"...mixed blood, a rebellious nature and an over-riding poetic obsession, is not easily outgrown."
Robert Graves
Friday, February 22, 2008
Thursday, March 22, 2007
"Thus, as children, you experienced two of the most important things men ever know - the wonder of life and the wonder of the universe, the wonder of life from within the wonder of the universe. More important, you knew them not from books, not from lectures, but simply from living among them. Most important, you knew them with reverence and awe - that reverence and awe that has died out of the modern world and been replaced by man's monkeylike amazement at the cleverness of his own inventive brain."
Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers
Quote of the Year
"I worry about dumbing down the schools to the current level of politics in the adult world."
- SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts
- SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Keith Jackson as Thomas Wolfe
Melville was said to have kept a motto engraved in wood on his writing desk - “Always remain true to the dreams of thy youth.” Being inclined to mischief and unable to preserve, at least for long, much in the way of highbrow affectation, I've mutated a few consonants to suggest that remaining true to the "teams" of thy youth deserves as much or more adherence. Certainly the sports teams of our youth are sublimely imbricated with the dreams of youth, and equally deserving of lifelong tenure amidst our inventories of the intangible. In our family the sport was football, and to this day, every time I hear Keith Jackson’s voice calling the play-by-play of an Autumn classic, the march of time’s onslaught is slightly but perceptibly knocked back on its grim heals. And the fight songs of our favorite boyhood college teams can still conduct as much emotional voltage as The Battle Hymn of the Republic. These passkeys to the memories and sensations of childhood are a divine gift to be savored sparingly but fully; they are the anodynes that bestir weakened spirits, bind families, and off-set life’s inevitable losses. In whatever form they take, from the lofty to the mundane, they are consolations, wellsprings from whence the transcendent portion of our selves first began to take shape, and can be re-visited if one is not lacking the will and the simple courage of belief and imagination. Well, that may sound a bit highfalutin' but Melville was hardly a miser with language either and if you're speaking of the soul, then why, as they say, be dull?
My father heads East every Autumn for an annual visit that reconvenes our family in the house he grew up in. A born New Englander, his Naval duty in the immediate post Korea years stationed him for a while in southern California, and he still speaks with joyful recollection of first sighting from the deck of a destroyer the blanched heliocentric color spectrum with its azure bounds that the southwestern coastline makes glisten only to the eye of the poet. He was in love with it then and remains so now, but in some of us the onset of early adulthood tripped an internal navigational signal to return to New England, where the lives of a dozen generations had planted an invisible beacon. So in an inversion of the Biblical parable, he himself returns to the homestead to be welcomed by the sons, and the fatted calf in these reunion feasts takes the immaterial form of each and every exercise and gesture, from the formal to the trivial, that intimate of shared memories from the family’s sapling seasons. Necessarily then, among other pleasant doings that have over time been promoted to ritual, we spend a Saturday afternoon watching a football game rivalry we’ve been following for my whole life and two-thirds of his – USC vs. Notre Dame. And what would appear to the uninitiated as a slug-like, couch-borne, passive reception of cathode ray images, burning fewer calories than a cherrystone clam snoozing in the mudflats, is actually the humming horsepower of earnest memories working in tandem to retrieve the euphoric comfort of childhood re-visited.
The house itself is a couple hundred years old – an 18th century farmhouse set prudently back from the ocean by pragmatic Yankees whose calculus of domestic utility attached no value to the beachfront tropism of the land’s current seasonal dwellers. And yet the view from the front windows across the acres of sandplain grasslands to the distant blue line of ocean is more mystical and rapturous than a closer proximity would allow. A mildly curving dirt road leads away and toward the horizon from a small nexus of likewise imperfectly linear paths that again evoke a sense of evolving over time out of function, rather than planning. So maybe the old settlers had more aesthetic sensibility than we give them credit for, or, more likely, the imprint of their simple, uncomplicated practicality upon the terrain left its own artistic beauty beyond what a more pre-meditated design could fathom or include. My father’s side of the family were not among those earlier pioneering sorts, and yet their arrival on these grounds in the latter 19th century goes far enough back in time to allow a comfortable aura of family legacy about the place. And it’s a place where, as a guest once noted “the veil seems awfully thin,” referring to that spiritual partition between what is and what was; there’s a sense, if one is attuned to such things, that you’re sharing the space with more than the merely material. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."There are black and white photographs on the walls of beloved, of well and not-so-well remembered forebears in military uniforms and in college football team poses going back almost a century, including Harvard’s 1919 squad (the last year, incidentally, that they played in the Rose Bowl and won a national championship). Similar photographs of succeeding generations appear incrementally more contemporary, but the themes remain the same. And there’s a memento of my grandfather’s autographed by Army’s Heisman Trophy winner, Glenn Davis. So it's a wonderfully apt place for this family re-union ritual with Dad, who had my Irish-twin brother and me practicing fumble recovery drills on the front lawn at ages two and three - if you can walk you can play, after all; if you can touch it, you can catch it.
