year a major American city closes streets and holds a week long bacchanal.  Cab drivers, cops and prostitutes work triple shifts; streets are closed; movie stars, celebrities and all the human detritus that comes with them swarm like moths to the flame.  Media outlets from countries most of the players have never heard of send reporters and camera crews.  It has little to do with the game to be played; it is celebration of another glorious year in the reign of football, an unequaled display of power, popularity and wealth.

The game itself, whether a compelling matchup or a blowout, causes the mighty behemoth of television to almost halt itself.  That is a superhuman achievement in itself.  Every non-Super Bowl channel has to find some quirky, niche oriented program to run against it because everyone will be watching the game.  Waggish press releases will point out that only a few minutes of actual play take place and highlight the ridiculous cost of the commercials, but they’re missing the point.  When ostentation is the order of the day the price of the commercials can never be too high; hype and popularity are self perpetuating.

You can see the NFL as a hypocritical and exploitative organization, one that proclaims itself a paragon of respect and integrity while chewing up and spitting out its own players even as it tacitly encourages them to sacrifice everything to the god of Sunday victory.  You can see it as a league composed of fickle, petty and greedy franchises that expect unconditional love while demanding stadium deals, tax breaks and charging eight dollars for beer.

Or you can look at it as a great American success story, an institution that became a money factory through hard work, guile and risk (much of it forgotten today).  You can see an employer, of players and support staff, one that has positive financial and social effects on communities, a highly visible example that lets talented, hard working people make more of themselves than they otherwise could.

Truthfully it is all of those things, business and pleasure, deadly serious work and frivolous entertainment rolled into one.  I’m always leery of metaphors for America, they are usually inane and foolish and pointless, but the game of football and the National Football League might be the best we have.  The game and the League reflect the best and worst about us, they are an unrestricted reflection of American money and culture and I can’t wait for kickoff.

“Fool me seven times, shame on you.  Fool me eight or more times, shame on me.” - Amy Wong

When it comes to the discussion of the Iraq War these days I can’t help but feel a bit like Ned Flanders.  Specifically, like Ned felt when an unconscious Homer bounced right back into the burning Simpson home after Ned risked life and limb to push Homer to safety.  Flanders simply shrugs and says, with resigned determination, “Okay.”  It is the perfect expression of frustration without despair.

The monumentally stupid plan to add a few extra troops in Baghdad has played out exactly as war critics predicted; nevertheless the public discussion over the war is being framed by an assumption that military progress has been made, and therefore that there might be a foundation for other improvement.  This is patently false and I find the credence it’s been given so far painfully familiar.  To be fair, to this point the discussion has mostly been media masturbation and I’m shouldn’t be taking it at all seriously.  No substantive (public) negotiations have yet begun, but it looks as though the debate, such as it is, is going to once again be conducted under disingenuous assumptions.

I am not going to debunk, line by line, the Administration’s incredible and dishonest report next week.  Professor Cole and others will do a far better job.  I will only point out something very simple.  Without exception - without exception - reports of turning points and progress have been flat out false.  I am going to repeat that because it’s all you really need to know when coming to a conclusion about whether or not we ought to continue our Mesopotamian adventure.  Without exception - without exception - every single time the Administration has said things are looking up, or that we’ve turned a corner, or that progress is finally being made, it has been proved wrong by subsequent events.

Just off the top of my head this includes the capture of Saddam Hussein (remember him?), the transfer of sovereignty (whatever that meant), the purple fingers, the promulgation of a constitution, more purple fingers, al-Maliki’s elevation to Prime Minister, the replacement of Rumsfeld, and now the, ahem, surge.  I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but it’s near impossible to keep track and I’m not even going to mention all the different tactical and command reforms we’ve undergone.  Crazed war supporters, most of them directly or indirectly on the White House gravy train, have to figure that if Congress and the public have swallowed the first thirty flavors, why not thirty-one?

There is a problem with that line of thinking though.  A government that is held accountable to its populace every two years should be aware of the fact that its wars need to be either brief or justified.  This one is neither.  Our troops are an occupying army in a foreign land that has no real government.  No thundering speeches or advertising campaigns are going to change that.  The fashionable malarkey about how the, ahem, surge is beginning to show military progress is coming from the same people who trumpeted all those other important milestones and critical phases.  I call bullshit.

Whatever security improvements that have been seized upon by the usual screeching chorus of chicken-hawks are almost certainly illusory.  The metrics and numbers that will be published on the fifteenth of this month won’t quite be made out of whole cloth, they will merely be cherry picked and twisted as much as humanly possible.  Trying to draw conclusions from that kind of data is like putting faith in Enron financial statements.  And even if the numbers weren’t fictional, they’re still meaningless.  There is no functional Iraqi government and there is no hope of forming one.  What security does exist is provided by sectarian militias with shifting allegiances and contradictory goals.  Even if we spot the Administration every piece of data and take them at their word, the situation is still hopeless.

Now for the good news: the very political vacuum that precludes any successful conclusion to our involvement can be used as an excuse to cover our tracks while we flee.  Blaming the Iraqis is like telling a rape victim that she was asking for it; it’s nakedly disingenuous and downright sleazy, but I’m willing to go for it if it ends American involvement in Iraq.  Whether we get everyone out in 2008 or 2009 will matter little to the history books (let the academics fight it out for the next thirty years), but it will matter a hell of a lot to the people, American and Iraqi, who get killed and maimed in the interim.  Those are the people we need to think about, the ones that are breathing today but won’t be a year from now.

Here’s hoping that there isn’t enough juju left in the White House bullshit machine to doom them.