Dark Days

Well it’s official. The NBA is rigged, George W. Bush is surrounded by yellow-dog turn coats, and the Angel of Weird still smiles in Denver. I was sitting on Tuesday night, trying to drink off a nasty funk as everyone in town cursed the day that Joey Crawford was born, when I took a call from a friend in another State.
“What about that last play?” he asked, sure that I would launch into an angry diatribe.
“What about it?” I said. “Barry was off and the Spurs lost it…End of Story.”
“But it was clearly a foul!” he screamed into the phone. “Fisher smacked Barry on the head intentionally. Barry was on fire all night long, that shot was meant to go in!”
“Barry dribbled and finished the play,“ I reminded him. “It was a good no call.”
“The hell you say! If nothing else Barry deserved a floor call, it was so clearly a foul. They could have tied the game, gone into overtime.”
“What? So Ginobili, Parker and Duncan could go on missing shots for another five minutes and hand us an even worse loss? You sadistic swine, what kind of Fan are you?”
“It was Crawford’s fault,” he whined. “Joey Crawford has it in for the Spurs!”
In fact, the entire city on Wednesday seemed to echo that same sentiment, openly reviling a respected member of the NBA Referee establishment in every local newscast, and on every street corner.
“If I were [Crawford] I wouldn’t start my own car for the next few weeks” offered one critic. Others were not so nice or nearly as subtle. But let us draw the curtain on that brand of ugliness and face up to facts. David Stern and the rest of the League would much prefer to have a Lakers/Celtics Finals in order to hoist up their faltering ratings. The NBA never did entirely recover from the lock out in ’99, and viewership has been regulated to die-hard fans and sad, sick holdouts like me who would like to have seen the Spurs go back to back at least once before Tim Duncan get’s too old to strut.
Was Tuesday’s loss the fault of a crooked official with a grudge? Was it just the Will of the League? Were the Lakers really the better team? Or was it just bad playing on the part of the Spurs. One thing I have learned over these last few seasons is to never count the Silver and Black out until the very end. Though, to hear some people talk about it, Thursday’s game will be as embarrassing as a fart in church.
It wasn’t only the Spurs who woke up to the dismal sound of doom and despair on Wednesday. George W. Bush heard his own banshee wailing within the pages of Scott McClellan’s damning memoir. McClellan was White House Press Secretary from May 2003 to April 2006 (Ah, the good years) and as such his book gave a supposedly inside look at the inscrutable W. Bush White House but in doing so basically calls the President a liar and the media a bunch of enabling cowards. He even says of himself: “I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be.”
Yes Scott, you most certainly did. What happened to Loyalty? What kind of media whore did you turn out to be, after all, and what makes you any different from those you’ve condemned?
Since when has “Washington's Culture of Deception” been any different? I don’t recall being handed the whole truth by any U.S. President while I’ve been alive…Not from Nixon, Not from Ford, Not from Carter, Not from Reagan, Not from Bush and certainly Not from Clinton. Can Scott McClellan really so naïve as to believe that Politics is anything other than self promotion of some sort? Or is he just practicing his own sorry brand of it and trying to cover his own sorry ass so he can find a job when the dust settles?
What really pisses me off with his book is that it’s just going to give those idiots who blame the White House for 9/11 even more fodder for their already out of hand insanity. Show some responsibility, Scott. And let’s face it- if he’d really had that much of a problem with what was going on shouldn’t he have taken a more honorable way out? It’s not too late to fall on your own sword and regain a measure of what honor you have left, Scott.
Wait, did I just say that? No, I didn’t. And even if I did surely it didn’t suggest what it sounded like. This isn’t Feudal Japan, or Ancient Rome, or even the Nixon White House, where dissenters were in serious danger of getting threatening late night phone calls and strange packages delivered to their mother’s at grey-care.
Hell no! We live in a kinder and gentler age; a Different Time Altogether. Why, it could very well be the age of First Contact. Well, at least according to The Rocky Mountain News, who reported on Rocky Mountain Oddball Jeff Peckman. Peckman, who has been pushing an initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission to prepare for the day that we make First Contact, has promised to show a video on Friday that purports to show a “Living Breathing Space Alien”.
Now, I’m not saying that there isn’t anything out there. Nor am I saying that Peckman might not have actual footage of something “far out”. But seriously, does he really believe that he is going about it the right way?
Of course, I know, I mean what exactly would be “the right way” to go about letting people know that “we are not alone”? Still, the only ones that are going to buy into it are the odd ball fringe that will buy into anything that will distract them from their mediocre lives. It’s going to take a ship landing on the Washington Mall to make believers out of most skeptics, and even then it’s going to take some convincing to assure them it’s not a promotion for a movie or for Pepsi.
Let’s face it, people don’t want to know if there’s intelligent life outside of our solar system. Most of them are too concerned with the orbits of their own lives to worry about such things as First Contact. They’ve become a nation of worriers, concerned about the environment, and gas prices, and being well liked by the people who want to blow us up.
They are, like I said, a kinder and gentler people…And we’re all the more fucked because of it.