I was technically born a Navy brat, I’m told, but my father’s transition from active duty to reserve officer occurred so soon thereafter that I wear that dignified mantle uneasily. The transition from military to professional civilian life was, however, incidental in its ramifications as compared to the cultural shift from New Englander to Southern Californian (a change of allegiance that my Mother never entirely accustomed herself to, and I suspect at this moment she’s in Heaven making an affectionate but smart-alecky comment on this matter at Dad’s expense). I remember early on, my father, and our only cousin who had made the same migration, sitting before the black & white TV and exhorting Notre Dame to victory. It made sense at the time; we were Irish and Catholic and from the older part of the country, as it were (and it was pointless for him to follow the gridiron exploits of his own alma mater; Harvard, in the years subsequent to his undergrad days, had become as inept at football as it had at producing military officers), but we kids were adapting to the environs we were growing up in, and that meant the best team in the nation was the University of Southern California. Our Pop Warner teams were named and modeled after the Trojans, and everyone seemed at most two degrees removed from at least one storied local hero who had or was going to play there. As a child, going to the LA Coliseum to watch a college game was as eye-popping a spectacle as even the broad adventurous vistas of boyhood allow of. Slowly, the partisan base took a wild swing within the newly gerrymandered household precincts; we all pulled for Joe Theismann in his scrappy sophomore debut subbing for Terry Hanratty, but that was the last time. Clannish loyalties being what they are, we might still cheer for the Fighting Irish against other opponents, but for one day every year Notre Dame was neither Irish nor Catholic, but merely belligerent pagan usurpers to be beaten from the ramparts and abjectly garrisoned within their godforsaken South Bend hamlet. And even as we grew towards adulthood, friends and cousins would remark that whenever “the boys” were on the phone, regardless of how removed we might be geographically or whatever other matters demanded attention, any phone conversation would inevitably turn the to fortunes of USC.
Now, as it turns out, this past year the stars were aligning to make our annual autumn event ripe with millennial import. My father had turned 75, and, however against-the-grain it might be to his innate modesty and aversion to anything self-referential, that milestone merits celebration. USC, meanwhile, was looking to make history, with the longest winning streak in the country and the chance to become the first team ever to win a third consecutive national title. It was thought that Notre Dame was among the few teams that might knock them off; they had just broken the bank and hired a pedigreed NFL coach to renew the program’s glory days, and the game this year was on their home turf. The confluence of these circumstances offered me an opportunity to fashion for my Dad an intangible sort of birthday present, a chance to use a simple timeworn ritual to garland the consoling sensation of re-grouping and re-living the best moments of our shared times together. So I bought authentic SC jerseys for everyone in the family (#5, Reggie Bush, natch) and mailed them around the country in advance of travel plans. And though this is starting to sound like a lot of fuss, I had a core motivation for wanting my father to feel happy and within the comfortable palisades that familial rejuvenation accords, because my little brother, the kid, the baby, Pop Warner Trojan lineman and the apple of his parents’ eye, would not be able to attend our annual gathering; he’d be in a transport plane with his Army unit deploying to Iraq.
