The Democrats’ Gift Horse

The games congressmen play. These days it’s High Horse (AKA High Horse, High Horse, Now Who’s On Their High Horse?)

I have long enjoyed games myself. Growing up as an only child in a sick, sick, sick, (pretend I wrote it 13 times), family, often living in isolation, I became adept at what you could call the Meta-Game Game, also known as Now What Might I Want to Do? The idea of this game is to invent a game, then another game, then another game, until a death in the family occurs, hopefully not your own. At no time is it necessary to play the games invented. In fact, if you play one of them, you automatically lose at the meta level, and have to start all over.

Some of the best games I came up with had no rules or instructions. For example, Figure Out How To Walk On Air pretty much says it all in the name. The game consists in spending hour after hour trying to figure out how to walk on air. One day I made the mistake of actually playing a spinoff game called Figure Out How To Bounce A Ball Off Air, and broke a window.

Having become so good at entertaining myself in isolation, I tend to take that skill for granted. So I’m always a little surprised when I discover people who are incapable of ever playing quietly by themselves. People like ex-Congressman Mark Foley, for instance. This is a guy who will never be satisfied with an imaginary friend.

Foley was playing a fantastic game of High Horse. High Horse isn’t as sophisticated a game as the Meta-Game Game, but that doesn’t mean that great play isn’t possible. Foley’s move of chairing the congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, in between exploiting underaged former pages for minor real-time titillations and jollies on the internet, was extraordinary, and will surely go down in High Horse history. For anything even close you have to go back to Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown in 1992.

Of course we’ve all been watching the entire Republican Party consistently win at High Horse for the past quarter century, ever since Reagan got even for that time Nixon fell off his. Their capture and ownership of the phrase “Family Values” continues to impress all of us, all the more so as their economic policies crush poor families.

Now the party that tried to force Clinton out of office for having extra-marital sex in the Oval Office and trying to keep it a secret is faced with charges of having a pedophile in their midst and trying to keep it a secret.

Now, I don’t know if you can necessarily say that Mark Foley is a pedophile. I mean, Jerry Lee Lewis married a thirteen-year-old girl. That was certainly something, wasn’t it? Did anyone call him a pedophile? Well, OK. But still, sixteen is practically ‘round the bend, when it comes to boys.

Anyway, for Hastert and Company to be aware that Foley was sending inappropriate emails to former pages and not call for an investigation, all the while trumpeting Family Values, that should earn them big points, and I think they deserve a lot of credit for staying on their game.

But the Republicans aren’t the only ones playing. We also have Democrats jumping onto their own Horses, pretending that if you vote Democrat next month it will be a vote for decency.

The Democrats are missing an opportunity to raise the game of High Horse to a whole new higher level. What they need to do is come right out and tell the truth, that the behavior of the Republican leadership was typical of all political leaderships in the face of such scandal, and that they, the Democrats, would have probably reacted the same way, because it isn’t the Republicans that are broke, it’s the whole system.

Then they could say, “Ha, ha, we told the truth and you didn’t.” And they’d be the new winners.

Nightmare of Elm Street

This is my last chance to yap about the 2004 presidential election before it happens. Also, I have no idea as of this writing how the World Series has developed, either. So let's talk about a metaphor!

The metaphor I have in mind has to do with the fact that I learned at an early age to dislike sports. I have told a part of this tragedy before. How I wore glasses in grade school. How, when it came time for us kids to play baseball for gym class, my teacher realized the threat that my glasses posed if I were hit in the face with a baseball. As she herself put it, my glasses would break into deadly razor sharp shards and pierce my eyes on their way to my brain, where doctors would be helpless to remove them, and I would either die in violent throes of agony, or I would be a vegetable for the rest of my life.

Therefore she made me go out and play right-field blind. Therefore I was hit on the head with a ball which I could not see coming. Therefore I did not die or become a vegetable, thank you teacher. Instead, I became traumatized for life.

Actually, I had already been traumatized for life three years earlier. That was when my father took me to a Red Sox game. I was six, and I had never seen a baseball game before. At the time we lived at Fort Devens, an army base about 35 or 40 miles from Fenway Park, so seeing the Red Sox was well within reach. It's also relevant that we were living on a street named after a Civil War battle, Chancellorsville Street. It has since been renamed Elm Street -- this is absolutely true -- to make it easier to spell.

You see, when I went to that Red Sox game, I thought the idea was to watch a baseball game, yell on behalf of the good guys, eat some hotdogs, see them win, and go home happy. My father had neglected to tell me that the good guys don't always win.

All he had to do to prepare me was to explain to me what our street name was about. Namely, what did transpire at Chancellorsville, Virginia in early May 1863, when they had the aforementioned battle? He could have said, "Son, we live on Chancellorsville Street. Have I ever told you what happened in the Battle of Chancellorsville?" And I could have said, "No, Dad, you suck. You're always watching Lawrence Welk. You never tell me anything." And he could have smacked me.

Or, he could have told me that when the Battle of Chancellorsville was over, General Robert E. Lee was generally considered the winner, since he had got the higher score. And this would have taught me that the other side (we, my father and I, being Northerners) sometimes wins.

Or, he could have really bored me to tears. He could have told me that, actually, General Lee went into the battle with only about half as many men as his opponent General Hooker, so the higher casualties on Hooker's side in fact represented a smaller percentage of losses for his total forces, and he was thus left with the larger force at the end, so you could very well say that the Union side won after all, so there.

Or, my father could have said that it was exactly during the Battle of Chancellorsville that Stonewall Jackson was fatally shot. Who knows, but maybe that particular casualty by itself cost the Confederates the whole War.

Or, he could have said, go read about it in a book, I'm too busy watching Lawrence Welk to talk to you now.

In any case, I could have learned that winning and losing isn't always what it looks like. I could have learned that the Red Sox could lose that game in 1955 but might still have a chance to win the World Series in 2004, or 2005, or someday after I'm dead. I could have been prepared for the 2000 presidential election, when the guy with the best score lost.

So what is the moral of our story? The moral is, don't demand that street names have to be easy to spell. What do elm trees have to do with presidential elections and baseball games? Nothing. So leave the names of streets alone.