Tell Your Coffee: Bitter, Begone!

Ordinarily, when I start getting excited about household hints it's a pretty reliable sign that my medications need adjusting.

Not so, this time. Trust me. This is important stuff. This is about…

Coffee.

There are some days (okay, most days) when the lure of a really great cup of coffee is the only thing that can entice me to get out of bed in the morning and get dressed rather than just pulling the covers over my head and having them bronzed in place.

I won't get on my soapbox (actually, coffeebox) about the wisdom of paying just a little bit more for a flavorful brand of coffee rather than the generic sawdust substitute that's a buck a pound cheaper. And I won't browbeat you about the extra freshness you can get by grinding your own beans in small quantities or by using a small cone-filter drip device to make one cup at a time rather than a whole scorched pot that deteriorates throughout the morning.

What I'll do, instead, is to ask you this simple question: when have you cleaned out your holes?

No matter what kind of coffee maker you have, there's some kind of little hole or holes that the mixture drips through as it brews. The manufacturer's instructions usually say to anoint these babies every month or two with some elite brand of coffee-pot cleaner that comes in a tiny jewel-like squeeze bottle, has to be special-ordered from the Swiss Alps, and costs more than the coffee maker itself.

Bah. Waste of money. Plain old baking soda does the job just as well. As for monthly cleanings, that's ridiculous. Coffee oils and acid build up around those holes in days, not weeks, and even tiny deposits can give a bitter taste to every cup you make.

Daily cleanings may be a bit of overkill, but if you scrub out the works at least once a week (twice, if you're finicky) you'll be amazed at how much better your morning coffee tastes.

Here's what I do. Take a small handful of plain old baking soda and cram it down into the holes of your filter container. Drip a little bit of water from the faucet onto the dry soda until it makes a paste. Let sit for several minutes, and then force the soda paste through the holes with either a tiny wire brush or, in a pinch, a coffee stirrer with a dab of paper towel twisted on the end to simulate a Q-tip.

Rinse and dry the filter container, and you're good to brew. (The night before is an ideal time to prep your coffee maker; you can pay attention and do it methodically because you won't be antsy to get that first great jolt of caffeine into your system.)

Even if you're not a coffee aficionado, and have gotten into the habit of drinking it for the buzz rather than for the flavor, you'll still be amazed at what a difference an oil-free, acid-free filter device can make.

Try it. Your morning will be brighter. You may even get more work done.

Nope, there's no need to thank me. That's what I'm here for.

Stop the bitterness. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Rise of the Underwear Police

So, what makes me suspect that religious fundamentalism is on the rise in Uzbekistan? Check out this report from Ananova...

Fur-lined Knickers Banned

Fur-lined underwear has been banned in Uzbekistan after authorities deemed it too sexy.

Sales of the furry slips have rocketed in temperatures that have hit the region of below minus 20C.

But the government has now banned the lingerie saying they want to protect citizens from "unbridled fantasies" caused by wearing the soft fabric.

Textile company Collapse, which has been making fur undies for both men and women, have protested the decision from the capital Tashkent, reported online newspaper Ferghana.

***

Unbridled fantasies. As opposed to "bridled" fantasies, which I presume are OK?

Eagles' CD Box Set a Treasure Trove

Hear me, o ye young, and attend unto my hard-won wisdom. Of all the indignities and depredations to which we fall prey in middle age, few are more humbling than the experience of listening, at a remove of some 20 to 30 years, to the popular music that formed the soundtrack, as it were, of your young and vigorous life—songs by artists you worshipped for their lyrical profundity and their genius with a melody line or rhythm track—only to discover that in truth this once-hallowed music, not to put too fine a point on it…sucks.

Thus, it was with no small trepidation that I opened the plastic seal on the boxed CD set “Eagles,” containing seven of the group’s best albums that so beautifully bridged the fences between rock, pop, folk, and country beginning in the 1970s.

Would the music measure up? Were such songwriting gems as “Take It Easy,” “Tequila Sunrise,” “Lying Eyes,” “Desperado,” “The Best of My Love,” “Hotel California,” and dozens of others, actually as timeless as they seem in memory, or was I hearing them through the soft complimentary filter of life in 1970s America, when I was young and energetic and living large and no goal seemed impossible?

I’m both proud and relieved to report that upon repeated listening, these guys who produced a decade’s worth of great pop music are even better than I remembered.