Teddy Roosevelt expressed poignantly the overwhelming burden of a father who knows his direction and example have lighted his own children’s path into combat. My Dad is the sort of affable stoic who has never had a bad day. College dormmates who answered the phone when he’d call would remark that his voice had an uncanny generic resemblance to that of a commercial jet pilot coming over the loudspeaker (“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, our left engine has just peeled off the wing in a gyroscoping fireball and the tail section dropped into Lake Erie, but otherwise it’s still a beautiful blue-sky day and we’re going to have you safely home in a jiffy.”) But having your youngest driving around the badlands of the Sunni Triangle would shatter the nerves of St. Francis himself, regardless of how serene a façade he was still able to project. (And he IS the master at that; my father would make Buddha look like a manic hypochondriac, or, for that matter, like Woody Allen, gulping down a quad espresso moments before discovering God really does exist - “Now, y-y-y-y-ou d-d-didn’t take any of that stuff s-s-s-seriously?! They were JOKES!!! And, the daughter/wife stuff, well…d-d-didn’t you see ‘Chinatown?’” It won an Oskah!!!)
My youngest brother grew up in the fashion of, what used to be called without irony, an archetypal middle class, All-American boy. The San Fernando Valley, for the uninitiated, bloomed to capacity in the post-war years as the land of Canaan for the Greatest Generation. In topology, it took shape as though Plato and Pythagoras had put their heads together and determined that the Ideal Form of “suburb” should be laid out with only 90 degree angles, and, as regards the overlay of architectural style, purvey a dizzying chaos reminiscent in its randomness of bumblebee flight. But it reflected the Southwest’s sunny and broadly egalitarian potential. And one could grow up there in an undramatic manner framed mostly by sanity and common sense, going to school and playing sports, running safely with the neighborhood peers until the streetlamps lit, and all in all develop into a whole human being, without much fuss or fanfare.When he turned 18, he enlisted in the military like his brother before him, and later used his Army Reserve status to help finance college at Cal State Northridge, “the biggest university you’ve never heard of,” in the apt phrasing of soldier/author Chuck Pfarrer. After graduation he began building a healthy career in aviation and law enforcement, and, then, while still in his twenties, and like tens of thousands of others, he left a home and a job and the manifold trappings of pleasant youthful living to serve overseas as his nation had asked, without whimper or hesitation. You’ve heard it before but it bears repeating; these youngsters are the backbone of America.
So there we were on this beautiful October afternoon in New England, settling in to watch the big game, conscious of using this long-enjoyed ritual to wrap a layer of ease around the family while the youngest was in air transport somewhere over the Atlantic. The game itself was…well, by near unanimous consensus among the national sportswriters, it was, though admittedly occurring only a half-decade into the new millenium, the “game of the century” thus far. Keith Jackson, performed the play-by-play. If there were a National Sports Broadcast Voice Laureate (as indeed there should be!) it would have to be conferred on this gentlemanly icon, with his trademark sonorous gravity and homespun narrative exclamations; “Whoa Nelly! That blitz came on like a jailhouse break!” His partner in the booth was Pat Haden, another local hero who had quarterbacked SC to the national title in ’74, which included along the way possibly the most humiliating defeat in Notre Dame history, a 55-24 stampede that obliterated the previously Number One ranked Irish 24-6 halftime lead (that one may have turned even Ara Parseghian into a black-hooded atheist). As it was, the omens were aligning in the firmament, and they weren’t wearing green.One of many symptoms of my premature curmudgeonliness, I’d always regarded what are no doubt benign references of the Notre Dame faithful to “Touchdown Jesus” as possibly sacrilegious and, at the least, vulgar and crass, so I savored perhaps more than the average fan that it was Matt Leinart, the kid from Mater Dei in Santa Ana, the largest Catholic High School west of Chicago, who said a silent, private prayer on the sidelines before taking the field and performing a miracle. On fourth and nine, with under a minute to play and backed up in their own territory, with the Notre Dame band and fans already poised to storm the field, he called an audible at the line, dropped into the pocket and lofted a perfect fade pass into double coverage for his rommate Dwayne Jarrett to carry 61 yards to the doorstep of the Irish goal line. Seconds later, after a false ending that had Irish fans storming the field in triumph, the clock was re-set for three remaining seconds and the gutsy kid from Santa Ana snuck the ball over the goal line for an SC victory with only zeros left on the clock.And there was my 75 year old Dad, jumping up and down in his SC football jersey with all the zany enthusiasm of a tweenie bird greeting the Beatles at Heathrow. A photo of him thusly attired was quickly packetized and captured in little brother’s cell phone soon after he landed in Kuwait for ingress to Iraq. It was the first thing that had made him smile since leaving home. Let no one doubt the comforting power of such pixilated totems of family and Americana when held in the hand of a young man entering a foreign, hostile land.
