The people who die are real people, you know.

One last thing I want to say about the defunding fools and the much wiser Republican establishment types. Defeating ObamaCare by letting it fail in practice is a death sentence for a lot of Americans.

Are you upset about Benghazi? Angry that someone made the determination that there was nothing to be done to save the victims of the attack?

Then how do you reconcile your conviction that we should let ObamaCare collapse in practice? What does collapse consist of? People who lose their insurance, lose doctors who know their histories, lose their lives because doctors are fleeing Medicare and there’s no one to call when they’ve fallen down and can’t get up because of old age illnesses no one, especially the government, wants to deal with anymore?

Think I’m overstating? What’s the definition of a failed government program? Paperwork up the wazoo, lots of lost time before anything happens, and bureaucratic interference in what is finally decided. Those are cracks in the system people die into.

Repealing ObamaCare a couple years from now requires that all such failures have to be catastrophic. Meaning we are hoping, if this is our strategy, that many men, women, and children will be highly visible casualties.

This is the source of the schism between the American people and the Washington establishment. People are looking at very real personal impacts, both economic and health-related. The DC power brokers are looking at it like a game of chess.

Why the very few who have publicly committed themselves to fighting tooth and claw over every inch of turf are heroes to huge numbers of people. It’s not chess to them. They have a mother, a child, a spouse who is terrified of what ObamaCare means. They’re not interested in racking up statistics of government malfeasance.

A word to the wise, meaning Hume, Krauthammer, Will, Charen, Sowell, Rove, O’Reilly, Henninger, etc, etc. The people are rallying to Cruz because he doesn’t think chess but war. War for people’s lives.

Wise is sometimes simpler than you all think. It’s recognizing that there are fights which transcend politics. And what you forget is that we don’t care about how smart or right you are. We care about stopping the most truly terrible things from happening. Step by step and day by day.

Another way of saying that to us you look like pompous, negligent fools. Which you probably are. And, final word to the wise, there are huge numbers of us who are absolutely furious. Whether that computes with you or not.

If you ignore that, God help you.

We lost Goddammit! Get in line and quit trying to escape! Forward MARCH!

Let’s nip this one in the bud.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz compared his 21-hour speech on the Senate floor against Obamacare to the infamous Bataan Death March that killed hundreds of American troops at the hands of the Japanese during World War II. Cruz was speaking Wednesday at the conclusion of his remarks thanking staff who stayed up through the night for his speech.

“Now in 31 minutes we will be concluded,” Cruz said. “I don’t want to miss the opportunity within the limited amount of time is imperative that I do, which is to thank the men and women who have endured this, this Bataan Death March. And I want to take a little bit of time to thank by name. I want to start by thanking the Republican floor staff and cloakroom. I want to thank Laura Dove for her fairness, for her dealing with crises and passions on all sides and for her effectiveness in the job. And this is an interesting occurrence to occur so early in her job and I thank her for her service.”

Now the libs are offended by a military reference they would otherwise routinely scorn? (If they even knew what it was before some old dog snarled.) Sure. How many ways can they make up false causes for their deep disgust and anger at the locutions of conservatives? Answer: Countless.

Context is everything. Every major pundit and beltway type has condemned Cruz’s defunding fight as a cataclysmic and even suicidal impulse toward political disaster. “Bataan Death March” is unquestionably a succinct summary of how his critics have characterized Cruz’s tactics — a doomed path to the massacre of his own party’s future prospects given his opposition to ObamaCare in this way and at this time. What was he saying? “I thank you for all the work you did in what everyone must have told you was a lost cause.”

It’s also not a bad analogy. The March occurred after the U.S. forces on Corregidor surrendered. The Japanese did their best to dispirit and kill the troops they were leading to inhuman prison camps. The triumph of the Death March was that so many troops survived. They kept moving, kept helping one another, confident that if they could survive this ordeal, rescue would one day come. As it did. In other words, in the face of total defeat and disaster, they never gave up. Would that we could say the same about Republican leadership right now. But we can’t. John McCain of all people spoke on behalf of the occupying force and after claiming credit for having fought an honorable fight proclaimed that we are now defeated and must accept the consequences. Is anyone as outraged by that statement of surrender as they are by Cruz’s defiance and determination to keep fighting?

