This pre-game handshake made a fair bit of news even before the game was played, garnering a segment on Around the Horn and being noted by pundits and aspiring pundits ’round the Internets. The response was predictable: Much dudely “this is stupid” scoffing.

It’s not stupid. In fact, sports in America could use a heavier dose of stuff like this. And Blount’s spectacular post-game freak-down is precisely the reason why.

Is it goofy? Kinda. Is it necessary? No. But it’s helpful. At the very least, for a moment it reminds everyone–players, coaches, fans, media–that this is a game. This is not a battle, you are not a warrior, it tells the player. If only for a moment, a bit of “hey, chill, this is just a game, like kickball in gym class” reality intrudes upon the false pretense that this is the most important thing that will ever happen, you are Hercules, those guys in blue are evil, GRRRARGGHHH I AM A BIG MAN KILL KILL KILL!

It’s a game. There are two guys in sweaty, fuzzy animal suits gallivanting about on the sidelines. The crowd’s chowing on popcorn, hot dogs, and nachos while watching other people exercise. People have squeezed themselves into jerseys and sweatshirts that fit twenty pounds ago. Shirtless frat guys have painted their torsos a color they’re going to be finding deep in their pores for two months. There are cheerleaders.

It’s a game.

When the aliens dig up the remnants of our race millions of years from now, along with The Collected Works of Shakespeare, Shaq’s Twitter, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, and Rock of Love will, I’m sure, be a reel of a football game. And the aliens will be confused by the men running around in gaudily colored uniforms and tight pants, bear hugging each other every thirty seconds. “This man appeared to call himself ‘Ocho-Cinco.’ He is wearing a cat head.”

It’s a game. And a sort of ridiculous one, at that.

That tiny bit of perspective masquerading as sportsmanship provided by a pre-game handshake is not much. It’s rote, it’s as routine and mechanical as warm-up stretches, and it’s not going to revolutionize the game. However, if it gets a hepped up college sophomore to stop for a second, look his opponent in the eye, and acknowledge that there’s actually a someone there, then it’s enough.

Blount sucker-punched an opponent post-game because one night didn’t go his way and he didn’t have the maturity level to deal with that like an adult. ‘Course, that’s true of so many figures in major sports; Blount’s not exactly blazing a trail here. Maybe, though, if instead of the “you are a special little rainbow” pump up BS that promising athletes are fed from the age of 8, a little moment’s pause of actual consideration for others were injected into sports every now and again, even in tiny doses, these implosions of the entitled would happen with less frequency.

LeGarrette Blount, grow up. All of college football, grow up. American sports culture, grow the hell up. Starts with a simple handshake.

Well, it’s time for us to take that word back. Democrats, quit hunching away from the title of “liberal.” Wear it with pride.

Are you for equal pay for equal work? You’re a liberal.

Are you for strong direct diplomacy? You’re a liberal.

Are you for effective environmental protection? You’re a liberal.

Are you for a decent working wage? You’re a liberal.

Are you for a woman’s right to choose? You’re a liberal.

Are you for well-funded, excellent public schools? You’re a liberal.

Are you for quality, affordable health care for all? You’re a liberal.

This word is not a pejorative, and we should quit treating as such. Don’t tiptoe around the word for fear that Rush and Fox News will try to smear you with it. Don’t let the conservatives determine its propriety. It’s not theirs to fling around like a Scarlet Letter. It’s ours to own.

Don’t let them tell us preemptively that a liberal politician’s funeral shouldn’t acknowledge what he believed down to his toes.

Senator Edward Kennedy was a liberal and proud of it. He stood for civil rights, for gay rights, for health care, for women’s rights, for labor, for the least of us, for all of us. If nothing else, at this defining point in history, his life and his death should spur us to rise out of our protective crouch and reclaim proudly the title of “liberal.”

“As long as I’m a vote and as long as I have a voice in the U.S. Senate, it’s going to be for the Democratic platform plan that provides decent quality health care North and South, East and West, for all Americans as a matter of right and not of privilege.”

