30 August 2003

There was a tide of emotion surging through the holy city yesterday. Thousands poured in from throughout the country, walking to the corner of the sacred shrine where their spiritual leaders were last seen. I'm not talking about the Shrine of Ali, either, as you well know. That was going on, of course. They will be angry and mourning in Iraq for three days over the murder of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim. This is going to require some serious intervention to manage the anger that Shiites feel all around the world. There will be not closure for them, since there is no body for the funeral. All that was readily identifiable were parts of the black turban that marked the ayatollah as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, and a couple of prayer books.

There was a tide of emotion back in my home state, too, one that occasionally runs into a schism as great as that between Sunni and Shia Islam. Thousands poured into the stadiums at E. Lansing and Ann Arbor to commemorate the ritual of the season opener. Michigan and Michigan State both beat up interstate rivals yesterday. OK, maybe they were just glorified high school teams, but that isn't the point. This is the tune-up game, a simulation that counts on the regular season. It is a hell of a lot better than having Notre Dame come to town first time out of the box. This allows the jitters and butterflies to fly away. They are just kids, after all, and that is why the college game is so exciting. It is about raw emotion. On the field and in the stands.

This is gong to be an interesting season. I am not used to following more than one team at a time, or rather, my usual Fall practice was to track my favorite two teams. Those being Michigan and whoever was playing Ohio State. It is hard to get into football since the weather is so hot, and since I bought the Tivo digital television recorder, I have got out of the habit of watching the television. It is a curious paradox, like the cooking I love to do. I spend an hour chopping and slicing and hours simmering. I put together a good meal and then lose interest in eating it. Knowing that the little video machine is recording 40 hours of top-quality shows I would actually watch if I sat down to do it removes any imperative to actually do so.

So the machine quietly records and I go on with the rest of my life.

Saturday, I walked the dog, who is visiting me for the long weekend, and tried to fit roller-blading and swimming between the thunderstorms and regular chores. I honestly spaced out the season opener. At one point I even knew that I should be drinking in front of a TV someplace and shouting, but maybe the twelve-step program is wokring. The dog and I hit the dry-cleaner and Fort Myer early. I was attempting to not to sweat right through my shirt and failing miserably while the dog suffered in his fur coat, tongue lolling. I had a long chat with a colleague there while the dog panted. It did not occur to me that the emotional season of the year was starting. My sons are both at college and both were going to Big Ten football games. It took me years to get over the rush of emotion over Football Saturday. If we lost, I would cower in bed, refusing to look at the newspaper, believing that the results had changed over night. I would look askance at the Sports section over my eggs, bile and anger rising at the timerity of paper to report the humiliation of defeat. In the end, I discovered the answer was to give up the paper and mange my anger by channeling it into something constructive.

Which is how I missed tailback Chris Perry piling up a career-best 232 yards rushing. He scored twice as my No. 4-ranked Michigan rambled to a 45-7 thrashing of Central Michigan. Classes haven't started yet, and I know my son was there in the stadium they call the Big House, big as life. Coach Lloyd Carr has got himself a sweet schedule this year. I mean, really, the Central Michigan Chippewas? It is not fair, even if Central got a fat payday for being a punching bag in Ann Arbor. Perry carried 22 times and had touchdown runs of 11 and 26 yards, while quarterback John Navarre threw for 245 yards, including scoring strikes of six and 48 yards to Braylon Edwards. The Wolverines ran up 615 yards total offense, 342 of them on the ground and 273 through the air. Nice balance. I like that in an offense. Balance.

So it begins, another season. I going to have to get around to programming the Tivo to look for Michigan or Michigan State football. It does not feel like football weather and I am not in the habit yet of finding the game on the cable line-up and hunkering down for three hours in the afternoon to watch the games. It is going to have to cool off a little before I am ready. Big Blue is ranked just behind the Ohio State Buckeyes, both of them in the top five. The Bucks are defending national champions. Michigan starts the 2003 campaign having appeared in 79 consecutive straight top 25 Associated Press polls, the longest streak in the nation. Nebraska held the record before that and there was not a dry eye in the house when they dropped off the list last year. Those people are really emotional about their Cornhuskers and naturally enough we hate them. I was in Omaha to see the newspapers, black bordered like something had passed away. I could not resist a grin. The whole state required Grief Counseling and some significant intervention on the anger management front.

Meanwhile, My younger son is about to embark on the long emotional road of being a Big Ten fan. Not on a casual basis. He now is an actual Spartan. Oh, he and his brother are going to be at each other's throats every year from the football season opener to the end of the NCAA basketball tournament. 72,9232 other fans showed up at Spartan Stadium to help his baptism. The game marked the 27th-consecutive sellout in Spartan Stadium and the (35th of the last 40 games.) It was not a bad start for him as an emotional participant. He saw senior quarterback Jeff Smoker roll up 321 yards of total offence and become the MSU career total offense leader at 5,756 yards, surpassing Ed Smith (1976-78) at 5,556. With 324 yards passing, he also became the career passing yardage leader. They are famous for burning things after victories at East Lansing. Normally old couches and the like. It was a squeaker, though, MSU pulling it out 26-21, and Munson the Western QB actually outperformed Smoker. There was no report of widespread rioting after the game on the radio, but I don't read the paper anymore so maybe I missed it.

