(Spartans QB Andrew Maxwell drops back to pass in the 17-16 squeaker win over the TCU Horned Toads. Photo Matt Kartozian/USA Today Sports.)
It was a good Saturday down at the farm. The skies cleared and the dusting of snow was gone. I shopped for local food at Croftburn Market, joined the local health club and felt pretty good about being in the country.
The Spartans won a squeaker over the Texas Christian University Horned Toads, and I lurched into Sunday tapping my toe as the afternoon games rolled on, settling the line-up for the playoffs. How did this season get so far so fast? That was the whole year- a blur.
By kickoff, the Redskins knew they had to win to make the playoffs. The Monsters of the Midway had vanquished Detroit in a smash-mouth game that brought back the memories of the old Black and Blue Division of the old NFL. That made victory the only way to the playoffs for the once-Deadskins. No wild card, and the hated Cowboys had to be beaten on the field.
I guess they did. The intense interest in the rallying ‘Skins (remember, they started 3-6) had caused the kickoff to be delayed until 8:05 PM at Fedex Field, and I was sleeping peacefully on the red sofa in the living room at Refuge Farm. I had to look it up in the morning, as I tried to deal with New Year’s Eve. Damn, this is an exciting team with some dynamic young men. A good weekend all around. Then I yawned.
It is customary to look backward on this last day of a year that was breathtaking in scope and amazing in trajectory. It featured every emotion possible in the human experience- and in Technicolor.
But you know what? It just makes me tired to think about it all.
I appreciate your forbearance through the process of death, an endless romance that traveled beyond the grave, the mundane details of closing out earthly affairs, the sale of real property, mountains of memories, wheelchairs, physical therapy and emotional elections.
We are standing on the edge of the budget cliff, which will arrive this week, and which we appear to be committed to leaping off in some bizarre Washington suicide pact.
On the up side, I did manage to fix that broken drawer in the antique folding table in the great room of the farm, and I can walk again, so I guess you have to agree that this was a great year.
I think I will take a page from the Congressional playbook: I am not going to worry about tomorrow until it happens. And then, I suppose, all the mysteries will be revealed.
Well, not all of them, of course. But I got a taste of some of what is to come on the OpEd pages of the venerable New York Times.
“As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions…Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.”
(Professor Louis Michael Seidman, noted scholar and windbag. Photo Georgetown University.)
The words are from a Georgetown professor who ought to know better. His name is Louis Michael Seidman, and he is something called the “Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law” at Georgetown. His legal training at the University of Chicago and his Juris Doctorate from that pesky old Harvard University, just like President Obama.
His credentials are impeccable, which goes to show you that idiots can come with great pedigrees. I am no scholar of the founding documents, though I keep a copy of the Declaration and the Constitution around for easy reference. They are much easier to understand than something like the Affordable Care Act.
As I read them, it appears clear that the overarching intent of those old dead white guys was to state plainly that our rights come from Divine Providence, not from the knuckleheads on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Then, to make sure that the knuckleheads got it, they called them out specifically in the Bill of Rights.
They cannot be taken away by Professor Seidman, or anyone else who isn’t God herself.
I had a terse exchange with an old shipmate about that. He reminded me we swore oaths to defend the Constitution, and that while we were retired from active service, it still applied. “Enemies foreign and domestic,” he pointedly reminded me.
So, without getting into this too far, I think it is going to be a hell of a 2013. Imagine it topping 2012! Damn!
At least the Spartans and the Skins won. That is something, anyway.
Happy New Year!
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com