The sheer musicianship, for one thing, is staggering in its consistency. I realize it’s hard to go wrong with side players the caliber of Joe Walsh, but even so, there are no throwaway cuts here. Even the less-distinguished songs (and every group has some) are meticulously polished in the studio and yet escape being overproduced as so much of the era’s music was.

Classic guitar solos don’t get any better than these. If you can listen to these songs at full volume on your car stereo and not at times momentarily steer with your knees so as to play air guitar, you don’t have an ounce of rock-and-roll in your bones.

But what makes the greatest of these efforts by songwriters Glenn Frey and Don Henley endure—to be sung around campfires and on festival stages, in my humble prediction, long after the Eagles and myself have all turned to dust—is the lyrics that go straight to the head and heart at once.

I sometimes tell people that my favorite contemporary philosopher is Don Henley, and I’m only half joking. There’s a blinding amount of wisdom hiding in the words of these radio-friendly melodies:

—“Beautiful faces and loud empty places / look at the way that we live / wasting our time on cheap talk and wine / left us so little to give…” (“Best of My Love”)

—“Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy…” (“Take It Easy”)

—“You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave…” (“Hotel California”)

—“When it comes down to dealing friends / it never ends…” (“Tequila Sunrise”)

—“Don’t you draw the Queen of Diamonds, boy / she’ll break you if she’s able / the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet…” (“Desperado”)

And perhaps the most hard-won lesson of all, that I could never have fully understood in my 20s:

—“Every form of refuge has its price…” (“Lying Eyes”)

Tell it, brother.

It’s not often, in any art form, that you find truth and beauty in equal proportion, but this treasure trove of music manages to pull it off.

Ironically, most of these songs were written in an atmosphere of excess and drugs and hard living, and yet they manage to be deeply moral without being moralistic. Much of what passes for “religious” music these days could learn from Frey’s and Henley’s clear-eyed assessment of their own failings and of their respect for our shared humanity.

But I digress.

If life were fair, the aging members of the Eagles will win a whole new audience of young listeners who realize that this is very different stuff than they’re finding on today’s radio airwaves. Different in a good way.

If not, then at least my fellow geezers and I get the satisfaction of knowing that we weren’t just dreaming the first time around. These guys play like demons and sing like angels. And music doesn’t get much better than that.

Buddhism and Enlightened Belief

One quick afterthought (okay, two) on the previous post's commentary by John Steinberg, in which he says that one of the most basic questions for any religion is "What do you do when belief and data collide?"

To my knowledge, only one of the world's major religions has taken an unequivocal position on that thorny issue: Buddhism. As the Dalai Lama himself has repeatedly said, "If the words of the Buddha and the discoveries of modern science conflict, the former have to go."

Surprised? You're not alone. The country of China and its Western allies have made an enormous public relations effort over the past 50 years to portray Buddhism as a "backward" and "superstitious" belief system because many of its precepts and rituals are unfamiliar to a Judeo-Christian mindset. This smear campaign arose after the Chinese government failed to destroy the practice of Tibetan Buddhism through genocide, violence, and punitive restrictions such as imprisonment for possessing even the smallest religious image or symbol. (The United States, meanwhile, despite its facile "spreading freedom" mantra, looked the other way as Buddhist monks were tortured and killed and their centuries-old libraries and monasteries burned to the ground.) To learn more about the ongoing nonviolent struggle for Tibetan autonomy, you can start here.

How ironic, that a "backward" belief system is light years ahead of others in reconciling spirituality with our actual life on this earth. The Dalai Lama has also memorably observed, "Religion is a luxury. Compassion is not." But that's a story for another day.

Speaking of irony, I was talking recently with the editor of a "Christian" publication and I mentioned to him my deep respect for the principles and practices of Buddhism. As we parted, he wished me luck in "converting" all my Buddhist friends to (his particular version of) Christianity.

Yeah, right.

Failing the 'Reality Check'

Do you ever come across an article that instantly clears up your confusion over some topic in the news? The ol' cartoon light bulb goes on in your brain, and in this piercing new illumination the situation makes sense.

That's how I felt about this recent piece from John Steinberg of Raw Story, in which he explains our nation's current failure to face even the most basic precepts of reason about our dark political circumstances. (It's a fairly long article, so I'll just excerpt a few of the high points. I highly recommend the whole shebang, which you'll find here.)

One of the basic questions about how we make our way through the world is, “What do you do when belief and data collide?” A core tenet of post-Enlightenment Western society is that a rational person will drop a hypothesis that is contradicted by good empirical evidence. It is the scientific method enshrined by Descartes and Bacon, and, for good or ill, it has given us every scrap of technology and science. But we see evidence in every corner that this is not how people live their lives.