His Democratic Party was the Democratic Party of the Civil Rights Act, of SCHIP, of Title IX, of Medicare and Medicaid, of the Voting Rights Act. It is not the party who is paralyzed in fear at the thought at being called weak for providing a hand up. It is not the party who balks at helping America’s less fortunate. It is not the party that would forsake health care reform for escaping screaming protesters.

In the decade that opened with the election of Teddy’s brother John to the Presidency, two pieces of legislation were enacted in large part due to the nation’s bonding emotional response to the deaths of titans. In 1964, after extraordinary legislative wrangling by the Former Senate Majority Leader-turned-President, Lyndon Baines Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act. The bill was introduced by President Kennedy, and in his memory, LBJ vowed that the legislation would pass “without a word changed.” Four years later, after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, LBJ demonstrated his legislative mastery once again, and achieved passage of the 1968 Open Housing Act, a bill that may not exist if not for King’s often-controversial campaigns exposing de-facto segregation in the North.

And now, as the nation crawls ever closer to enacting health care reform, we’ve lost reform’s most devoted champion. It would be easy to argue that Sen. Kennedy’s death could play a similar role to his brother’s and Dr. King’s in spurring passage of crucial legislation at the top of his own agenda. While he may become the primary face–the rallying point, either implicitly or explicitly–of the push for health care reform, the political world has changed. The parallels aren’t exact, of course, and LBJ and the liberals were fighting the Southern members of their own party as much if not more than the minority to enact civil rights legislation. And while President Obama has similar majorities to LBJ, where is his Everett Dirksen? This debate is so poisonous, disingenuous, and in large part fact-free, that the whiplash back to reality provided by Sen. Kennedy’s death may be the only chance at a real debate this reform has.

I can wish for a replay of 1964 and 1968, but I hope Sen. Kennedy’s death jolts us enough to see the core of this issue. This is about guaranteeing quality health care to all. Caring for the sidelined, for the ignored. Nothing sinister lurks beneath this goal. It is government’s most precious purpose.

His was an extraordinarily American life, a man born into incredible privilege who sincerely and honestly devoted his life to civil rights, to the less fortunate, and to the forgotten.

But above all else: Thank you, sir. The dream will never die.

Reasons:

• Motherloving Brett Favre. Honest to God, dude, go away. I’m tired of you. Your look-at-me-I’m-rugged beard angers me. Gramps, this year’s rookie class were roughly five years old when you were drafted. It is past time to go. But my real problem with you is this: Why is it that your every thought is given the force and weight of a UN declaration by ESPN et. al., especially considering you have all the decision-making capability of an ADD-riddled Hamlet? With the helicopters, and the Breaking News banners, and the round-the-clock Brettapalooza? There was practically theme music and a logo for your arrival in Minnesota! I’m really not looking forward to spending the next few months listening to various commentary teams work out their mancrushes as you throw three picks in a quarter. Just retire and mean it, so we can get to the team in the booth longingly reminiscing about that time Brett led an amazing 4th quarter comeback and cured little Timmy’s cancer phase of Life Without Favre. Sigh. Remember that, Cris? I do, Al. I do. And then we all move on.
• Michael Vick. In Philly, no less. Totally, totally obnoxious. Also, when did Tony Dungy’s word become unimpeachable to the point of scripture? I know this is treasonous coming from an Indy native, but sorry. Just because one is religious does not mean one cannot be wrong. Or cannot seriously misjudge another human being. Dungy’s word is not The Word. It does not wash Vick clean. We’d do well to remember that, as would members of the sports media. It is okay to question Dungy. Ask why and what, probe why he believes Vick has changed and understands not just that what he did was wrong, but why it was. Tony Dungy is a very devout former football coach. I respect that. However, that does not elevate him to a status above the rest of us. I am perplexed by the level of deference given to Dungy simply because he is a good guy. Even in the effed up world of sports, Not A Jerk is not a qualifier for earthbound sainthood.
• Eli’s Coming, Hide Your Loot, Giants. I’m a Colts fan, yes, and come down pretty firmly on the side of Mr. Laser Rocket Arm in the Peyton v. Eli debate, such as there is one. But come on, who in their right mind would guess that Eli would be the highest paid player in the league right now? His entire career is one freakish play!
• The Return of Tom Brady, Touchdown Jesus. Frankly, I don’t know why we didn’t just cancel the rest of the season the second he got injured last year, and sit shiva until he returned. His injury gave sports wags an extra reason to talk about him even when he was nowhere near the field last year, and now, we get the endless series of omigod breathless questions. Is he going to bounce back? Was it a good idea to get rid of Matt Cassel? Will he be the same Tom Brady? What does the scar look like? Do you think he likes me?