I have no notion of what it’s like to patrol a Dantean hell-scape, where dervishes seek to incinerate you or saw your head off out of sheer psychopathic hatred of your home and culture. But I strongly suspect it’s not fun. Many a sullen young cynic of the sort our universities mass produce with the industrial-era efficiency of General Motors, might do well to backpack their faux existential ennui through the side streets of Baghdad; it would more than likely rid them for good of the tendency for glib condescension towards the American bourgeoisie that has been the punch line of the dissipated elements in our culture for forty years now.The simple family-watching-a-football-game tableau I’ve tried to here conjure into descriptive form may seem quaint in our jaded world, and has undergone not a few amusing calamities of late. Yet in our collective clumsy grasping to re-capture confidence in the world outside our own domestic fences, perhaps imperfectly but fairly framed as the “family values” debate, we could benefit heartily from the clarifying medicine of memory, intuition and common sense. Liberal secularists, with their circus-clown flair for the hysterical over-reaction, would have us believe that only witch-burning Puritans would fear for their children’s scalded psyches after, for example, watching Janet Jackson’s de-bustiered boob leer, fish-eyed, into America’s living rooms during the Super Bowl. But I’m here to tell ya, as a full-fledged middle-aged adult, that that non-telegenic mammary with the metallic nipple piercing, like some surreal door-knocker from a Salvador Dali dreamscape (one could imagine it morphing into the visage of poor Marley’s ghost - “Ebeneeezer Scroooooge!!!”) perpetrated a retinal trauma on any sentient human who’s not wearing a Federally mandated tracking bracelet.
So how do we define reasonableness in the area of cultural self-restraint without the appearance of fundamentalist backsliding? How do we model the aesthetic environs for children that instill an apprehension of what’s good and decent? My own family… with allowance for the inevitable mis-steps, still adheres to the “God, Duty, Honor, Country” quartet, but that’s admittedly too retro to win over today’s sophisticates. So, I’d submit that hearkening back to the moments of joy in our own childhoods allows our intuition to divine those fundaments upon which a sane world rely. Now, if you’re the type for whom such nostalgia is the stuff of torturing small animals and your kindergarten peers, then, pardner, you’re hopeless, and might as well join up with the Taliban like John Walker Lind, or worse yet, begin blogging for “The Daily Kos.” But for the far vaster number of us not topping the team roster on Hell’s depth chart, who can still recall the joys of waking to summer light slanting through multi-paned bedroom windows (with the possibilities it betokened for an infinite day) and the comforting smell of their parents’ faces, then your intuition already knows what is innocent and what is good, and you have to defend that perimeter like it’s Christmas in Bastogne. Or something like that.
My father heads East every Autumn for an annual visit that reconvenes our family in the house he grew up in. A born New Englander, his Naval duty in the immediate post Korea years stationed him for a while in southern California, and he still speaks with joyful recollection of first sighting from the deck of a destroyer the blanched heliocentric color spectrum with its azure bounds that the southwestern coastline makes glisten only to the eye of the poet. He was in love with it then and remains so now, but in some of us the onset of early adulthood tripped an internal navigational signal to return to New England, where the lives of a dozen generations had planted an invisible beacon. So in an inversion of the Biblical parable, he himself returns to the homestead to be welcomed by the sons, and the fatted calf in these reunion feasts takes the immaterial form of each and every exercise and gesture, from the formal to the trivial, that intimate of shared memories from the family’s sapling seasons. Necessarily then, among other pleasant doings that have over time been promoted to ritual, we spend a Saturday afternoon watching a football game rivalry we’ve been following for my whole life and two-thirds of his – USC vs. Notre Dame. And what would appear to the uninitiated as a slug-like, couch-borne, passive reception of cathode ray images, burning fewer calories than a cherrystone clam snoozing in the mudflats, is actually the humming horsepower of earnest memories working in tandem to retrieve the euphoric comfort of childhood re-visited.
