Don't get carried away

Mom says we should support our boys.\n She was talking about the game. The basketball game. But she might as well have been talking about any number of conflicts going on around the world. I am often told I should be better about supporting our boys in Afghanistan. I wonder if I should do the same for our boys in Yemen, training that country's army. Or our boys at Guantanamo Bay, guarding the interminably imprisoned Taliban soldiers, force-feeding the hunger strikers who are protesting their uncertain fate. And then there's the ultimate boy we're all supposed to be supporting: Our boy wonder in the White House.\nI heard him on the radio the other day. Pitiful. The man can't speak. That's the fact of the matter, regardless of what anyone says about the President having stepped up to the plate, grown into his job and learned on the fly.\nThat's why it's irritating every time someone tells me that we ought to be supporting our boys. Of course we support the individual soldiers, but our boys do create a marvelous buffer between the administration's mush-mouthed leader and the consequences of his decisions; once the president sends in "our boys," it seems that we can't complain about the objectives of their mission without being accused of disrespecting their self-sacrifice and courage.\nThat's ridiculous. It's the lamest firewall between a president and responsibility I have ever seen, but it's working like a miracle. We are supposedly fighting a war, and are ostensibly on high alert for more terror attacks. There is a catastrophic war going in the Middle East. After foolishly pulling out of peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Bush administration is now grudgingly, bumblingly trying to make up for lost time.\nAnd yet the pep band keeps playing for the president, whose approval numbers dip but don't plunge. Maybe when the four horsemen of the apocalypse come riding out of the West Bank, someone will take notice…\nBut no, we've got to support our boys.\nThat works for basketball, but I'm not sure it's a slogan that furthers a rational foreign policy, or even a reasonable debate about the administration's loopy logic.\nAnd when we're not being asked to support our boys, we're being told to listen to God.\nCoach Davis has a strange habit of thanking God for our basketball victories. I was brought up to believe that God divided his time between world peace, curing the sick, and punishing little boys who wouldn't go to bed on time. As much as I would like to think that God is on our side when the Hoosiers sweep down the court, I think it's ridiculous to assume that God's going to make a choice between teams. Or that God cares about basketball at all.\nThe same goes for the old U.S. of A. This administration in particular has insisted that God has chosen sides in the war against terrorism, against the Taliban and against Palestine on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and alternating Thursdays, with divine condemnation directed against Ariel Sharon the rest of the time.\nI happen to think that God is on the side of the children being blown to smithereens, or shot on their way to school. And on the side of our boys, thrown out into the world by a president who I'm not convinced understands that world.\nThank heavens for the circus on Kirkwood, our boys on the court and for God's favorite ball game. It does not even feel like there's a war on.