Upside:

• It appears that the Raiders are staying classy, as always. Coach fight! Glorious.
• The Cowboys (also taxpayers) spent a gazillion of monies on a new stadium, and the monster scoreboard appears to eat punts. Awesome. Everybody point and laugh at Jerry Jones.

I Can’t Decide Where To Put This, But It’s Funny In A Headslap Way, So:

• TO has a cereal? Huh. This has potential to be both an obnoxious distraction and a harmless marketing sideshow, not unlike TO himself. Wait and see. But I love that a guy who can’t find a place to live found the time to slap his name and face on a cereal. Sports in America. Priorities totally in check.

If we get more of the Raiders Being the Raiders, and fewer Brettgasms, I’ll be alright. Otherwise, I may put my foot through the television about when the Lions are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. So, mid-October, I’m guessing.

I have a list of grievances. Sports journalists, especially those of you on the teevee, stop doing these things, now, for the sake of my brain. Thanks.

• If you don’t have anything to say, then don’t say anything. Just because there are pictures on the screen, that doesn’t mean you have to be talking. Television sports journalism has been reduced to “well, my mouth was moving, words came out, my mic was on, and those words were broadcast, so I must have been practicing journalism. Some of those words were sports jargon, right? I said Michael Vick a few times.” Silence does not equal death, here. Keep it shut if you have nothing more significant to contribute than what John “Here’s A Guy Who Sees Better Wearing Contacts” Madden would toss in right now.
• There is no need for a Super Bowl pre-game show that begins in, what, November? Stop that.
• For that matter, stop with the NFL Live shows in friggin’ June. I know the NFL rules the universe right now, but you can cover something else, instead of deciding who’s winning the Super Bowl six months out. Why even play the season? Just have ESPN analysts decide how everything unfolds. Save us all some time.
• Shut up, Dick Vitale.
• Nascar is not a sport unto itself. It is a series under the larger umbrella of motorsports. Calling it a sport would be like calling the NFL a sport distinct from college football. Or Major League Baseball is a sport, and the Minor Leagues yet another. It is a motorsport; Nascar is simply the sanctioning body, the series. It is not a sport distinct from the IRL or Formula 1 or sports cars. Especially when you consider all the innovation in motorsports, whether in speed or technology or safety, come from those other series. Nascar is a bunch of lunky clunkers toting outdated technology around a track cramped by too many cars while the audience crosses its fingers for the big one. If that’s earned the status of being called a sport separate and apart from the rest of motorsports, then I quit. Really. I quit the world.
• What is really, really not a sport, though: MMA. NO. I don’t care how many watch it or buy tickets. Not a sport, and I will never care.
• You are paid to speak, dudes in the booth. At least pretend like you didn’t just learn English the Thursday before this Saturday event. To wit: You can’t qualify the word “unique,” okay? Something either is unique or it isn’t. So stop saying “really unique,” or “very unique,” or “extremely unique” in a tired attempt to sound smart. You sound like an idiot to those watching who went to college and actually showed up to class once in a while. Also, it’s “an historic,” not “a historic.” I know it’s sports, but at least try to speak in diagrammable sentences, not Sarah Palin-ese.
• The Little League World Series on ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN 360, ESPN U, ESPN Chip In Your Brain and ABC, brought to you by Snickers and the Shattered Dreams of Over-Involved Parents is gross. It’s gross.
• Confidential to Scott Goodyear, ESPN/ABC IRL Broadcasts: Quit speaking to the audience as if we are the dumb paste-eating kids in the fourth grade. If we are watching an IRL race, we are familiar with marbles, and we don’t need it explained, slowly, with small words and visual aids, during every race. Moreover, most of us have figured out the magical wonder that are mirrors by now, and we know that Marco Andretti can see Dario Franchitti coming up behind him in their wizardry. Do you assume that most of your audience needed help dressing themselves that morning?
• Brett Favre. Just, God, Brett Favre. Interception Jones was never that good.