The house itself is a couple hundred years old – an 18th century farmhouse set prudently back from the ocean by pragmatic Yankees whose calculus of domestic utility attached no value to the beachfront tropism of the land’s current seasonal dwellers. And yet the view from the front windows across the acres of sandplain grasslands to the distant blue line of ocean is more mystical and rapturous than a closer proximity would allow. A mildly curving dirt road leads away and toward the horizon from a small nexus of likewise imperfectly linear paths that again evoke a sense of evolving over time out of function, rather than planning. So maybe the old settlers had more aesthetic sensibility than we give them credit for, or, more likely, the imprint of their simple, uncomplicated practicality upon the terrain left its own artistic beauty beyond what a more pre-meditated design could fathom or include. My father’s side of the family were not among those earlier pioneering sorts, and yet their arrival on these grounds in the latter 19th century goes far enough back in time to allow a comfortable aura of family legacy about the place. And it’s a place where, as a guest once noted “the veil seems awfully thin,” referring to that spiritual partition between what is and what was; there’s a sense, if one is attuned to such things, that you’re sharing the space with more than the merely material. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."There are black and white photographs on the walls of beloved, of well and not-so-well remembered forebears in military uniforms and in college football team poses going back almost a century, including Harvard’s 1919 squad (the last year, incidentally, that they played in the Rose Bowl and won a national championship). Similar photographs of succeeding generations appear incrementally more contemporary, but the themes remain the same. And there’s a memento of my grandfather’s autographed by Army’s Heisman Trophy winner, Glenn Davis. So it's a wonderfully apt place for this family re-union ritual with Dad, who had my Irish-twin brother and me practicing fumble recovery drills on the front lawn at ages two and three - if you can walk you can play, after all; if you can touch it, you can catch it.
I was technically born a Navy brat, I’m told, but my father’s transition from active duty to reserve officer occurred so soon thereafter that I wear that dignified mantle uneasily. The transition from military to professional civilian life was, however, incidental in its ramifications as compared to the cultural shift from New Englander to Southern Californian (a change of allegiance that my Mother never entirely accustomed herself to, and I suspect at this moment she’s in Heaven making an affectionate but smart-alecky comment on this matter at Dad’s expense). I remember early on, my father, and our only cousin who had made the same migration, sitting before the black & white TV and exhorting Notre Dame to victory. It made sense at the time; we were Irish and Catholic and from the older part of the country, as it were (and it was pointless for him to follow the gridiron exploits of his own alma mater; Harvard, in the years subsequent to his undergrad days, had become as inept at football as it had at producing military officers), but we kids were adapting to the environs we were growing up in, and that meant the best team in the nation was the University of Southern California. Our Pop Warner teams were named and modeled after the Trojans, and everyone seemed at most two degrees removed from at least one storied local hero who had or was going to play there. As a child, going to the LA Coliseum to watch a college game was as eye-popping a spectacle as even the broad adventurous vistas of boyhood allow of. Slowly, the partisan base took a wild swing within the newly gerrymandered household precincts; we all pulled for Joe Theismann in his scrappy sophomore debut subbing for Terry Hanratty, but that was the last time. Clannish loyalties being what they are, we might still cheer for the Fighting Irish against other opponents, but for one day every year Notre Dame was neither Irish nor Catholic, but merely belligerent pagan usurpers to be beaten from the ramparts and abjectly garrisoned within their godforsaken South Bend hamlet. And even as we grew towards adulthood, friends and cousins would remark that whenever “the boys” were on the phone, regardless of how removed we might be geographically or whatever other matters demanded attention, any phone conversation would inevitably turn the to fortunes of USC.
