(Defending World Champ Cardinals celebrate the end of the Nationals pennant drive. AP Photo Nick Wass.)

“The question of how baseball could be so cruel to this city may be answered some day. It existed in horrible form in the nation’s capital for decades, and then it vanished for 33 years. It came back gnarled and wretched for seven more seasons, only to yield to this blissful summer, to the moment Friday past midnight when Drew Storen stood on the mound at chilled Nationals Park and, with two outs in the ninth inning, threw 13 pitches that could have moved the Washington Nationals four wins from the World Series.”

– Adam Kilgore, reporting in the Washington Post this morning.

I already burned up the keyboard this morning doing an analysis on what might have happened if all that stimulus cash thrown at green technology had been directed elsewhere. Like us.

As Smokin’ Joe Biden pointed out pithily the other evening, even Paul Ryan asked for some stimulus on behalf of his constituents, like that wasn’t his job. Joe was awesome, in the same way a drunk ex-brother-in-law might be, before one of those uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinners.

The mantra of the campaign, as we stumble toward The Day, is “the lies.” I can’t sort it out- there are so many of them, and the word itself, uttered at increasing decibels and accompanied by rolling eyes and maniacal laughter, seems to substitute for rational discourse. So, I am going to put that aside.

I don’t use the Washington Post for much these days- I dropped my hard-copy subscription years ago when the cheerleading seemed to jump over the OpEd line and get entrenched in what had been the hard-news side of the press room.

Not that it ever was, really. Politics is a tough business with a lot of high-elbows and cheap shots, and has been since the beginning. Harry Truman observed famously that “if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.”

Actually, he had been saying that long before he became President. When he was in charge of the War Contracts Investigating Committee in the Senate, looking at war profiteering issues, he used the phrase. When he became Chief Executive he updated it to refer to the grilling of his appointees by rambunctious Senate Republicans. In 1949, he said: “I’ll stand by [you] but if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

I like cooking, and I can deal with the heat in there, even if the hurly-burly of modern politics in the wired age doesn’t appeal to me much. As an aside to the Truman reference, the period has a grip on me at the moment.

I am taking a break from blood-soaked modern Western mysteries and am reading the fascinating story of the Eisenhower administration’s development over the ‘boring” eight years of the 1950s. The title of “Ike’s Bluff,” by Evan Thomas refers to the way Mr. Eisenhower handled the genie-in-the-bottle of his day: atomic weapons.

Though the story comes across as a sort of Restoration Comedy of manners compared with modern politics, it features some amazing moments. Some of them include National Security Council meetings where serious discussion of nuking the Red Chinese came up more than once.

The times may have been antique, but the issues were real. Ike turns out, in this depiction, anyway, to have been a pacifist. Maybe only someone who has been responsible for the prosecution of an enterprise that was truly horrible can judge the consequences of pursuing a course of action that could result in something even worse.

Thomas claims that Ike’s refusal to take the nuclear option off the table made it credible, though he never would have exercised the option. Its very existence was deterrent enough, so he never disclosed if he was really willing to use The Bomb.

I don’t know about that. I do know this: it is going to be a sunny day, with temperatures in the upper sixties. The forecast for tomorrow has changed, for the better. Time to head for the farm. There are more things to consider than the change of the season, and the season of the witch that we are living together.

The Nats lost, darn them. They were so freaking close. They had the best record in Baseball, and they won the National League East.

Adam Kilgore wrote about it in the Post this morning, since the game did not end until I had been asleep for hours. Adam is a veteran reporter now, and his words this morning are lyrical.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nationals/nationals-lose-9-7-cardinals-advance-to-nlcs/2012/10/13/d1aabce2-14d7-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html

The only political implication in Adam’s piece is that we will have way too much time to listen to the nonsense. There are 24 days to go until we get to take the ribbon off the box that contains the answer to the riddle of our collective future.

The Nats don’t have one, at least until the start of Spring Training next year.

Hope springs eternal, naturally, but I think this afternoon I am just going to look at the colors of the trees on the back pastures at Refuge Farm and just not worry about it.

Go Tigers.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com