Finally, the next person who refers to a professional athlete as a “warrior” is getting a pissed off me on their doorstep. Look, I know that sports writing and commentary is home to more hyperbole than a nation’s wounded psyche can really stand, but this is where I draw the line of macho hero worship. You’d think that in the midst of two wars, we’d draw back on the military/battle metaphors, but that presumes a nation in control of its sports culture. Sports in the United States in 2009 is so unwieldy, so obsessive, such a writhing ball of money, sexuality, class, race, and more money, that we have no real grasp of its trajectory. We have a vague expression of disappointment in performance enhancing drugs, violence, and sex, coupled with a longing for a never-really-there good-old-days, but both of these are inchoate at best. We play this game where we elevate athletes onto a pedestal that they don’t really deserve–that nobody deserves, that nobody should withstand–then knock them off when they fail to live up to our expectations. In the meantime, when they perform mightily on the field–or court–or diamond–or track–we throw ourselves headlong into the hyperbolic language that equates playing a game with literal, life-or-death battle. As battles are being fought in our name in two countries.

I love sports. I love it so much that I am writing at 3 AM because I couldn’t stop thinking about this. But no multi-millionare athlete with a shoe deal hitting a ball with a stick deserves to be equated with a young woman standing in a field in Afghanistan–hoping that this time around her nation’s Congress got the funding for body armor right–just wanting to do her job for her country and come home to her family.

Athletes amaze me. Almost every day, they do. The steel of Tiger Woods. The pure will of Michael Jordan. The holy-crap-what-did-I-just-see of Usain Bolt. The once-in-a-lifetime skills of Michael Phelps. The distilled human desire and craft on display is utterly jaw-dropping, even in the elaborate multi-billion dollar fast food and energy drink shilling scheme American sports have become.  But calling, I don’t know, Chad Johnson a “warrior” because he caught a couple of tough passes over the middle hits a level of ridiculous even the circus of American sports shouldn’t tolerate.

Yeah, I’m done now. Maybe it’s a good thing I never set foot in Ernie Pyle Hall on the IU campus, because there’s no way I’d bring myself to write stories about football players who want to Twitter during practices and games without someone standing over me methodically poking me with a very sharp stick.

I finally decided that since so much of the third section–which deals with contemporary American fundamentalism, the world as Abram imagined it, expanded–ran parallel to my final thoughts on what I read, that I’d finish with one final piece.

In one passage toward the very end, Sharlet describes a catalog produced by Vision Forum, one of many providers of fundamentalist homeschooling materials. Describing the cover photograph of a young, dimpled boy dressed in a Confederate gray shell jacket, topped by a red sash, sporting shiny black fetish boots in a wide stance (yes, really). This boy is photoshopped in front of the Alamo, standing at an enormous scale only a day-dreaming boy could conjure. Sharlet: “[The] catalog is as perfect and polished a distillation as I’ve found of the romance of American fundamentalism, the almost sexual tension of its contradiction: its reverence for both rebellion and authority, democracy and theocracy, blood and innocence.”

This tension is something that I found to be the most interesting aspect of an especially interesting story.

Abram sought to protect democracy by installing a theocracy of top men. The Family taught reverence for authority through the insistence that any actions, no matter how anti-democratic, or immoral, or erratic, how rebellious, of the powerful cannot be challenged. Coe distanced himself from the violent results of his overseas meddling with the claim that he only brings people together, but declines to take positions.

The Family–and by extension, their C Street house–only came to wider, beyond the Beltway attention this summer as a result of the affairs of Sen. John Ensign and Gov. Mark Sanford, the alleged affair of former Congressman Chip Pickering and their respective relationships with The Family. After operating as an underground, yet curiously powerful Washington institution since Coe’s tenure, the organization was thrust suddenly into the spotlight and its quiet presence–to the outside world–around the globe, its level of secrecy, its guiding philosophy, such as it is, became the subject of debate.

