XLVII - Brothers in Arms

After falling one game short last year, the Harbaugh brothers will become the first brothers to coach against each other in the Super Bowl. Jim's San Francisco 49ers will take on John's Baltimore Ravens in the Superdome in New Orleans February 3rd, 2013 so the game has been given various monickers on the theme: the Har Bowl, Harbaugh Bowl and the Super Baugh. Having grown up in Canada I was inundated with American culture of which the NFL is as integral a part as McDonald's, Coca-Cola and peanut butter. Despite being thousands of miles away I still get a monthly hankering for a Big Mac and Coke, make sure there's a jar of peanut butter in the cupboard and find a way to watch American football most every Sunday from September to February. I've watched games from the Hilton in Sana'a, playoff games at a TGIF in Quito and Super Bowls on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, in smoky bars from Madrid to Cracow and even from poolside in Varadero, Cuba. The game is larger than life much like America itself yet it's hard not to notice the dark clouds forming. Disease is causing worrying cracks to appear on the surface and in the infrastructure of players' brains and America itself which are seen as behavioral problems but are indicative of a deeper psychological illness threatening to bring both the game and the nation crashing down.

First Quarter - Season Review

While my team predictions for the year proved once again that I'm a much better annotator/commentator than prognosticator, I was quite prescient in choosing the rookie quarterback theme for my preseason post. Along with the Broncos riding the right arm of Peyton Manning and Adrian Peterson's stunning return to form for the Vikings leading both teams to the playoffs, the rookie quintet were the story of the year as they might be the best QB draft class since 1983. If Brandon Weeden weren't a rookie QB about to turn 30, his year would have held more promise, but as usual, the Browns are probably stuck with something shy of mediocrity. Ryan Tannehill may not have had the impact of the big three, but he still provided hope that #17, the 17th QB to start since Dan Marino retired from the Dolphins in 1999, will be around awhile and lead the team to the playoffs someday.

The big three rookies QBs were, simply put, amazing. No, electrifying. Wait, not quite. Prodigious, spectacular and wondrous. No one was too surprised by Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III (RG3), the numbers one and two picks in the draft for the Colts and Redskins respectively, but the Seahawks' Russell Wilson came out of nowhere. Seattle coach Pete Carroll's decision to go with the 5'10" Wilson, picked five spots after a punter in the 3rd round, over Matt Flynn, a guy they paid millions for in the off-season, turned out to be the coaching decision of the year. A 26/10 TD-to-Int ratio (+16, a rookie record and TD tally tying Peyton Manning's rookie record), four more TDs on the ground and a 100 QB rating helped lift his team to the playoffs where they won the wildcard game and lost a heartbreaking comeback thriller to the Falcons. Having grown up in the west, I was forced to watch Seattle games more afternoons than I care to remember which is why they became known to me as the Shithawks. Watching Wilson this year has me rethinking that name.

The losing side in Wilson's wildcard win was RG3's Washington Redskins. I got to see a few of his games last year including a week 17 playoff-clinching victory over the Cowboys in which he humiliated Dallas on one leg. Over the course of the year he threw for 3,200 yards and 20 touchdowns while rushing for 815 yards and seven more scores. He just looked so in control of every situation, always seeming to know he had an extra gear to outrun a pass rusher or the arm strength to get the ball past a defender. Well, he did. We'll have to wait until after surgery to find out if Mike Shanahan's decision to allow him to play hurt, and then blaming a doctor, has any long term effects. Meanwhile, Andrew Luck's Colts seemed to be out of it when their head coach Chuck Pagano was diagnosed with leukemia at the start of the year. Well, that went into remission and by the time he got back for the last game of the year, his rookie QB had guided his team to the playoffs. He completely turned around a 2-14 team as his rookie record 4,375 passing yards helped the Colts to an 11-5 finish. Clearly, it's a tough year to pick the offensive rookie of the year.

Elsewhere in the league, JJ Watt was dominant on D for the Texans, helping Houston deep into the playoffs and will win the defensive player of the year award. As mentioned, the Broncos and Vikings exceeded expectations meaning Peyton will be league  MVP and AP or All-Day, AKA the Purple Jesus will be offensive player of the year. Or vice-versa. Manning's Broncos won 11 straight at one point on the strength of his 4,659/37/11 (yards/TD/int) season after sitting out an entire year and having four neck surgeries while Peterson fell 9 yards shy of breaking Eric Dickerson's single season rushing record, tackled just short on the one year anniversary of surgery for his torn ACL in the second final play of the final game to finish with 2,097 yards. The over-priced and hyped Detroit Lions crashed and burned  but Megatron, WR Calvin Johnson, soared, breaking the single season reception yardage mark with 1,964 but won't get MVP consideration as much of it is seen as having been in garbage time.