Now, as it turns out, this past year the stars were aligning to make our annual autumn event ripe with millennial import. My father had turned 75, and, however against-the-grain it might be to his innate modesty and aversion to anything self-referential, that milestone merits celebration. USC, meanwhile, was looking to make history, with the longest winning streak in the country and the chance to become the first team ever to win a third consecutive national title. It was thought that Notre Dame was among the few teams that might knock them off; they had just broken the bank and hired a pedigreed NFL coach to renew the program’s glory days, and the game this year was on their home turf. The confluence of these circumstances offered me an opportunity to fashion for my Dad an intangible sort of birthday present, a chance to use a simple timeworn ritual to garland the consoling sensation of re-grouping and re-living the best moments of our shared times together. So I bought authentic SC jerseys for everyone in the family (#5, Reggie Bush, natch) and mailed them around the country in advance of travel plans. And though this is starting to sound like a lot of fuss, I had a core motivation for wanting my father to feel happy and within the comfortable palisades that familial rejuvenation accords, because my little brother, the kid, the baby, Pop Warner Trojan lineman and the apple of his parents’ eye, would not be able to attend our annual gathering; he’d be in a transport plane with his Army unit deploying to Iraq.
Teddy Roosevelt expressed poignantly the overwhelming burden of a father who knows his direction and example have lighted his own children’s path into combat. My Dad is the sort of affable stoic who has never had a bad day. College dormmates who answered the phone when he’d call would remark that his voice had an uncanny generic resemblance to that of a commercial jet pilot coming over the loudspeaker (“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, our left engine has just peeled off the wing in a gyroscoping fireball and the tail section dropped into Lake Erie, but otherwise it’s still a beautiful blue-sky day and we’re going to have you safely home in a jiffy.”) But having your youngest driving around the badlands of the Sunni Triangle would shatter the nerves of St. Francis himself, regardless of how serene a façade he was still able to project. (And he IS the master at that; my father would make Buddha look like a manic hypochondriac, or, for that matter, like Woody Allen, gulping down a quad espresso moments before discovering God really does exist - “Now, y-y-y-y-ou d-d-didn’t take any of that stuff s-s-s-seriously?! They were JOKES!!! And, the daughter/wife stuff, well…d-d-didn’t you see ‘Chinatown?’” It won an Oskah!!!)
My youngest brother grew up in the fashion of, what used to be called without irony, an archetypal middle class, All-American boy. The San Fernando Valley, for the uninitiated, bloomed to capacity in the post-war years as the land of Canaan for the Greatest Generation. In topology, it took shape as though Plato and Pythagoras had put their heads together and determined that the Ideal Form of “suburb” should be laid out with only 90 degree angles, and, as regards the overlay of architectural style, purvey a dizzying chaos reminiscent in its randomness of bumblebee flight. But it reflected the Southwest’s sunny and broadly egalitarian potential. And one could grow up there in an undramatic manner framed mostly by sanity and common sense, going to school and playing sports, running safely with the neighborhood peers until the streetlamps lit, and all in all develop into a whole human being, without much fuss or fanfare.When he turned 18, he enlisted in the military like his brother before him, and later used his Army Reserve status to help finance college at Cal State Northridge, “the biggest university you’ve never heard of,” in the apt phrasing of soldier/author Chuck Pfarrer. After graduation he began building a healthy career in aviation and law enforcement, and, then, while still in his twenties, and like tens of thousands of others, he left a home and a job and the manifold trappings of pleasant youthful living to serve overseas as his nation had asked, without whimper or hesitation. You’ve heard it before but it bears repeating; these youngsters are the backbone of America.