But by all means let’s play the new game of being enraged by anything, everything, over nothing, because somebody we don’t like said it.

Phooey.

btw, ObamaCare when fully implemented will kill a lot more people than the Bataan Death March did. Everyone shies from Palin’s term Death Panels. That what the affordable Care Act is, a humongous Death Panel. Regulations that increase delays before treatment, reduce research & development, drive doctors out of practice, seniors out of access to timely Medicare and Medicaid care, force dangerous choices for no insurance over too expensive insurance, bureaucratic control of transplant opportunities based on nanny state values, and the clip-clip-clip of hospital layoffs and cost-cutting because insurance companies will tighten the strings just trying to stay alive.

It all adds up to death on a large scale. Shortened lives, ruined lives, bungled treatments, indifferent doctors and nurses who kill you by no longer caring enough or being able to fight through the red tape. Kind of like being bayoneted on the side of the road. But more insidious.

But, you know, Cruz was out of line in what he did and what he said. Got it.

I understand you young’uns like the 80s, right? Everybody knows about Miami Vice, the pastel portrait of the dark side. Not everybody knows about its polar opposite, the pro-military show Airwolf.

Wouldn’t mention it now, but it’s available again on the G4 cable channel and on DVD. I’ve had the nostalgic pleasure of watching a few episodes from Season 1 while trying to evade the horrors of the news.

The nominal stars are Jan Michael Vincent and Ernest Borgnine, one a good looking but wooden leading man and the other a renowned ham who never saw a bit of scenery he couldn’t chew.

This would be a problem if the real star wasn’t the helicopter called Airwolf, which in dramatic terms is Superman, who always saves the day at the end after the ritual ducking into a phone booth to change his clothes.

The show premise is absurd, of course. Test pilot Stringfellow Hawke (Vincent) steals Airwolf from the government and refuses to give it back until they account for his brother Sinjean, MIA in Vietnam. An over-the-top CIA agent named Archangel (Alex Cord), dressed always in white suits and an eyepatch, contrives to use the situation as a black op. Airwolf will fly covert missions from its hidden lair, and Archangel will pretend to look for Sinjean.

Yeah, the shows have plots of a sort — threats from evil dictators, arms dealers, KGB operatives and such — but they’re immaterial. What matters is that eventually Airwolf rises from its concealed columnar canyon, the electronic music rises with it, and hell is unleashed on the bad guys.

Because, you see, Airwolf is a technological wonder, designed to look civilian but supersonic and armed like an F-16. It’s also beautiful, shaped and painted like a flying killer whale, and its howl on acceleration is unearthly. Not to mention the music. And the oddly sensuous way it flew. Almost as if Airwolf had hips. The cast and crew called it “The Lady.”

It didn’t last long. Jan Michael Vincent had some personal problems. But in its first two seasons it was a patriot’s dream. The show never hesitated to kill the bad guys or blow them to smithereens. (Unlike the awful A-team. They remade that; why not this?)

Watching it now is a reminder of how much we’ve changed from a few decades ago. It’s also a reminder that there are some situations in which overwhelming military power is indeed a useful solution.

My wife thinks it’s silly. But she’s a woman. This is a guy thing. Look it up if you miss grinning at the end of a TV show.

You know St. Trayvon.

But not St. Nick.

Well, this is a minefield, but I’ll step into it anyway, because how many of you are personally acquainted with someone who was shot to death on the street?

I’d have let it go, but the media-driven martyrdom of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent crimes and outrages it has inspired don’t seem to be going away. This morning on Drudge there was this delightful headline: School official tells students Trayvon Martin case proved it is ‘legal to hunt’ children.

Here’s an excerpt:

An email sent to students by a University of Maryland official that cites the Trayvon Martin shooting as evidence “it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida” is being blasted as the latest evidence of a left-wing bias on campus.