The Eagles did the opposite of soaring in Philadelphia leading to coach Andy Reid being fired and then hired by the Kansas City Chiefs almost immediately. As my buddy texted, I wish I could screw up so bad and still get a job so fast. The Falcons once again dominated in the regular season while the Saints couldn't without Sean Payton. The Bengals looked less like the Bungles in making the playoffs while their AFC North rival Steelers fell to mediocrity. Both the Giants and Bears seemed headed for the playoffs only for the wheels to come off late while the Packers went the other way, starting slow and finishing strong. And my Cowboys? Well, at least they're not as bad as the Jaguars or Chiefs but once again couldn't finish the season and didn't make the playoff.

Second Quarter - "It's war. They're out there to kill you, so I'm out there to kill them. ... I'm a soldier."
      - Then 20-year-old Kellen Winslow, former 1st round pick, current free agent TE

Of course none of the previously mentioned QBs will take the field in this year's Super Bowl. Nor will there be a Brees, Brady, Rogers or another Manning, names conventional wisdom held you needed on your roster for success in today's pass-happy NFL, but Flacco and Kaepernick instead. The former, Joe, who may have the strongest arm in the league and is the only quarterback to bring his team to the playoffs in his first five seasons, winning at least a game in each, will lead the Ravens against the later, Colin, a second year dual threat monster thrust into starting duty midway through the season after starter Alex Smith went down to injury. Even though Niners' coach Harbaugh's decision to stick with Kaepernick after Smith's recovery despite having led his team to a 6-2 record was the key decision to get his team to the big game and the fact the league is now ruled by the QB position, it will be the defenses that will most likely determine the winner come Sunday.

The Niners have arguably the best defense in football while it seems the Ravens have been a perennial defensive powerhouse. San Francisco was the number two defense in points allowed this year and are led by pass rushing DE Aldon Smith (league leading and most by any player since the NFL started tracking in 1982 35.5 sacks over the last two years), run stopping DE Justin Smith, a strong secondary which includes Carlos Rogers and two first team All-Pro inside linebackers, Patrick Willis and NaVorro Bowman. Meanwhile, the Ravens defense disappointed most of the year. After being a top ten defense for more than a decade they fell to 17th in yards allowed but much of the blame for that stat was how long they were kept on the field this year - 1,342 plays so far this season, including the playoffs, the most for any team dating back to 2001, with the Super Bowl winning 2011 Giants being the only other team with more than 1,300. The aging group is still anchored by run-stuffing DE Haloti Ngata, S Ed Reed whose eight career post-season interceptions is one short of the record, LB Terrell Suggs with a couple of playoff sacks showing he's recovered from injury, and of course MLB Ray Lewis.

Deservedly, Lewis will be one of the big stories this Super Bowl as he tries to follow up his 2000 Super Bowl win and go out in style by winning his second as he retires after the game. After recovering from the awful sounding torn triceps suffered October 14th (perhaps using the banned substance IGF-1, a compound found in deer antlers that reportedly stimulates muscle growth), he's been his dominant self registering the most tackles in the playoffs, 44. Like it or not, he's the face of the Ravens and maybe even the game regardless of how much eye black he applies. His introduction dance may annoy most, his "no weapons" post-Bronco victory interview may have confused everyone, and his god's plan speeches and constant prayer antics may make Tim Tebow look like an atheist, but there's no denying his talent as his 13 Pro Bowls and two defensive player of the year awards attest. He's never fully explained his role in the murder that occurred during Super Bowl week in Atlanta before their victory 13 years ago. We'll probably never know why the victim's blood was found in his limo or why he fled the scene but all is forgiven as he's born again. He epitomizes the confused Christian, mixing metaphors of sports, religion and war. Not only did he once describe himself as a warrior he was given a real purple heart from a soldier wounded in Operation Enduring Freedom, aka Operation Perpetual War and will be sure to be praying before, during and after the game with the cameras following his every move.

"In football, the object is for the quarterback, otherwise known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack which punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line."

While these words were spoken by George Carlin less than a quarter century ago, war metaphors in sports have been around as long as sport itself as throughout history sport and militarism have been inseparable. Achilles held funeral games in honor of his friend Patroclus; the ancient Olympics featured races in full armor to build up speed and stamina for military purposes, the marathon is named for the 42.195 km run from Marathon to Athens made by a messenger to warn of Persian attack; Waterloo was won, the Duke of Wellington famously remarked, on the rugby fields of Eton; Walter Camp, the father of American football, spoke of football teams as "armies," of the kicking game as "artillery work," and of coaching as "generalship." While American football's rounder, more foot friendly cousin, football, may have led to an actual war, no other sport is as entwined with the military as what Europeans would call handegg. The Army and Navy college football teams were traditional powers for much of the 20th century while the "flying wedge", a formation in which large numbers of offensive players charged as a unit against a similarly arranged defense (resulting in quite a few on field deaths), was devised by Lorin Deland in 1892 after studying Napoleon's military campaigns.