Bizarre hybrids like “Creation Science” notwithstanding, fundamentalist religion rejects reason. Reason embraces the possibility of error; absolutist religion must deny it. By definition, Fundamentalists maintain belief by rejecting the data.

Look at the declining role of science and reason in our society and wonder how we could be anywhere but this sorry juncture. A 2001 Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans believe evolution is flat-out wrong; the Washington Times reports that more than 60 percent of Americans believe that the Biblical Genesis and Noah’s Ark stories are literally true. True believers are pulling their children out of public school by the thousands to avoid contaminating them with unwanted questions. All of those children are being bred to believe what they are told, and that the world view of their parents and teachers is correct — simply because they say so.

The brilliant cynic Karl Rove saw that the religious right had manufactured millions of Americans programmed to follow without asking questions or demanding accountability. In short, America’s heartland had produced a substantial population that believes rather than thinks. Rove understood that all he had to do was provide a leader callous enough to speak their code and claim the shepherd’s mantle. The subtle part of Karl Rove’s subtle genius is that he has positioned Bush not merely as President, but as Messiah — the touchstone of a belief system. That he accomplished this feat while flying under the radar of the mainstream press is one of the great feats of modern politics.

If you think of the Bush White House as a Church, many things begin to make sense. Religious leaders don’t take hostile questions at press conferences, or debate policy with non-believers. Followers do not debate their infallibility. Non-believers are hectored, then ignored, and finally scorned. And most significantly, fundamentalists create belief systems that banish critical thinking. As the Catholic Church learned hundreds of years ago, reason cannot be tethered to dogma, and inevitably contradicts it. Fundamentalist leaders know this, and tie reason to the devil instead.

Accept that reason is no longer essential to decision-making, and a host of policies snap into focus. The decision to invade Iraq is now the most obvious assault on reality-based decision-making, but there are many others. Global warming is denied in the face of virtual consensus among scientists; billions of dollars have been transferred to defense contractors building missile defense systems that most experts agree will be useless; energy policy assumes infinite resources; environmental policy suspends belief in cause and effect. The old separation between church and state has become a separation between church and reality, and government increasingly stands opposite reality.

As the actions and polices of this Administration show, faith-based government obviates the need for Constitutional protections. Any American sixth grader should know that “checks and balances” form the basis of our system of government. What we usually talk about are the ways each of the three branches of our government limits the excesses of the others. But at root, they all depend on a more fundamental kind of checking and balancing: the reality check. And when reality ceases to be the touchstone for policy, the very concept of checks and balances loses meaning.

The result has been a tragic symbiosis. Its value to Bush et al. is obvious: as Mel Brooks once said, it is good to be the King. God’s powers are by definition absolute, yet God, despite His omnipotence, takes a pass on accountability. The worse things become, the more tenaciously true believers cling to their views of Him. A tragedy like 9/11 might make others question their faith, but not the Bush disciples. A dangerous world increases the need for comfort, and if filling that need requires a belief in the objectively false (like Saddam-9/11 links, or Iraqi WMDs), so be it. Pointing out that Bush did nothing to prevent 9/11, or has made us less safe with his new crusade, is unavailing. The faithful vest in the object of their faith attributes based not on reality, but the size of the hole they expect him to fill. A sickening spiral ensues: the further Bush drifts from the moorings of reality, the stronger the support from his disciples becomes.

2006: The Year in Advance

The good folks at Birmingham Weekly graciously asked me to look into my crystal ball and predict what the new year might hold for us all, so I offer those ramblings herewith as my two cents' worth on the subject. And fairly priced, at that...

***

Few things will dampen a good New Year’s buzz faster than to start invoking the ghosts of Victorian Era poets, but one Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) coined the ultimate go-to line for prognosticators when he wrote “The past is prologue.” And he’s never been more on the money than this month in which American political history turns the corner from 2005 to 2006.

True, every year has a habit of churning up unexpected events that no sensible person could have predicted in his/her wildest dreams. But the issues already on the plate of sloppy leftovers that the Bush administration must deal with in the next 12 months can’t help but shake up the nation’s political picture in major, and quite possibly historic, ways.

Hey, we can dream, can’t we? Some best-case scenarios:

—The domestic spying scandal has not even begun dribbling out specific unsavory information that will offend a growing percentage of Americans. Ideally, some of those Americans will be in sufficient places of power to make a difference. A completely separate issue: Our friendly telecommunications giants apparently said “No problem!” to the government’s request that they open up easy spy portals to all our most private information. This, without even the courtesy of informing us of same via the small-print disclaimers on the back of our monthly bills. Can you say “Lawsuits”?