The email, from William Dorland, director of the school’s Honors College, starts by welcoming students back to campus, but then quickly veers into politics.

“This year, we learned that it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida,” it reads, in a reference to the trial of George Zimmerman, who was cleared of all charges in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The email went out to all students in the Honors College.

Since the Zimmerman trial, we’ve already had a number of random crime incidents that seem suspiciously like black on white retaliation for the death of Martin and the unwelcome verdict in the case. I won’t enumerate. I’m not keeping score.

What seems clear, though, is that regardless of the facts, the all-important MSM ‘narrative’ is that a (sort of) white man killed a black juvenile, and so it must be, automatically has to be, no matter what, about racism. But because there are no facts supporting this narrative, the response became about futile gun control initiatives, because we have to do something and this is a way of making a big stink.

Why I’m writing this post. About 40 years ago, there was a far more vicious instance of gun crime in San Francisco. As of this writing, utterly forgotten, shoved down the MSM memory hole. Everyone’s heard of the Zodiac murders. Who has heard of the Zebra murders? Anyone?

The “Zebra” murders were a string of racially motivated murders, committed by four African-American men who were later convicted, that took place in San Francisco, California, from October 1973 to April 1974.
During 1973 and 1974, fourteen execution style murders and eight assaults occurred in San Francisco, whose police named the case “Zebra” after the special police radio band they assigned for the investigation. Twenty-two crimes in a six-month spree involved mostly white victims…

I’m resurrecting the story for three reasons. I knew the last of the fourteen victims who died. Like me, Nick Shields was a Mercersburg boy. We weren’t friends — he was in a class ahead of mine and we weren’t interested in the same things. But I remember hearing about his shocking murder. He was putting stuff in the back of a station wagon when he was suddenly riddled with bullets. There are times when it does seem the world really is coming apart. I think of the 40 years of extra life I’ve had and he didn’t. For no reason. Unless you count irrational ignorant hatred as a reason.

It’s also the case that his dad was profoundly changed by the loss of his son. There was no rhetoric of ‘hate crime’ then, and so he did all he could think to do: become an activist advocate for — what else? — gun control. He has since died, but I believe he achieved some legislative successes.

Finally, I write because no one remembers or even wants to remember that racial hatred is a two-way street. Trayvon Martin will probably be remembered forever as a victim of white racism. More crimes will be committed in his, uh, honor.

Yet there’s no sign in the record that white people made a cause out of the deaths of Nick Shields and 13 other innocents who died very expressly because of the color of their skin. And maybe one other:

Harris revealed the existence of the group to the police, and told them of a homicide which did not make the papers; it was that of a homeless man whom they had kidnapped from Ghirardelli Square. They had brought the man to Black Self-Help Moving’s warehouse, gagged and tied him up, and while he was still conscious, took turns hacking away his limbs. Harris told the detectives that they had dumped the body into the bay. He told his story in such detail that the police were convinced of its veracity, especially since the police had, on the previous December 24, recovered the bound and badly butchered torso of a male, missing its hands, feet and head, that had washed up in the city’s Ocean Beach district at the foot of Pacheco Street.

In fact, we go out of our way not to remember. Consider all the channels that make a living out of sensationalizing true crime stories. The Zebra murders are a natural for such treatment. Multiple killers, high body count, a reign of terror that may have surpassed the ‘Son of Sam’ siege in New York. But it just can’t be allowed to have happened. Because, you know.

So much for honest conversations about race in America.

P.S. So. There’s going to be a movie. Starring Jamie Fox. I’m sure it will be great. And even-handed. And all like that. If you know what I’m saying.

Keeping on keeping on.

Not my phrase btw. Stole it from Bill Hemmer, who used the term as he was announcing that Cruz was beginning his 20th hour on the senate floor. He also said it’s the third longest speech in senate history.

But that doesn’t begin to capture what’s interesting and significant about this non-filibuster filibuster. It’s the dawn of a new age in politics.

What?! You heard me. Why?! Permit me to explain.

Numerous Internet sites are running live video of Cruz. He’s not speaking to a largely empty senate chamber. He’s speaking directly to millions of Americans. Which, to dinosaurs like Brit Hume, constitutes “theater of the absurd.” Really?

All politics is theater. (Remember the truism that politics is show business for ugly people?) It’s just not usually good theater. This is. For example, filibuster speeches generally aren’t speeches at all. They’re parliamentary stalling maneuvers executed in private. Senators in the past resorted to such tactics as reading wholly unrelated texts into the Congressional record, even phone books if they wanted to, because nobody was listening. Cruz’s speech really is a speech (with time out to read Green Eggs and Ham to his young daughters at their bedtime). Twenty hours in, he is still on point, coherent, speaking in complete sentences, composed and making sense. Because he knows we are listening, and not coincidentally, the thrust of his message is about listening. He is insisting that the DC establishment start listening to us.

Waste of time? Not at all. Why do you think the insiders are so furious? Not because he’s a distraction. Because he’s going over their heads to people senators are used to patronizing and lying to with impunity. That’s ending here and now. He’s keeping his campaign promise to fight with every ounce of his personal conviction and stamina on behalf of the people who elected him.

And now, for the first time in history, the people can actually watch him doing it. The difference is the role of technology. Throughout American history, the senate has been the country’s most exclusive private club. Think of how they always refer to one another, even political enemies: “My very good friend from South Carolina/Massachusetts” etc. Cruz is blowing that pomposity all to hell. The cigars, the paneled offices, the wink-wink deals behind closed doors, all in the name of fooling voters enough to secure reelection to the club.

Why even the self-proclaimed firebrand reformers we send to congress seem always to disappear mysteriously into committee meetings, double talk, and limousines. Suddenly they start telling us, more and more condescendingly, that everything is much more complicated than we could ever understand and they are still working in our interests. Right.

Cruz doesn’t care about belonging to the club. That’s his mortal sin. He’s not currying favor with the media elites, who are supposed to be the priests endowed with the authority to bless him. He’s not interested in being a good soldier in his party because the party generals are the only means of access to visibility, promotions, and future power opportunities.

As a freshman senator, he’s a buck private who should know his place and behave accordingly. Capiche?

But the Internet and the consequent rise of new media not under the thumb of the New York Times and NBC News have made the old model obsolete. When Brit Hume talks about “theater of the absurd,” he’s revealing himself as an elderly retainer in the emperor’s household who thinks all theater must conform to the conventions of Kabuki, everything stylized and concealed by traditional masks. (Be sure to read the comments on the Hume link.)

The tear of Brit Hume

But now it’s masks off. Incredibly embarrassing to those who have been hiding behind them. Akin to the plight of silent movie stars after talkies arrived. Careers ended. New stars were born. And the entire nature of film acting changed.

Cruz is talking, talking, talking his way through the Kabuki masks of the congress. And they don’t like it. But we should recognize that he is flinging open the doors of the exclusive royal theater to the rowdy masses, who are — as is becoming apparent this morning — amazingly energized and enthusiastic about his so-called meaningless stunt.

Because they know it’s not meaningless, and no amount of spin on either side of the aisle will change their minds. He’s putting everyone else on the spot, Dems and Repubs alike, and they have no place to hide.

I think it’s called sunshine, otherwise known as the best disinfectant.

P.S. Ted Cruz just guested on the Rush Limbaugh Show. Apparently he’s not out of gas yet. He’s from Texas. About Republicans and the Senate, he said what I said in this post, very directly. Give him a long hard look, regardless of the heaps of horrible press that will be descending on him.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

The shattering on the right continues. All because of the Obamacare defunding attempt. The smart ones are in a tizzy. For Jonah Goldberg it’s the Con Factor. For Charles Krauthammer it’s the Theater Factor. For Karl Rove it’s the Electoral Suicide Factor. For Mitch McConnell it’s the “I’ll share my oppo research on him” Factor. For John McCain it’s the “I hate his fucking guts” Factor. I could go on…

But I have a proposition of my own. What if it’s the Truth Factor?

See if you can follow my logic, which doesn’t seem to have the same fault line as the smart guys’.