It was a season opener elsewhere, too. Adrienne T. Samen was in court last week to plead guilty to a reduced charge of creating a public disturbance. The press has been calling her "Bridezilla." She is 18, and accordingly was only fined fined $90. Police responded to her wedding reception after she became enraged when the restaurant closed the bar. She began throwing things, including wedding cake and gifts, and then exited the party where police later found her , police said. Samen left the restaurant, and police found her walking down the road in her wedding gown. I suppose that is comforting, considering the alternative, but when the cops tired to take her away she kicked the door and window of the police cruiser and tried to bite an officer. She called the cops ignorant pigs and accused them of damaging her wedding ring. The cops responded that the bride removed the rig and hurled it to the ground.

Judge Patricia Swords fined Bridezilla the ninety bucks and ordered her to pay for the broken glass at the restaurant. She also suggested Samen seek substance abuse and anger management counseling, saying "This behavior does not bode well for the well-being of your marriage."

Been there, done that.

The groom was there in court, God bless him. He is three years older than Adrienne and is a Marine reservist. He just got back from a six month deployment to Iraq, which says to me he saw the part before and after the conclusion of major ground combat. He and Bridezilla had eloped before he shipped out and Adrienne wanted a bigger ceremony once he came home. Bridezilla says she will tell her side of the story next month on Sharon Osbourne's television talkshow. Sharon is the wife of heavy metal music star Ozzy Osbourne who used to bite the heads off bats or other small mammals. He has been to anger management and is supposed to be much better now. I am going to program it on the Tivo to record it so I don't have to watch it.

Bridezilla's husband isn't the only one just back from Iraq. A friend sent me some remarks by Judge Don Walters, a federal judge who was part of a 12 man team the government sent to evaluate the state of the Iraqi justice system. His remarks are interesting in the context of the national expression of anger. He said the reality of the mission there is not being told by the media. He had been against the war, strongly against it, but what he saw convinced him it had been the right thing to do. Saddam and his boys were thugs and criminal of the worst order, and the thing they did and the graveyards they filled justified the overthrow of the regime completely. He thought the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction was irrelevant. He summed it up by saying that:

"….our way of life is a threat to theirs…. They fear the modern world is about to run over them, destroying family life as they know it, educating and freeing their women, forbidding honor killing...coca colas, jeans, lack of parental respect and respect for the old ways and religion. And to defend their way of life and their religion, they will die with the same fervor with which the Christians marched to the lions. In their fear of western life, some will fight and kill us; but I remain convinced that the majority want a secular society and the best that the west has to offer."

I think he is right. The Iraqis may just need to get some intervention for anger management. I was talking to General Bob over at Fort Myer yesterday, right around the kick-off time I ignored and before roller-blading and the onset of the heavy thunderstorms. Bob is one of the Deputies over at the Veteran's Administration. He has been retired from the military for a few years and in retirement was my opposite number when I worked for the Department. We normally meet in the Produce section of the Commissary Saturday morning to squeeze the melons, releasing tension and debriefing the events of the week in our respective government organizations. It was therapy of a sort, watching the people shop, standing there like a Couple Mr. Whipple's squeezing rolls of Charmin toilet paper

This morning, though, we ran into each other at the Gas Station/Class Six Store. What with the situation in Iraq, gas has hit an all-time high. The long-term government contracts enable us to get a significantly lower price on post, and with the liquor store right there, it is just as necessary a stop as the produce section. The VA is a trip. I was trying to open up some doors and establish relationships with them because of their role in procuring and packaging several of the pharmaceutical stockpiles, both their own and the strategic one we managed through the Center for Disease Control out of Atlanta. VA is an astonishing organization. It was built to accommodate 12 million of us vets on demobilization from World War II and have hospitals literally everywhere. That means the VA has strong Congressional support, and now their mission is eternal, even if there are only a few hundred thousand vets to take care of.

Bob expressed some dismay that I had left the government. I assured him that I had completed a complete anger management course and had terminated my subscription to the Washington Post. I told him I intended to be fully engaged in all the issues we worked, whether I was at the Department or not. We could continue to squeeze the melons in the produce section of the Commissary and try to avoid thinking about who the Wolverines were playing that day. We could work out our frustrations that way. Then I suggested that he buy one of those Tivo units.

"Bob," I said "Tivo is the first step to quitting television altogether."

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra