My Head Asplode!!

It's almost funny. Here comes a bus. Soon my fellow progressives and I will be thrown unceremoniously under it. The last ten days it's almost as if the purpose of going to a bus stop is to be run over by oncoming omnibuses: climate change, health care, Afghanistan. You name it. Name a progressive cause and it's been squished in the past two weeks. And if it hasn't, if you can think of one that is not now looking like a beer can reconfigured by an oncoming locomotive, just wait tell next week.

I could react with anger to these developments. Certainly not with surprise. For example, I almost reacted in anger just a few moments ago when I read this in the New York Times:

Independent Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman says he expects to support the Democrats' health care legislation as long as any government-run insurance plan stays out of the bill.

Lieberman has been a question mark on the health care legislation for months. To win him over, Senate leaders said late Monday they were backing away from a Medicare expansion Lieberman opposed. They already had dropped a full-blown government insurance program.

Lieberman told reporters Tuesday that if the Medicare expansion and government insurance plan are gone, ''I'm going to be in a position where I can say what I've wanted to say all along: that I'm ready to vote for health care reform.''

Senate leaders need Lieberman's support to secure 60 votes necessary to advance the legislation in the 100-member Senate.

Isn't that great? We somehow went from single payer universal health care (that could never pass, they said) to a robust public option (that could never pass, they said) to a weak tea public option for the select few all of whom live down the block (that could never pass, they said) to a medicare buy-in (that could never pass, they said), to nothing (which evidently Uncle Joe approves and which can easily pass because, well, because it's nothing and nothing is what we have now so it's easy to pass).

Remind me if you can why I voted in 2006 and 2008 for Democrats? Remind me, if you're really creative, why 70% of the population wants health care and they're just not gonna get it. Maybe I'm forgetful. As I said, I almost got angry about this.

I also almost got angry last night when I heard two Democratic Senators on Maddow and Keith explain how much progressives had helped with the HCR bill and how even if it didn't have a public option or a medicare buy in or anything else of any value to people who actually need health care and insurance, it was still an enormous victory because, get this, it will provide a foundation for the future. And in the future we can build upon the foundation (if you like this metaphor). And soon on this foundation there will be a 1700' tall, glistening sky scraper, a beacon to the nation if not the world, called Universal Health Care and you, my dear friends, can even go in an visit the lobby of this edifice. Soon, of course, is a term of art. It means a time between now and the next, distant ice age. You can visit the magnificent structure for which you have provided the foundation if you can live to be 200 years old without adequate health insurance. I personally am not taking this as a bet. Are you kidding me? This is truly a case in which legislative nothing is claimed to be governmental something. So I was almost getting angry. And thinking of things I could do to get even (I'm like that. I don't apologize for being like that). I'm a Buddhist, but revenge did cross my mind and perch on my eyebrows like a carrion vulture.

Then I recalled some recent pacifying remarks by Pinche Tejano. His remarks were to the effect that it was all just a computer game and should be treated as such (his analysis was far more eloquent and intelligible than this very basic boil down of his very subtle and correct idea). So I began to think about all of this electoral politics as just a game. I couldn't get mad about a game that was obviously rigged so that I couldn't get to the next level, so that I would have an EPIC FAIL. What's to get mad about that? It happens all the time. Especially to people like me with no game skillz. No game cred. In a word, losers. Suckers. I'm used to being pwned by games. I don't like losing, but I don't get mad about it. It beat the hell out of being almost angry about politics. Yeah. All of a sudden all of this electoral politics and senate politics and astroturf movements and Joe Lieberman made sense. It was all just like son of Pac Man. It was finally sensible. Even to me.

And that's when my head asploded.

It's just like this:



How did I know that Strongbad was so prescient? How did I know that Home Star Runner was really equipping me for the future of politics? My head asploded.

Ebbsfleet United!!! My Football Club!!!!

Ebbsfleet (in red) Beats Torquay in the FA Trophy Final

Imagine my surprise, when today's New York Times reported on Ebbsfleet United, the football (that's soccer to the gringos) club that is owned by its fans, including me. The Times writes:

LONDON — Wembley Stadium is usually the stage for some of the most glamorous names in soccer, yet 26,000 spectators were there in May, most of them clad in red and white to support tiny Ebbsfleet United in a cup final match against Torquay United. It was an incredible turnout for such a small team, considering that many had never heard of it until a few months earlier, when they got together over the Internet and decided to buy it.

Watching from the stands was Will Brooks, the architect of one of the world’s most unusual sports experiments.

“Twelve months ago this was all a dream, and now we’ve gone to Wembley,” he said.

For Brooks and the rest of Ebbsfleet’s fans/owners, the trip was a success. Their team prevailed, 1-0, and won the F.A. Trophy for English soccer’s equivalent of minor league clubs — the biggest prize in Ebbsfleet’s 116-year history.

Brooks, a 37-year-old former advertising copywriter, set up a Web site in 2007 called MyFootballClub.co.uk that asked a simple question: how many people would be interested in pooling their money to buy a soccer club, so that ordinary fans could vote on every decision, from uniform design to player selection? More than $400,000 was raised on the first day of public registration.

The Web fantasy became reality when members voted in February to take over Ebbsfleet United, a tiny, unsuccessful club in southeast England, for slightly less than $1 million.

MyFootballClub has about 31,000 members/owners from all over the world (including the author of this article), all of whom pay an annual subscription of about $60 to be a member of the nonprofit trust that owns “the Fleet.”

And most important, one of the 31,000 members/owner from all over the world is your truly.

Why would somebody do this, you might ask? Why would somebody spend the princely sum of $60 +/- per year to own a share of a professional sports team, especially an English football team that is four five divisions below the Premier League? And why would somebody proudly wear an owner/manager t-shirt for Ebbsfleet?

This is the kind of thing that, if you don't get it instantly, it's very hard to explain. It might even be impossible to explain if it doesn't light you up on hearing it.

I love the game. I love the game in its disorganized, pick up form, and in its most star filled, regimented, corporate package. I love the game when the ball is made of rags and duct tape. I love the game when it's played before 50,000 screaming fans. And I love the game at all the spots in between. I'd rather watch re-runs of Boca Juniors playing River Plate in the rain in a scoreless tie than most professional US football (pigskin) games.

So the chance to play a new role in the game, as if I were a small scale Sir Alex or George Steinbrenner or Roman Abramovich, is just delicious. It's fantastically exciting! Let's face it, I can make some room in the upper arcana of teams I like to follow for Ebbsfleet United, of which I am a proud owner.

And to top it off, I'm delighted to bring this kind of inexpensive, democratic ownership to sport. After all is said and done, Ebbsfleet United is a great experiment and I want to see it succeed. It's something great that the Internet has made possible. Its success will inspire other groups of people to own other clubs. We will slowly take ownership of the sport back from the undeserving, spoiled, greedy billionaires, spread it around, and make it a widespread, public phenomenon.

You can get involved in this too. Click this.