The criticisms aren’t based on defenses of ObamaCare. They’re based on the idea that the defunding attempt is bad tactics and/or bad strategy because it carries the implicit threat of government shutdown. But historically, people barely notice a shutdown, just like they’ve barely noticed the sequester. They may yell about it to pollsters but they’ll forget about it before they remember to hold a grudge about it.

So why are the smart guys so anxious? They see everything as a congressional poker game where you look like a fool if you go all in and lose. They’re in a panic that the Democrats will humiliate Republicans in the event of some temporary government shutdown, which would imperil the opportunity to hold the house and reclaim the senate in 2014. What they forget is that a shutdown would be much more exciting to them than to us. All the checks to people will keep coming regardless. End of story.

They’re full of it. Their view is strictly inside the beltway myopia. Demonstrating just how out of touch they are.

Truth. The country, the economy, people’s health care situations, foreign policy, trust in government itself, and faith in the integrity of our leadership and the rule of law are all imploding so quickly that no 2014 election will be determined by what Ted Cruz is doing right now to stop ObamaCare.

When there is no sign on any front that things are getting better, and when most signs indicate that everything is getting worse for the nation as a whole and for people individually, there is no spin possible that can blame it all on Republican obstruction.

Especially on the subject of ObamaCare. Doesn’t matter what today’s polls are saying. By 2014, the majority of people, the ones who pay the taxes and the bills, will have discovered that healthcare for their families has become a huge effective tax increase and that the real costs, in terms of time invested, declining quality of care, and flat-out worry, have escalated substantially. While everything else was going to hell except for the stock portfolios of DC’s incestuous Wall Street cronies. And the salaries of their most generous lobbyists.

That’s the fault line. It’s not between parties. Where the smart guys have missed the boat. It’s between the people and the incredibly affluent and insulated Washington establishment. During the Obama years the only increase in prosperity has been in the nation’s capital. More federal bureaucrats making more money and acquiring more power and immunity from consequence while life got steadily harder for everyone else.

How all the scandals the media keep dismissing will come home to roost. In the end it won’t even matter that nobody knows what happened with Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS, the NSA, and all the other instances of corruption in the current administration. What will shake out in the final analysis is that nobody has ever been held accountable for anything. Which isn’t their own experience of life.

You see, there is a point at which people say, “Hey. There are different rules for government folks than me. Time to send them home.”

That’s also the point at which they might remember that Ted Cruz was the most hated man in Washington, DC, when he said ObamaCare was a stake in our hearts and has to be fought every inch of the way to implementation. Hmmmm.

To believe that he’s a fool is actually to believe that ObamaCare might really succeed and make people happy.

Another way of saying that people who are philosophically and pragmatically opposed to ObamaCare are so cowed by the administration spin and its echo chamber in the MSM that they’ve lost the courage of their own convictions. Meaning they have lost touch with everything important about life outside the beltway.

When the ObamaCare implementation hits, it will precipitate an accelerating disaster for every demographic. Doctors will retire, hospitals will downsize, insurance companies will be squeezed into dropping the low end affordable policies many counted on, and young people will pay the fine rather than the tithe the government was counting on to fund the whole enterprise. Why it will be bankrupt from the start and quality of care will plummet not gradually but dramatically to rationing and death by paperwork.

So Ted Cruz led a quixotic effort against terrific odds to stop the locomotive before it hurtled off the tracks. By 2016 that could make him a hero.

The effort hasn’t been a charade. What Cruz has accomplished: he’s forced the Democrats to defend a program that will materially hurt almost everyone, even in the short term. Which means he’s also provided electoral cover for Republicans who were more equivocal in their opposition to ObamaCare. At least they weren’t the Democrats who were pretending that a disaster is a Great Leap Forward.

Elections are always a choice between the lesser of two evils. All but the worst of RINOs will be glad of Cruz’s offensive by November of 2014. At which time they can claim they supported him in spirit.