As it should be. This is an organization deeply ingrained in the DNA of Washington. Abram’s “Idea” has become intensely real. And now, in order to gain and hold power in DC, at least some connection to The Family has become part of the life. As a citizenry, this should trigger alarms. Not simply because this is an organization that has gone to great pains to hide that there is, in fact, an organization, or because of the explicit reverence for power and the elite, or because of the documented results of their “corporate/church/state chuminess” around the world, but because even the most senior members seem confused about who and what they are, and what they believe.

That, in the end, makes them more dangerous. As long as a dictator is willing to express a love for Jesus and reverence for power, The Family will throw their support, and implicitly, the support of many Members of Congress (and likely, depending on the current administration, important military and diplomatic figures), his way. With that, comes corporate money and interests, and who cares if that dictator strips the country and scorches the earth behind him as he flees? The people questioned authority. They deserved what they got.

This is a group that uses “social order” as illustrated by Hitler and Mao to mean Jesus above all. And that Jesus plus nothing equation, as parsed by Sharlet, slowly comes into focus as invisible power, slowly built of and for a few (here comes Romans 13 again). But because they have engaged this slow build through smiling diplomacy, the totalitarian overtones are missed or simply ignored. In my view, after reading Sharlet’s book and doing additional research on The Family, their miasmatic theology should, when centered over DC, take its place as an infamous destructive force on the shelf alongside K Street, incumbent complacency, and illogical campaign finance rules.

Vereide, known mostly as Abram, was a Norwegian immigrant who came to the United States searching for peace and respect. He envisioned a world governed by his “Idea,” and, 50 years before Ronald Reagan would assume the Presidency, applied Reagan’s future economic philosophy to religion. “Trickle-down faith” was the “Idea,” or “every Christian a leader, every leader a Christian.”

Beginning in the Pacific Northwest, Abram steadily built up a spiderweb of “top men” who he felt responsible for, ultimately, writing Biblical teachings into legislation as a response to the New Deal.

But while Abram began his fellowship in response to what he saw as the radical liberalism of FDR, it was a midcentury moderate who allowed The Fellowship their greatest access to power and their most necessary moderating screen.

In the 1952 Presidential election, Frank Carlson of Kansas, Abram’s closest Senate ally, ran Eisenhower’s DC campaign office, and his sidekick Henry Darby ran the Kansas HQ. Ike’s GOP nomination represented a shift toward conservative internationalism that nicely dovetailed with what Carlson termed Abram’s “Worldwide Spiritual Offensive.” Once Ike was in the White House, Abram’s new idea was a Presidential Prayer Breakfast, that would function as the type of gathering of power, make contacts, curry influence event that The Fellowship makes their crowning achievement.  Ike knew the precedent he was setting with the Prayer Breakfast, but he owed Abrams and Carlson. And now, decades later, the American populace sees the Prayer Breakfast as an innocent, almost secular gathering of politicos and the influential over plates of eggs and pancakes.

But in reality, The Family uses the Prayer Breakfast and its veneer of spirituality stripped of religion to further its own agenda. And that agenda includes introducing foreign dictators to Members of Congress, who will then advocate for beneficial legislation.

The Family shield themselves from the horrors their alliances with dictators may bring by denying the very idea of guilt for the powerful. To justify this idea, they employ Romans 13: “The powers that be are ordained of God.”

With Doug Coe in charge after Abram’s death in the late 1960s, The Family went underground, began financing things “man-to-man” (ie. off the books), allowed their initiatives to be proposed on the letterhead of public men rather than on their own. They left their goals deliberately vague and long-term so that the organization would never have to answer for them. In short, to most, there would appear to be no organization at all.

