The Stupid Bowl

It was this writer's hope that the Philadelphia Eagles and the Tennessee Titans would have prevailed in yesterday's NFL conference championship games, giving us the first Super Bowl meeting in which both teams started Black quarterbacks. That would have made for a nice Martin Luther King Day article, especially on the heels of the first-round AFC playoff game between the Jets and the Colts this year, marking the first time two Black head coaches had met in a post-season contest.

And that would have all tied in nicely with the fact that our Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an African-American, had a few comments made public today. It turns out he is openly opposed to President Bush's filing of a brief in the upcoming University of Michigan Supreme Court case, the White House weighing in against that school's admissions policies, which are tilted somewhat in favor of minorities. And then there is Bush's announcement that the federal government, even during a "wartime" deficit, is increasing by five percent the amount of money to be given away for grants to Black colleges and Hispanic institutions of higher learning. So Bush doesn't support affirmative action, but he does support a thinly veiled form of segregation. Hmmm ...

But the Raiders and the Buccaneers won, setting up a great Super Bowl, with former Oakland coach Jon Gruden returning to California to face his former team. This is the Raiders' first trip to the big dance since the 1983 season, when they whipped the John Riggins-led (and heavily favored) Washington Redskins, 38-9. But they were playing in Los Angeles back then. Three years before that, as the Oakland Raiders, they pounded the Ron Jaworski-led (and heavily favored) Eagles, 27-10. So for Oakland fans, this is a long-awaited moment. For Tampa Bay, it's a complete first for a franchise that only came to being in 1976, and lost its first 26 games. A young Doug Williams, who eventually became the first Black quarterback to start in a Super Bowl (for Washington in 1987), gave them a glimpse of playoff success in 1979, but then the franchise settled into a long malaise that ended yesterday.

So there it is, the big game. Don't bet against Oakland, that's all I can tell you, based on a couple of bad experiences from a long time ago, especially if the other team is favored to win by the odds-makers. And don't forget about the two white quarterbacks, which makes it a normal game when it could have been something special, which means I can't really write about that today. There has to be something else.

And of course there is. It crawled across the bottom of the screen in one of those little news lines on one of those little news channels. I couldn't find it anywhere else this morning, but here it is: The United States has deployed military personnel in Israel, working with them on their Patriot-style missile defense system. It was announced that the troops would stay in Israel for the duration of the "situation" in Iraq. That jibes nicely with the AP report that one of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's advisors finds the latest U.S.-backed Middle East peace plan to be "unrealistic". But with an election at the end of this month, and his good name sullied by a financial scandal, some might say the same about Sharon's political viability.

Never mind that the presence of our grunts (even if only techie-grunts) on Israeli soil is guaranteed to stir up major anti-American sentiment among Muslims in the region; forget the hypocrisy of Israeli acquiescence to U.S. troops for missile defense, but not to U.N. peacekeepers to stand in between the Jews and the Arabs. Ignore the fact that Israel is under no pressure to ease up in their totalitarian occupation of the Palestinians. Disregard all of that; it is quite clearly duplicitous and irreconcilable for a nation as great as ours to attack one country for violating U.N. resolutions, while at the same time rendering military assistance to the country next door that does the same thing. While we may be able to get away with it based on our stance of Colossus, astride the rest of this world, it ruins our credibility and eats away at our diplomatic capital for the future ... and we're going to need it as this Bush thing wears on.

With Tony Blair being quaked by his own supporters over his lockstep-march alongside Bush in the direction of war with Iraq, we find less and less support abroad for this operation as time goes by. And at home, Bush is losing more and more of the hill of beans that amounts to his approval rating because of his overcooked domestic agenda. Despite the fact that U.N. weapons inspectors keep finding warheads and such, the world is actually backing away from us now. And even with all that military equipment and all those men already in place, we hear Don Rumsfeld saying this, the most conciliatory statement to fall from his lips since his wedding day:

"To avoid a war (in Iraq), I would personally recommend that some provision be made so that the senior leadership in that country and their families could be provided haven in some other country." Ah. And who is it that should be making said provisions? And what does that say about the Bush Doctrine? Not exactly the wording one might find on an old Texas "WANTED" poster. Sanity such as this is always a welcome (and surprising) development within the Administration, but it no doubt galls the starchy conservative base that has been snapping up the war bait for over a year now.

Football, war, it's all in season. The difference is, next year, all the teams in the NFL get to start out with a 0-0 record, a clean slate. For the nations of the world, there are no playoff games, only a seriously terrible version of the Super Bowl. We are always the heavy favorite there, whether we are Raiders or Buccaneers. All that really matters, I suppose, is the final score.