—The Congressional bribery (aka Abramoff) scandal will give the spy mess a good run for its money, both in the increasing number of “persons of interest” and the lengths to which resulting court trials (televised, with any luck) will drag on to Election Day 2006 and beyond.

—Karl Rove’s and Scooter Libby’s great CIA leak lapse appeared to be the only big investigatory show in town as recently as October. But it will now have to jockey for headlines in the media as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s ongoing investigation continues to tighten the screws. The second grand jury is already seated for the new phase, and it’s a logical guess that it won’t take Fitz till springtime to bring them up to speed on what they’re looking at and get down to business. Meanwhile, in the background:

—Everybody talks about the weather, and Swinburne’s past-is-prologue pronouncement will be nowhere more true than in matters meteorological. The unprecedented tropical storms of autumn have already given way to historic extreme winter across parts of the globe, and January has barely started. It shouldn’t surprise us if the coming hurricane season in the U.S. is as bad or worse than the one we just faced. And chances are, the government’s profoundly failed response capabilities as highlighted by Katrina will not have improved appreciably in the interim—no matter how extensively former FEMA head Michael Brown (immortalized as “heck of a job” Brownie) fulfills his government consultant contract by listing the ways in which he goofed up.

—The monumental human tragedy that is Iraq, which went from bad to worse in 2005, will stay on that trajectory throughout the current year, presuming that the American military remains there in force. If significant withdrawals begin soon enough, the situation could level off at “worse” for weeks or months at a time. History scholar Juan Cole, the most consistently credible voice on Iraq that I’ve heard yet, this week made 10 detailed predictions for 2006. The short version: compared to Dr. Cole, I’m a giddy optimist.

—The monumental debt the U.S. has run up with China alone, as a result of ill-considered tax cuts, corporate welfare, and runaway war spending may not exactly be called in by the creditor, but the leash of usury will be publicly tugged in some fashion that is, at the very least, embarrassing.

—On a brighter note, there’s technology! The “good guys” of nonprofits and philanthropy will continue to make more computers and other communication devices affordable enough for disadvantaged populations around the world. Not a panacea, by any means, and not without growing pains, including the inevitable clashes over government censorship. But overall, a surprisingly potent force for liberty and for good.

—And on the high-tech home front, the remaining 73 people in the continental U.S. who do not currently maintain a personal blog will see the error of their ways and sign up. As a result, Americans will be so occupied with writing blogs that the reading of blogs will have to be outsourced to a series of Third World countries, whose economies will boom proportionately.

—Concurrent with the blog victory, the remaining 89 people in the continental U.S. who do not currently own an iPod music player (or reasonable cheap clone thereof) will see the error of their ways and buy one. As a result, the music programming of the ravenous MP3 players will have to be outsourced to a series of Third World countries, whose economies (and eclectic tastes in music) will boom proportionately.

In other words, a win-win.

A Sign of Hope in Winter

After working for several days of bleak midwinter in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee, I can verify that spring is still a good ways off. Not a leaf-bud or a jonquil to be seen.

I did, however, spot one hopeful sign of better times ahead: a young man picking up his two daughters at an elementary school had a bumper sticker on his car that said MY KIDS CAN'T AFFORD FOR ME TO VOTE REPUBLICAN.

I've looked online for a supplier of those stickers, and can't find one. If you know of a place they're available for purchase, please drop me a note.

Thinking self-improvement...within reason

There's nothing quite like the first untarnished week of a brand-new year, when we all have an extra spring in our step and a head full of ambitious ideas just waiting to be tried out.

Obviously, this state of affairs is both unnatural and medically risky, so it’s a good thing that human nature soon kicks in and returns us to normal before too much damage can be done.

But admit it…when this optimistic delusion finally wears off (probably around 10 p.m. tonight, when you realize that tomorrow is not another holiday from work), don’t you sometimes crave to feel that giddy sensation of power and control once more, if only fleetingly, as the brave new year grinds down daily into history?

Don’t you wonder if there’s even a single idea for self-improvement that’s realistic enough to survive until at least Valentine’s Day?

Don’t you wonder if there’s such a thing as an impervious dream, one that doesn’t crumple at the first sign of misfortune or duress?

Don’t you wonder if this will be the year when the field of String Theory in quantum physics is indeed proven to be the missing link between Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the realization of a Unified Field Theory?