Notables:

• A (maybe) former member of The Family who contacted Sharlet after his initial Harper’s article on Ivanwald appeared, about the group’s secrecy: “There is the problem of separation of church and state. And you can get so much more accomplished in secret.”
• Coe, rationalizing The Family’s association with the bloody Siad Barre regime of Somalia: “I don’t take positions. The only thing I do is bring people together.”
• Sharlet introduces us to the concept of “Jesus plus nothing,” which, if there can be such a thing, seems to be the underlying Family philosophy. The concept, as you read, gradually unfolds itself. The idea is that people don’t use/hurt/etc. people. People, in fact, don’t do anything. They are used by God for God’s ends. Jesus plus nothing means power, the slow build of power to be used for a few. The truly frightening prospect about this concept is how, via events like the Prayer Breakfast, via associations with “liberal” politicians like Hillary Clinton–who need The Family or some gloss of religion in order to climb to power and stay there–is how The Family has managed, through diplomatic, backroom conversations, private, small cells for the powerful, and relationships with corporations extending as far back as Abram’s earliest tenure, to mainstream fundamentalism.

Again, this is simply skimming the surface (I didn’t even get to the Fellowship/Family change and how that coincided with the influx of “family values” onto the domestic political agenda). I have the final section to read, and after a summary of that section, I’ll write a more complete summation of my thoughts. In my head, I’m calling it the Totally Wigged Out By The Puppet Strings Really Controlling The World Review.

I got some interesting responses, the general consensus being, if you truly believe that health care reform will mean mandated sex change surgeries, then please stay over there, far away from me.

But a couple of people asked me, why, even with the corporate-backing, if I like to consider myself a small-d democrat, a die for your right to say it type, was I so up in arms about the crowds at the Town Halls? Weren’t they merely reveling in their right to protest–right to disrupt, even–just like my heroes in the Civil Rights Movement?

The answer is yes and no. I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about this, and I will spend some more time on this after I post this. The right to protest is sacred, absolutely. Even irrational, multi-decibel, ill-informed protests are protected. You wanna show up at a Town Hall and yell at a Congressman that Obama’s secretly a space alien from the planet Grabthar and Michelle is totally 10,000 years old? Go for it. I will party for your right to fight. “Death panels,” “My America!” “eugenics,” whatever. Bring the crazy.

The problem I have is this: these protests as we have seen them thus far are conducted with an anti-democratic spirit. In 1964, Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement echoed Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience as the students under his direction staged a massive strike and sit-in at Sproul Hall on campus—the climactic moment of a struggle between students and administration for on-campus political speech that established the enduring model for student political activity. Savio, addressing students, reporters, and administrators, declared, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” Hurling himself into the cogs of the apparatus, Savio—assisted by hundreds more whose names will never grace a history book—rose from a miasma of oppression and repression to ignite a firestorm of change.

Now, “you’ve got to make it stop” can easily, if you’re not thinking, be equated with “shut it down,” the essential theme of the Town Hall protesters, borrowed from the Brooks Brothers Riot during the Bush-Gore 2000 recount. Yet, there is a fundamental difference between the two at the heart.

The Sproul Hall protest was, as I mentioned above, done without the completely anti-democratic spirit that has come to characterize the Town Halls this month. Rather, Savio and the Berkeley students were firmly entrenched in the essence of democracy. They wanted a right to speak, a right to protest, and right to distribute literature and material on the CRM. The current Town Halls, like I wrote in my previous entry on this subject, seek to prevent a discussion from occurring. They are instructed, by right-wing groups, on the best way to derail a Town Hall. Part of my strenuous objection to these phony grassroots “protests” does have to do with their repeat a lie often enough strategy (“OMG, secret plan to kill old people!”), but my primary objection is that–despite the genuine opposition that may exist among most of these protesters to reform (the ones who aren’t stupid enough to wear their Anthem/Blue Cross-Blue Shield polo to the event or claim to be “just a mother from a few blocks away” with no political affiliation when in fact she worked for the MoC’s opponent in the 2008 election and was the county vice-chair of the GOP)–when viewed as a whole, these mobs function as a deterrent to democratic institutions.

In short, these Town Hall protests are the funhouse mirror version of Savio, of Saul Alinsky, of Rev. James Lawson.

