06 January 2008

Running the Route



It is morning here in this part of America, still dark, and the moisture from the sky is the same that was over Three wish I could tell you that I was frantically clicking back and forth between the double-headers late yesterday. It was a good line-up: the 'Skins were out in Seattle, taking on the Seahawks, and later the Jacksonville Jags had the shoot-out with the Steelers in Pittsburgh.

There are intense feelings in all four cities about the teams involved, and I extrapolate only a little. I could feel it everywhere I went in the afternoon. The staff at The Forest Dry Cleaners was in burgundy football jerseys, just as were many shoppers at the Commissary at Fort Myer.

It is quite remarkable that we put so much emotion into something that in the great scheme means so much less than say, a flat tax program, or war.

But no matter. I am a believer in Free Will, and if my hand chose Channel 4 rather than Channel 7 all by itself, it was hardly the intervention of the divine.

That is not the case with the Benedictine Monastic Order. They are the veritable poster-order for the influence of the divine on the world, and Father Jon DeFelice, the Dean of Saint Anslem's College in Manchester, New Hampshire. He ensured that his school was front-and-center in the struggle of the Endless Campaign.

The Benedictines founded Saint Anselm in 1889 to carry out an educational charter that dates to the days when Imperial Rome still stood. Manchester is also the home of the cantankerous Union Leader newspaper, whose influence is so outsized in respect to its circulation. That, in turn, is (or was) linked to the place of New Hampshire in the order of the primaries that made the little state of such outsized importance every four years.

The college has an impressive performing arts facility known as the Dana Center, after the family that donated it, and that is where the double-header debate was held.

Yes. St. Anselm's also has a football team, and no, they did not do that well this year. They might have known what was coming before the first debate was held at the Dana Center on campus last June. The Hawks were going to go 0-10 for the season, bottom of the Northeast 10 Conference, and team and staff were going to be safe and comfortable in front of their television sets along with the rest of us in this chill January afternoon.

The boys at the State Department rental house across the street from Big Pink had been whooping and hollering all afternoon getting ready for the game. The air was filled with footballs over the street between them and us. It did not settle down until they moved the keg indoors and the game coverage began.

The Skins and Seahawks kicked off a few minutes before the Republicans did at the Dana Center. From what I hear, Mitt Romney and John McCain disagreed sharply on subjects including drug companies, amnesty for illegal immigrants and campaign ad accuracy. The Redskins started sluggish, and the Seahawks put up a touchdown and two field goals in the first three quarters.

The Skins were turning it around as the game entered the fourth quarter, and I was filled with buoyant optimism- by God, they were a team of destiny this year!

After the murder of hard-hitting safety Sean Taylor, the team had become filled with a unifying sense of purpose and mission. They ran the tables on their last four regular season games, and looked unstoppable against the hated Cowboys last week.

The Skins were winning at the magical moment when the Republicans had finished savaging each other, and the top four Democratic candidates emerged from the wings. The presumptive next leader of the Free World was somewhere among them, unless there is someone who is going to come off the bench and sweep them away. The crowd responded with wild applause at the momentary display of civility and cordiality.

I was concentrating on the performance Replacement Quarterback Todd Collins drove the team for two quick touchdowns, putting them up by one, and on the kick-off, the strange winds of the storm over Seattle grabbed the ball, holding it motionless in space, and then dropping it yards in front of the waiting receiver, where it bounced completely over his head to be retrieved by a slashing Redskin special teams player.

It is one of those bad breaks for a professional, since there was nothing he could have done about the wild bounce, except to stand in astonishment and dismay. It seemed completely clear that the Redskins were going to capitalize on the mischance, and go up by eight.

They didn't. They blew three plays from the ten, and missed a chip-shot field goal from the 30. The Democrats, by this time, were slugging it out themselves. Hillary was treating Iowa like a bad bounce, and as a professional, was practicing a slashing offense against an agile Barak Obama.

Then Todd Collins, the 36-year-old Cinderella Redskins QB who had not started a game in ten years before answering the call late in the season, finally three an interception. Receiver Santana Moss put a juke on defensive back Marcus Trufant, and it didn't work. He gave up on the route, not knowing that Collins had already launched the ball to the place where he was supposed to have been.

It was an embarrassing moment for a professional. Trufant waited patiently, caught the ball unopposed, and ambled 78 yards for the score.

You have to run the route to completion, since that is the professional thing to do. With the interception, it was all over, though there was more to come.

The magical season was over for the Skins, and then there was a bridge show to hype the next game. The ex-players were there to provide their commentary, and like the fact that the Catholic Church had sponsored the presidential debate, the fact that they were all African American went completely without remark.

The action cut to Heinz Field, for those of us that stayed with football. You may recall that the Heinz fortune, which passed to a widow, bankrolled John Kerry's run for the White House, the one that sank under the rancor of a war that had been over a long time. The new stadium in Pittsburgh stands near where the old one did at Three Rivers, where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers join to form the majestic Ohio.

They say the Democrats were shouting and waving fingers at each other while the yellow towels were swirling in the stadium. It was curious that amid the recriminations about health care and a strange triangulation of Edwards and Obama against Senator Clinton, all of them said they would take military action to destroy Osama bin Laden, even without the permission of Pakistan, provided there is reliable intelligence on the terrorist's location.

My man Bill Richardson did pretty well in staying out of the anger pattern, and that is in accordance with a come-from-behind strategy that could couple his ethnicity and experience to replace an Obama melt-down.

The new team, the Jacksonville Jags, put it to the Steelers, who have all the experience in the world. That is what is driving Hillary crazy, and Mitt, too. Everyone is tired of the legacy or the last two Administrations. Talking about experience is not going to cut it this time, not Mitt's business acumen nor Hillary's rigorous preparation and attention to detail.

I think it is going to come down to something basic in the American psyche, one that Ronald Reagan was able to channel so effectively. It is the American Dream that someone will clean up the toxic partisan mess in Washington, and that we will move ahead as one people, resolute in fairness and justice.

That is absurd, of course, and we whores in Washington are too far gone to be brought back. There will have to be a thorough house cleaning for anything to change measurably.

As the people, though, we believe in the most astonishing things. If we run the route hard, and never give up, we can drive on to victory.

This is about electing, not governing. That is when running the route to completion gets really important.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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