Okay, scratch that last one.

If you long for realistic self-improvement strategies, you’re not alone.

This year, I’m banking on the concept of “Think small.” (Last year, I banked on the concept of “Think again,” but that’s another story entirely.)

As a result, rather than starting 2006 with a bushel of resolutions so grandiose that they’ll only be discarded week by week like slightly rancid banana peels, I’m starting small and adding on gradually.

And when I say “small,” I mean small.

In January, for instance, I have pledged to spend at least five minutes a day performing some task that will not benefit me or anyone else immediately, but only in the long run.

Last night, as an example, when I unloaded all the Tupperware bowls from the dishwasher, I did not crudely jam them into the high kitchen cabinet above the oven where they would fall out on our heads at some future date, as is my habit.

Instead, I actually dragged a stepladder up from the basement, emptied the high cabinet of various debris and varmint carcasses and threw away the six grungy, orphaned pieces of storage-ware that lacked either bottoms or lids and were apparently placed there at some point during the Civil War.

Which, by chance, exactly made room for the good Tupperware to sit in carefully arranged ranks for future use, the big bowls in back and the smaller ones in front, a home economics teacher’s dream.

Not to brag.

What to do tonight, for an encore?

It’s too soon to say. Necessity is the mother of invention, though (or as an alternate version goes, “Necessity is a mother”) and if inspiration doesn’t strike before bedtime I’ll have to improvise.

A similarly manageable personal resolution to add to my plate for February is just a distant dream, at this point. Much less March, April, and…whatever they call those other months, nowadays. Why borrow trouble?

Or as Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” I’m fairly sure we’re told somewhere, probably in the Book of Thessalonians or the Book of Titus, that this applies equally to New Year’s resolutions. But I’ll have to look it up to be certain.

(The only verse whose source I know for sure is the one that Lewis Grizzard used to quote, from Leviticus: “Thou shalt not put sugar in thine cornbread.”)

In the meantime, I’m taking 2006 day by day.

And if this does turn out to be the big year when Einstein is finally able to say, “I told you so!” then that’ll just be icing on the cake.

In memory of Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Can poetry be prophecy? We should hope so...

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

--Langston Hughes



(Thanks to Tristesse at firedoglake.com for the quote)

Spirituality versus Religion

Much food for thought in this quote of the day from filmmaker Oliver Stone:

"Organized religion is for people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been to hell."

The Death of Fiction?

One morning back in 1991, I woke up and turned on NPR’s “Morning Edition” news broadcast and learned that the Soviet Union had just been dissolved.

Ordinarily, this would be really good news. The only problem was, at that point I had been getting up long before daylight every morning for almost five years, to work on the manuscript of a novel before I had to be at my office job. It was a long fantasy novel, about a group of Tibetan monks with psychic powers who had been entrusted with staving off the coming Apocalypse. And of course the Apocalypse, as we all knew back then, would come in the form of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

But on that day in 1991, after five years of hard work, I found out that the Apocalypse had been canceled. Talk about mixed emotions.

So the very next morning, I went back to the drawing board...rewriting the book from scratch. I can testify that spending cold winter mornings before daylight trying to imagine a different way for the world to end is not exactly a prescription for good mental health. It would be almost four more years before the new version of the novel was finished and on the bookshelf.

So imagine my dismay recently, while my new book of fiction is on the publisher’s printing press, when I open up the New York Times Book Review and see an article saying that fiction is dead. It was an interview with author V.S. Naipaul, and here’s what he said, exactly, about fiction:

“That business of making up narratives, making up stories, has done its work. It was very dominant in the 19th century, in France and England and in Russia. And then there was nothing more for that form to do. Forms have to change.”

What that form should change to, Naipaul says, is nonfiction…if we want to be taken seriously, we should instead be writing only real facts, about the real world.

Now…understand that every few years, at least during my lifetime, somebody comes out and pronounces that the novel is dead. Or the short-story is dead. Or even, that reading is dead, what with video games or DVDs or whatever the high-tech buzz of the day is about. Naipaul, though, is a lot harder to ignore. Not only is he a Nobel Prize winner, he’s also written more than a dozen novels of his own, before he apparently kicked the habit.

And to be honest, I know where he’s coming from, on this. If the barbarians are marching toward your city, and you have the choice of buying either a newspaper or a good novel, any sane person will buy the newspaper. The news will tell you who, what, when, and where the barbarians are. What the news only pretends to do, though, is tell you why. Why do they want to kill us? What on earth are they thinking? What are they feeling? How are they like us, and how are they different?