If you disagree, describe the State of the Union that will obtain in November 2014. Probable recession, expanding foreign policy failure and disgrace, simmering scandals that ultimately disgust because this administration never comes clean about anything, and exponentially increasing uncertainty about personal privacy and the future of family health costs.

Unless that’s all going to get magically better almost overnight. Tell me how much you believe that.

They both suck.

Things start. You’re hopeful. You watch and keep watching. And they keep getting worse.

So it is with The Bridge and Broadchurch. I apologize.

Bleak doesn’t mean deep. It just means bleak. Which both of these extended melodramas are. Lots of talent expended for no benefit.

In The Bridge, you come to like one character. Nothing can save her. Everyone else deserves what happens to them, which is horrible. They needed 13 episodes to inflict this on us? Mostly you wind up second guessing the writer and director and actors. What were you thinking with this insane plot? How is this not an insultingly stereotyped depiction of a Mexican cop in every particular? Who told the producer and director that Matthew Lillard could act? Why does Anabeth Gish think a softcore porn role might benefit her career? Why is her character in the show in the first place? Why is one relatively minor character doing a fairly gross impersonation of a major character who doesn’t deserve to be mocked in this way? Does anybody involved think this is acting, clever, worthwhile, illuminating, or anything but totally damn dumb and pretentious?

Broadchurch. With The Killing it took me the betrayal at the end of season one to realize I didn’t care who killed the killed girl. With Broadchurch it’s taken only six episodes. I. don’t. care.

If the purpose is to convince me that all English life outside of London is low, venal, meaningless, dull, and sick, I’m convinced. Kill them all. It doesn’t matter what they do or what is done to them. They deserve it.

The boy on the beach died before the show started. I envy him. He’s well out of it. And I’m prepared to believe he got what was coming to him. Yeah, he was a kid. But he was an English kid. He’d have grown up to be like everyone else in the show — a dim, selfish, drab drone who flails at life without ever even being interesting.

Sorry. I got taken in. It happens. Forgive me.

Yes you are.

In big time football programs, they pretend they play a 12 game season, but they don’t really, because the first three or four are played against schools they know they can beat. This is what we call the doormat season. For example, in today’s exciting gridiron contests, Penn State edged Kent State 34-0, Maryland outlasted West Virginia 37-0, Virginia nipped VMI 49-0, Louisville finally overcame a game Florida International team 72-0, and Ohio State came back from a dead even 0-0 score at the opening kickoff to prevail over Florida A&M 76-0.

Which is to say that most of the big college programs actually play about an eight game season. The doormat charade pads their records, but it’s kind of disgusting when you think about it. It doesn’t even really qualify as a pre-season. What do you learn by scrimmaging with teams whose players are about three quarters your size and two thirds your speed? Anything?

This is one of the last areas where the Ivy League has anything to offer, what with being pretty much nothing anymore but left wing propaganda factories for the permanently spoiled narcissist progeny of federal government officials. But they don’t play a doormat season in the Ivy League.

I admit they used to. There were a bunch of colleges and universities that were actually founded for this purpose and located near Ivy League schools. Places with strange names like Bucknell, Colgate, Lafayette, Lehigh, Holy Cross, UMass, and the University of New Hampshire(!?), they existed to provide easy wins for Harvard, Yale, and whatever the other ivy schools call themselves.

But this has long since ceased to be the reality. These days, most of them frequently drub the ivy teams they play early in their schedules, which go on to include numerous college names nobody has ever heard spoken aloud.

When you think about it, it’s kind of nice, a sort of proof of the victory of egalitarian ideals over obsolete notions of aristocracy and meritocracy. And people say there’s no progress.

But, as usual, the next step into the future is being pioneered by Harvard, whose relentless search for social justice in football has caused the Crimson to schedule for the past two years as its opening game none of the traditional local doormats. Who wants to start the season with a 42-30 loss to Holy Cross? I mean, it’s so much more global of spirit to leave New England altogether and fly out to the lovely lower left hand corner of the country and play with the University of San Diego, whose team even has a Spanish name, the Toreros (loosely translated in English as ‘barristas.’).

