He's had a terrible year.
And our schedule is significantly harder than Colorado's, such that we're not on whom you want to bet.
And, as predicted, the deadline deals have been busts.
But that was a helluva weekend and, watching on the DVR at 11:00 PM last night, I came off my couch when Edgar Renteria hit that grand slam. It's a fun team and it's been a fun year. Giants!
What I watched after the game was the Daytime Emmy Awards; similar to the BET Awards, I like to use awards shows to maintain some type of annual connection with that element of the culture. And my dominant thought was about the health care debate.
Not literally, although Krugman, and Kristoff, moved the ball nicely over the past couple of days, but what I was thinking about was the unease the people feel when their institutions are taken away from them.
The most insufficiently covered entertainment story of the summer is the end, after 72 years, of The Guiding Light. I've written before (beats the hell out of me where, I thought it was in this space) about the way that media marginalizes a form of entertainment like soap operas because of it being culturally relegated not only to women but to "stay at home" women. One can't say, "you know who's a tremendous actor, that Grant Aleksander" without being thrown in a barrel with those viewed as disposable.
Probably, there are fans of the Guiding Light who have followed the narrative for decades - the
Spauldings and Bauers are integrated into their lives in the way that their daily newspaper used to be.
If you're a person of a certain age, and your newspaper is gone, and your television program is gone, and your house has significantly dropped in value, and maybe the stores where you shop have vanished and your bank went out of business - if those bedrock, stable institutions in your life have just...ended...over the past year, how unreasonable is it to believe that Democrats are going to take their health care away?
I'm empathetic to those who feel like screaming at an elected official. Hell, I'm right there with them if the screaming is about the last administration's trillion dollar big government Iraq War or the big government suspicionless spying on US citizens undertaken by last administration, or the now unprecedented levels of economic inequality that have turned the 21st century into Gilded Age2K.
I'd even be willing the scream about the end of Guiding Light. There are lots of reasons to yell at a Congressman. Philadelphia fans wearing jerseys of a guy who put dogs on rape stands. The environmental unsustainability of our way of life and the use of the cloak of religion to justify our scientific ignorance. The inevitable collapse of my Giants, certain to cause me maximum pain right around my birthday, as has happened virtually every year of my life.
I'd yell at a Congressman about all of that.
But giving Americans the same level of health care as every other industrialized country in the world would give them?
No, that would be change worth believing in, thanks.