The biggest contribution of today's NFL to war is the power of propaganda. One would have to excuse an outsider looking in on the game for mixing up the game with a military recruitment video. From the presentation of the flag to the air force fly over to the singing of the national anthem (Alicia Keys tries to avoid the Christina Aguilera disaster), the players, crowd and viewers are whipped into a jingoistic frenzy before the game has even begun. At some point the audience will be reminded that the game is being beamed by satellite to their brave troops protecting American freedom at home by occupying abroad in 175 countries and aboard Navy ships at sea. Don't forget about the barrage of commercials throughout the game promoting the US Navy as a "Global Force for Good", the Marine Corp "defending the American way of life or the US Army's ad inviting the unwitting to try on "the jersey of the greatest team on Earth".

Don't forget the "Salute to Service" campaign conceived to "strengthen the relationship between NFL teams and the military community" in which teams wear decals on their helmets with the insignia of the U.S. Armed Forces. You couldn't miss the not-so-subtle switch from the pink to camo as the NFL went from breast cancer awareness month to celebrating Veterans Day by branding goal post wraps and pylons with camouflage ribbon decals, wall banners and the words Salute to Service written in the back of the end zone (Except for Washington and Kansas City that is, you know the whole cultural sensitivity thing, the US military having massacred many a Redskin and Chief). Well, at least you can get cool gloves to play war games while playing football! Now that "valor knows no gender" and women will be allowed in combat roles instead of just victims of rape maybe next year they'll go with pink camo.

The commentary of military and football analysts and the methods deployed to illustrate football and war became indistinguishable during Super Bowl XXV, played January 27th, 1991, just days after the beginning of the coalition bombing in Gulf War I. Whitney Houston's rendition of the the Star Spangled Banner that year, which hit the pop charts and turned her into a hero, was interspersed with several shots of flag-and-sign-waving fans, many of them homemade red, white, and blue posters announcing "America's Best Citizens Support our G.I.s," "God Bless America," and "Go USA," literally signs of support for the war. There were also dissolves to soldiers on the field, including a close-up of an African-American marine and tracking shots of several rows of enlisted men and women on the field holding the flags of various coalition countries. The Disney-themed New Kids on the Block half time show was preceded and followed by Peter Jennings news segments reassuring the public the Patriot missiles were intercepting SCUDS, the untested troops were ready for the still vaunted Republican Guard and that "Yes, men and women in the war zone have been able to see the first half" followed by a cut to a shot of Whitney overlayed with "The Gulf War: Super Bowl".

Is it "hopelessly Chomskian" to think the timing of the initial air strikes on Afghanistan after 9/11, about a half-hour before kickoff of Sunday's early games October 7th, was more than a coincidence? The New York Times wrote that news of the strikes "came on a pristine fall Sunday, 'a perfect day for football,' as the announcers like to say, just as many people were sitting down in front of their television sets for their weekly dose of gridiron glory." New York Senator Chuck Schumer had just suggested moving the Super Bowl to Giants Stadium stating "I can think of no better way to send a message to the terrorists". The games weren't preempted by war coverage, why would they be? Millions of red-blooded Americans parked in front of their propaganda screens with testosterone pumping could prove they supported the troops by watching Dubya's speech, a little network anchor commentary, and have the coverage get back to the Colts and Patriots on CBS or the Vikings and Saints on Fox, missing only a minute and 26 seconds of the latter game.

Imagine the power this drumbeat has, so powerful it convinced former Cardinal Pro Bowl linebacker Pat Tillman to walk away from the millions and glory of the NFL to enlist to defend his country first in the occupation of Iraq then be redeployed to get murdered by his own side in Afghanistan. Only America could turn his death into a recruitment moment. In life he opined to a friend "I don't want them to parade me through the streets" but in death, despite his opposition to Dubya and the Iraq war which he called "illegal as hell" and an act of "imperial whim", that's exactly what they've done. Following the Jessica Lynch script, a GI Joe story was concocted for the original report of Tillman's death as the puppet masters realize the initial bogus story carries vastly more weight in public opinion than the eventual corrective.

Halftime - Of Instant Replay and Beyonce (hey, it's better than a souffle baked by Timothy McVeigh)

Though a primitive version was used by the CBC during a hockey game in 1955, true instant replay didn't come to sport and the world until December 7th, 1963 when CBS Sports Director Tony Verna rigged up a 1200 pound machine to perform the Instantaneous Time Travel to the Past via Videotape magic for what else, an Army-Navy college football game. Try to imagine watching a game today without it. You can only fill the voids in play with so many cheerleader shots and endless chatter. Additionally, it has become a fundamental part of the rules of the game as replay reviews popped up over 26 years ago, coaches challenges began in 1999 and have spread to other sports from the NBA to the NHL and tennis. Ironically, or not, live TV in the US also died with football thanks to the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII when Justin Timberlake whipped out Janet Jackson's right tit sparking nipplegate. Sure, 111 million people tuned in to watch the Super Bowl last year, but 3 million more were watching when Madonna performed at halftime.