The University of San Diego has a very distinguished history. It was founded just 300 and some years after Harvard, in 1949, as the San Diego College for Women. Cool.

And, yes, men are now allowed to enroll, 40 or 50 of them per year, a number which is expected to grow through time until it may one day reach a critical mass that will inspire Harvard to look elsewhere for a brand new pigskin peak of aspiration, maybe Mount Holyoke.

Today, though, the Crimson triumphed, 42-20, despite being severely yelled at by the opposing defense.

Where was I? This whole doormat thing should stop. Why can’t the big-time programs learn from the example set by the schools that invented football in the first place and were better at commandeering all the early national championships than anyone has proven able to do since?

Why?

Oh. And in late breaking news, former ivy doormat Rutgers thumped the Arkansas Razorbacks in what looked very much like a real college football game.

R. RRRRR. Sorry. I missed Talk Like a Pirate Day by one day. I can live with that. Better a day late than a touchdown short. Yo ho, me hearties.

The Winning Thing

Couldn’t sleep. Wound up tuning in to this movie. Which I had seen before, but as sometimes happens, it struck me differently this time.

If you don’t know the history, West Virginia’s Marshall University lost its football team in a 1970 plane crash. The movie, with some liberties taken, is about what happened in the next year. A coach from tiny Wooster, Ohio, accepts the job of rebuilding the football team from scratch. He has three surviving varsity players, a traumatized assistant coach, a university president in over his head, and a college town scorched by grief. He succeeds in winning one game. End of movie.

Several things I found riveting this time around, in no particular order.

The traumatized assistant quits after a humiliating first game blowout. He tells the new coach, “We are not honoring the dead players or [coach]. He said ‘winning is everything,’ and all we’re doing is disgracing him and them.”

When the new coach responds, it’s in a chapel, just the two of them. The newbie says, “He was right. Winning is everything. Every coach in every sport forever has always believed that. I’ve said it more times than I can count. I’ve always believed it until I got here.

“But that’s not what this is about. This isn’t about winning or losing or even how we play the game. Right here, right now, it’s about suiting up and getting on the field every week. We may not win tomorrow, next week, or any game this season. But if we keep playing, we make it possible for our teams to win again in the future. If we do our job today, we’ll get back to a day when winning can be everything again.”

Beautifully said. It took more than a dozen years, but Marshall returned not only to winning but to three national championships in their division.

On the other hand, something else I noticed. The big speech occurred, as I said, in a chapel, and there was a camera cut or two to the cross. Without Hollywood’s aversion to religion, a simpler argument might have been to nod at the cross and say, “He lost. He suffered through death. If his brethren had quit, we’d never have heard of him. But they didn’t quit, and he ultimately won two-thirds of the earth.”

Can’t do that in Hollywood scripts, though. Take a look at the critics’ reviews at imdb.com. Cliched, superficial, weak. Really? This is a story that actually happened. The acting wasn’t over the top. The production and editing were up to standard. The script was clever throughout. What’s so bad about the movie? That the critics don’t want to hear about a positive story with Christian overtones that really did happen. Period.

All that aside. What stays with me is the part of the big speech that says we have to keep suiting up and getting on the field. We may not win today or tomorrow.

But if we keep playing, we may one day get our country back. Otherwise, we fall back to being badminton and beach volleyball players, while the big guys romp in the Division I political class.

We are Marshall. As many of us as have the guts.

It’s been a rough week. Time to give your mind some different nourishment. Dig in. Most are in the form of galleries, but patience is rewarded.

The 25 smartest players in NFl history.

A Murmuration of Starlings (scroll or click on photo for gallery format)

Creepy Abandoned Churches

The Ruins of Detroit (wait for it; loads slowly)

5 Ways Dogs Can Read Your Mind

8 Simple Questions Science Can’t Answer

26 Dogs Having the Best Day Ever (wait for it)

Make that 27…

It’s Friday. Mommy will be home soon. For now I have her sweatshirt to nuzzle.

Why he has happy feet. Trees of life. Or, if you’re watching the new series Sleepy Hollow, the four horsemen of the apocalypse.