I have a secondary problem, which is that it is very easy to jump from images of Obama-as-Hitler, comparing health care reform to the Final Solution, SS signs and Nazi insignia, to someone out there believing that it would be okay, even applauded, if they were to graduate from yelling at a pro-reform politician to shooting at him. Our recent history is littered with such examples of over-heated rhetoric driving an unhinged individual to see the political “other side” as sub-human–Tim McVeigh, the murder of George Tiller–but the Godwin’s Law governed territory of the President photoshopped with a Hitler mustache, t-shirts that read “Hitler Gave Good Speeches Too,” toddlers in strollers holding signs bearing swastikas is something else entirely. It is not just your everyday over-the-top political rhetoric, “everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and also immoral,” two guys screaming at each other on Hardball; it is dangerous.

Comparing the two–the Civil Rights Movement, Savio and the FSM, liberal activists pushing for a voice and these corporate-backed, most often ill-informed, anti-health care protesters–plays the false equivalency game that is frequently done in the media in order to avoid cries of bias. Well, sometimes one side is wrong. And we should say so.

Across the country, Town Hall events held by Members of Congress for the ostensible purpose of discussing health care reform are being hijacked by angry anti-reform mobs whose sole purpose is not to express their opposition, but to end the discussion. By yelling. About all kinds of insanity. And holding up signs using Nazi and Communist insignia directed at the Member or the President. A good portion of these people aren’t constituents of the Member, they are riled up, and given instructions, by lobbying groups with ties to the health care industry.

And there’s the part that should make you shudder. Firms like Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, a lobbying group heavily tied to the health care industry, are emailing out Town Hall Alerts, so that events Members of Congress specifically set aside during the recess to have a conversation with their constituents can be divebombed by activists. Freedom Works, another group with ties to DC lobbying firms, provides instructions on its website on how best to intimidate and obstruct discourse and discussion at Town Halls. (I’d link to these organization’s websites, but I don’t want them tainting my browser history. So here’s a Plum Line link on CPR’s rush to take credit for the mobs.)

The problem is essentially this: these lobbyist-backed eruptions at Town Halls are a disruption. Not just in the sense that they are disrupting the particular Member of Congress and the discussion he or she is having with his or her constituents at that moment, it is designed to disrupt–suspend–block–the democratic process itself.

I am a proud Capital-D Democrat, but what I revere more than party are the small-d democratic principles of free discussion and civil discourse. This is a disturbing, corporate sponsored assault on those principles.

These are all things that the rational know and have expressed in various outlets and in various levels of vitriol. So what do we do about it?

First, Democrats and progressives must be aggressive. Get out there. Don’t let them out-organize us. We can’t be passive about this, no matter how ridiculous they seem. Retreat is a terrible option. Yes, retreat, like what Indiana Congressman Brad Ellsworth (Evansville, Terre Haute) has decided to do. I’ve met Congressman Ellsworth. I disagree with him on a few issues, but I find him to be a decent, principled man. But, according to The Plum Line, his office has announced that in anticipation of these kinds of angry crowds, he has canceled a public appearance in favor of what reads like professorial “office hours” at his district office.

Indiana Dem Rep Brad Ellsworth’s office confirms to me that worries about disruptions from the Tea Party brigade have led him to rejigger a program that he’d been successfully using to assist seniors and vets who were having trouble getting their Federal benefits.

Here’s how the program worked. Ellsworth would peridocally station himself at a public place in his district — at a grocery store, for instance — to answer questions from constituents, such as seniors and veterans wrestling with bureaucracy. Ellsworth was set to do this tomorrow.

But he concluded that Tea Party activists were likely to hijack the event by shouting about health care, so he cancelled the public appearance. “Our concern was that some of these same groups that have been disrupting other public events would also prevent these constituent events from taking place,” Ellsworth spokesperson Liz Farrar tells me.

Instead, Ellsworth is making himself available tomorrow at his district office. But the rub is that seniors and veterans will now have to go to his office, whereas before they might have encountered him while running daily errands. This could mean some folks don’t seek advice they need, Farrar confirms, though the public program will eventually be revived.

Congressman, don’t let the mere possibility of these people force you to retreat. Be aggressive.