For those answers, you have to look to a different type of story. As another Nobel Prize winner, William Faulkner, said in his Nobel acceptance speech: “There is only one kind of story worth telling, and that is the story of the human heart in conflict with itself.”

What Faulkner realized is that the barbarians are always marching toward your city—every city, everywhere—and they always will be. Only their names change. Ironic as it is, the larger truth of any breaking news is only accessible to us through an act of imagination. An act of art...by people who are willing to take that horrible journey into an imagined stranger’s heart.

If Naipaul is right, I ought to call my publisher and tell them to stop the presses. I ought to take 25 years worth of short fiction and rewrite it as a book of short facts…adding footnotes about the global economy and Middle East politics and the price of heating oil. But every fiction writer around the globe who will sit down tomorrow morning to a blank page and try to imagine a world is literally betting his or her life that Naipaul is mistaken.

One of those writers is a novelist from New York named Francine Prose, who wrote this in a letter to the Times about Naipaul’s comments:

“Few people, I assume, read ‘Romeo and Juliet’ for its insights into Veronese culture, or ‘Oedipus Rex’ for its grasp of Greek politics,” she writes. “Rather, in every era, in every place, men and women continue to be born, grow up, fall in love, marry or not, live in families or alone, bear children or not, grow old and die. And strangely, regardless of whether or not we approve, people stubbornly insist in finding these events as important as the clash between belief and unbelief in post-colonial societies.

“What fiction continues to offer,” Prose concludes, “is profound and detailed information about what it is like…any time, anywhere…to be a human being.”

I doubt that even William Faulkner could have said it better.

_________
(For an audio version of this post in MP3 format, click here)

The 'Quaint' Beauty of College Football

When you look in the dictionary under "sports fan" you'll never find a photograph of me, despite my stint many moons ago impersonating a sports editor for a newspaper at a time when I needed a job and it was the only one they had open.

That said, there's a certain spot in my heart that nothing else can touch but college football. And if there's a more sublime use for a sunny, springlike half-day of January than watching Alabama squeak past Texas Tech in the last four seconds of the Cotton Bowl, it's a pastime I'll have to learn about in paradise.

Why, then, this lingering core of sorrow, deep in my gut? What's happened to the sense of total joy I could feel 20 years ago...or even 10...for at least a few hours of a perfect day after a hard-fought glowing victory? I suspect it all comes down to the word "sportsmanship."

Call me naive, but when I see a strapping young kid lay a bone-jarring tackle on an opposing team's lineman, then watch the tackler linger for a few seconds to be sure the downed man is okay, even reach out an arm to help him back to his feet, I'm not immune from shedding a few tears. I guess it's the idealistic notion that even a sport with violence at its very heart can be played within gentlemanly rules--played for the love of a fair contest, rather than just for spite of an opponent.

In that sense, college football hasn't changed. No matter how physically imposing you are as a player, if you try to cheat--or even if you just act like a doofus, by doing a cheap end-zone dance to symbolically rub the other side's nose in the dirt after you've scored on them--a whistle immediately blows and there's a penalty to be paid for your behavior. Identical and unchanging rules, enforced by the referees on David and Goliath alike. Character does count.

It's a wonderful fantasy, and (speaking of naive) we once could believe that such a system was not limited to a dozen or so Saturdays of the year on isolated swatches of green grass but actually represented what our country, above all other countries, stood for. No longer. If the people who now have control of the United States government can unilaterally decide that the Geneva Conventions of Armed Conflict are "quaint" and "outdated," then they surely must hold the elaborate code of sportsmanship in college football beneath contempt.

This in itself would be disturbing enough, but roughly half of American adults who vote in elections apparently consider this brave new no-rules world to be a big improvement over the old-fashioned laws of enlightened civilizaton. Remember the outcry on radio talk shows, a while back, when an Olympics committee decided it was bad sportsmanship for spectators at the events to wave the flag theatrically and chant "USA" in a taunting manner when our side is winning? Communists! Traitors! the talk-show blusterers said. What's the use of winning if you can't strut like a rooster and symbolically rub the losers' noses in the dirt until they're bloody? God bless America, and devil take the hindmost.

That's the core of sorrow that I feel, every waking minute of every day and in my dreams besides. If there's any silver lining, it's that while this spirit of darkness holds sway in the halls of our government, a template still exists for hope and civilized behavior in a violent and threatening world--even if that fantasy is now limited to a dozen or so Saturdays a year on isolated swatches of grass across a nation that once held such great promise.