So there we were on this beautiful October afternoon in New England, settling in to watch the big game, conscious of using this long-enjoyed ritual to wrap a layer of ease around the family while the youngest was in air transport somewhere over the Atlantic. The game itself was…well, by near unanimous consensus among the national sportswriters, it was, though admittedly occurring only a half-decade into the new millenium, the “game of the century” thus far. Keith Jackson, performed the play-by-play. If there were a National Sports Broadcast Voice Laureate (as indeed there should be!) it would have to be conferred on this gentlemanly icon, with his trademark sonorous gravity and homespun narrative exclamations; “Whoa Nelly! That blitz came on like a jailhouse break!” His partner in the booth was Pat Haden, another local hero who had quarterbacked SC to the national title in ’74, which included along the way possibly the most humiliating defeat in Notre Dame history, a 55-24 stampede that obliterated the previously Number One ranked Irish 24-6 halftime lead (that one may have turned even Ara Parseghian into a black-hooded atheist). As it was, the omens were aligning in the firmament, and they weren’t wearing green.One of many symptoms of my premature curmudgeonliness, I’d always regarded what are no doubt benign references of the Notre Dame faithful to “Touchdown Jesus” as possibly sacrilegious and, at the least, vulgar and crass, so I savored perhaps more than the average fan that it was Matt Leinart, the kid from Mater Dei in Santa Ana, the largest Catholic High School west of Chicago, who said a silent, private prayer on the sidelines before taking the field and performing a miracle. On fourth and nine, with under a minute to play and backed up in their own territory, with the Notre Dame band and fans already poised to storm the field, he called an audible at the line, dropped into the pocket and lofted a perfect fade pass into double coverage for his rommate Dwayne Jarrett to carry 61 yards to the doorstep of the Irish goal line. Seconds later, after a false ending that had Irish fans storming the field in triumph, the clock was re-set for three remaining seconds and the gutsy kid from Santa Ana snuck the ball over the goal line for an SC victory with only zeros left on the clock.And there was my 75 year old Dad, jumping up and down in his SC football jersey with all the zany enthusiasm of a tweenie bird greeting the Beatles at Heathrow. A photo of him thusly attired was quickly packetized and captured in little brother’s cell phone soon after he landed in Kuwait for ingress to Iraq. It was the first thing that had made him smile since leaving home. Let no one doubt the comforting power of such pixilated totems of family and Americana when held in the hand of a young man entering a foreign, hostile land.
I have no notion of what it’s like to patrol a Dantean hell-scape, where dervishes seek to incinerate you or saw your head off out of sheer psychopathic hatred of your home and culture. But I strongly suspect it’s not fun. Many a sullen young cynic of the sort our universities mass produce with the industrial-era efficiency of General Motors, might do well to backpack their faux existential ennui through the side streets of Baghdad; it would more than likely rid them for good of the tendency for glib condescension towards the American bourgeoisie that has been the punch line of the dissipated elements in our culture for forty years now.The simple family-watching-a-football-game tableau I’ve tried to here conjure into descriptive form may seem quaint in our jaded world, and has undergone not a few amusing calamities of late. Yet in our collective clumsy grasping to re-capture confidence in the world outside our own domestic fences, perhaps imperfectly but fairly framed as the “family values” debate, we could benefit heartily from the clarifying medicine of memory, intuition and common sense. Liberal secularists, with their circus-clown flair for the hysterical over-reaction, would have us believe that only witch-burning Puritans would fear for their children’s scalded psyches after, for example, watching Janet Jackson’s de-bustiered boob leer, fish-eyed, into America’s living rooms during the Super Bowl. But I’m here to tell ya, as a full-fledged middle-aged adult, that that non-telegenic mammary with the metallic nipple piercing, like some surreal door-knocker from a Salvador Dali dreamscape (one could imagine it morphing into the visage of poor Marley’s ghost - “Ebeneeezer Scroooooge!!!”) perpetrated a retinal trauma on any sentient human who’s not wearing a Federally mandated tracking bracelet.
So how do we define reasonableness in the area of cultural self-restraint without the appearance of fundamentalist backsliding? How do we model the aesthetic environs for children that instill an apprehension of what’s good and decent? My own family… with allowance for the inevitable mis-steps, still adheres to the “God, Duty, Honor, Country” quartet, but that’s admittedly too retro to win over today’s sophisticates. So, I’d submit that hearkening back to the moments of joy in our own childhoods allows our intuition to divine those fundaments upon which a sane world rely. Now, if you’re the type for whom such nostalgia is the stuff of torturing small animals and your kindergarten peers, then, pardner, you’re hopeless, and might as well join up with the Taliban like John Walker Lind, or worse yet, begin blogging for “The Daily Kos.” But for the far vaster number of us not topping the team roster on Hell’s depth chart, who can still recall the joys of waking to summer light slanting through multi-paned bedroom windows (with the possibilities it betokened for an infinite day) and the comforting smell of their parents’ faces, then your intuition already knows what is innocent and what is good, and you have to defend that perimeter like it’s Christmas in Bastogne. Or something like that.
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