Second, sunlight is best antiseptic. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, many of the McCain-Palin campaign’s rallies–mostly presided over by Sarah Palin, Former Governor Tracy Flick herself–were the site of angry, racist, scary outbursts from the assembled crowd. Audience members yelled out, among other bon mots, “Kill Him!” and “Terrorist!” And, yes, they were referring to President Obama. The McCain-Palin campaign failed to realize that the more footage that rolled on local and national news broadcasts of Sarah Palin standing at a podium smiling and winking while an audience member screamed “Kill Him!,” the more turned off voters became and the more independents became solid Obama voters. This angry hooliganism is the brother of those McCain-Palin audiences. Put them on TV. Spin them around the Internet. Point them out. Shine a spotlight. The ugliness will become more apparent under that light.

This is thuggery. It is bullying. It isn’t a discussion. It is preventing that there is a discussion at all. This is anti-democratic, and it must be stopped. As important as health care is as a policy issue, not allowing this hooliganism to work as a tactic (which would mean that it would be used again and more often) is much more important.

(Or, you know, I could have just embedded last night’s episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, which was pretty much an extended beatdown of these hooligans. But in that nice, polite, Rachel way.)

I played basketball in high school, for one of the best girls’ programs in the nation. And by “played,” I mean “sat my 5’4″ ass on the bench while the future college stars on my team ran us to an undefeated record and a state championship, only getting playing time when we were up by 30 with 3:00 to go in the fourth quarter–which happened more often than you’d think it would in girls’ high school basketball.” The only reason I played is because I fell in ever-lasting, stupid, crazy love with the game watching IU play as a young kid. I wanted to do what I saw Calbert Cheaney, or Steve Alford, or Damon Bailey do on my TV.

The old Cream and Crimson has fallen on hard times lately. On September 10, 2000–yes, I remember the date exactly; it was two weeks into my freshman year and one year+one day before 9/11 (one of the few details that penetrated my 9/11 fugue state to stick with me from that day were the special Knight/One Year Later editions of the Indiana Daily Student left on the floors of the lecture halls overnight)–Bob Knight was fired. His replacement, Mike Davis, enjoyed a brief flare of success, taking the Hoosiers to the 2002 NCAA Championship Game, before eventually stepping down. His replacement, Kelvin Sampson, ARRGH…. I can’t even.

The man who is tasked with repairing the damage done by Sampson’s treating the program’s integrity like a blindfolded five-year-old whacking at a pinata is current head coach Tom Crean.

Tom Crean is like a preacher whose religion is Hoosier Basketball. His Twitter feed–especially this summer–reads like the Gospel of Bloomington, proselytizing to the faithful about the IU basketball tradition, about its future, about the dedication of its fans, about the recruiting process, even about the fundamentals of basketball.

Last year our home attendance was ranked 16th in the Nation. As bad as our record was we still averaged 14,331 passionate fans.

In 2008-2009, Crean’s first season, the Hoosiers went 6-25 (1-17 Big Ten). The team was young, learning, over-whelmed with new information, and it showed. They looked like confused baby deer on the court a good portion of the time, skittish, unsure of what their own bodies could do, staring down the big bad hunters in the green Spartans jerseys. Yet, Hoosier Nation still packed Assembly Hall. With a young team, Crean is more than head coach; he is head cheerleader, and tweets like this show that he has embraced that place and has not forgotten to remind the fans of their role in this rebuilding process.

So does this:

I see [Twitter] as a great way for all of you to learn more about the inner workings of our players and program.

Despite the fact that he freely admits that Don Henley is one of the best concerts he has ever seen, I can’t help it. I’ve gulped down the Kool-Aid. I think I spilled some on my shirt. I think the guy’s exactly right for IU. For one thing, it’s nice to see a coach have the proper respect and reverence for the program and its place in history, however hard Knight and Sampson worked to taint that. And for another, I love that he has remained accessible to the fanbase while freely admitting that rebuilding is going to be hard.

Even though we are light years from having the right team leadership and maturity, i cant wait for the season.

Neither can I, Coach.

Yeah, I know it’s August and I’ve written two posts in a week about basketball. In my world, it’s always basketball season. Also, I’m taking a hour or two mental health break from reading The Family. Humor me, possible readership.