The shows the thing with which to eat that wing. The game is in fact secondary for the majority of the 110+ million viewers. Many are watching hoping to see Beyonce's breast. The halftime show has come a long way from the days of  marching bands, Up With People and Andy Williams when it wasn't a laser-targeted, sponsored ray gun of corporate synergy. Michael, that other ever-slightly-more-famous Jackson's 1993 performance is held to be the greatest of all time; weird to think just a few months later the thought of Michael surrounded by so many children would take on such a different meaning. It could be the Super Bowl party they came for; at an average of 17 people, they're usually pretty lively. It's only fitting that while being fed a steady diet of commercials for junk food Americans will consume 1,200 calories each on Sunday scarfing down 1.23 billion chicken wing, 11.2 million pounds of potato chips, 8.2 million pounds of tortilla chips, 4.3 million pounds of pretzels, 3.8 million pounds of popcorn, 2.5 million pounds of nuts and 69.6 million pounds of avocados. To wash it down they'll drink 50 million cases of beer, unfortunately 94% of it will be Bud Light, Budweiser, Coors Light, Miller Lite or Natural Light which demonstrates more than anything how culturally closed and corporate controlled America remains.

Oh, and we best not forget the commercials. While the world ridicules America for its obsession with a game no one else cares about, they can't help fixate on the other evil they always complain about; the consumerism as reflected in the importance of the ads. The world won't notice who won the game, but they'll all remember the next spot featuring a mini Darth Vader using the force. At a new record average cost of $3.8 million per 30 seconds of air time, companies better make sure they're good. In 1967, that same amount of money would've bought 101 ads as they went for only $37,500 a pop for Super Bowl I. While the basics of sex, celebrity and satiety haven't changed since Edward Bernays invented modern public relations, the media used to propagate the propaganda has. I'll be watching the game from my laptop while millions will be watching on a tablet, a 'smart' phone or some such mobile device. More importantly to the marketers, many actually think they'll get more enjoyment out of the game by paying less attention to it, falling prey to the multi-tasking illusion by tweeting and texting and liking and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. What's that? You say there's a game on? Oh yeah...

3rd Quarter - Offensively speaking

I don't think the San Francisco 49ers are playing in the Super Bowl if their starting quarterback hadn't been injured. QB Alex Smith was leading the league in completion percentage and had his team at 6-2, not to mention having taken the team to the NFC final the year before, when he suffered a concussion during a tie with the St. Louis Rams. While his replacement Colin Kaepernick didn't look great finishing off the game, he blew away the Chicago Bears on Monday Night Football the next week and when Smith was ready to return the following week he was out of a starting job. The unwritten rule is that you don't lose your job to injury but just ask Drew Bledsoe and Tom Brady how that worked out for them. Kaepernick isn't Tom Brady, in fact, he might be better. While it's too early to say, the divisional win over the Packers where he set a record for rushing yards by any player, QB, RB, whatever, with 181 and scored four TDs, two through the air and two on the ground, all part of 579 yards of offense and 45 points was enough to prove the possibility. A physical freak with a cannon for an arm and the foot speed to run past defensive backs he gives the Niners a chance to blow away the Ravens.

If Colin Kaepernick is flash, Baltimore Raven QB Joe Flacco is, well, whatever the opposite of flash is. Joe Cool just seems to do the job as evidenced by his record six road playoff wins in his five year career. Year in, year out you know what you'll get, 3,600-3,800 yards, 20-25 TDs and only 10-12 ints. Until this year it also meant always coming up a bit short. After losing to the Patriots in the AFC Championship last year thanks to a dropped TD then a missed chip shot field goal, it looked like the Ravens were set to fall this year to the 9 1/2 point favorite Denver Broncos in the divisional round. Yet somehow, inexplicably, with the Ravens down by a touchdown with 31 seconds left in regulation and no timeouts left and the ball on their own 30-yard line, WR Jacoby Jones was allowed to run past two defenders as cornerback Tony Carter failed to jam him and safety Rahim Moore didn't play deep enough. Flacco flung a pass beyond the awkwardly falling and flailing Moore, who had taken a poor angle, dropping it into Jones' arms who scored untouched. The Ravens went on to win in double OT after having beaten Luck's Colts the week before and then beating Tom Brady's Patriots two weeks ago in the AFC Championship avenging the previous year's defeat. Suddenly, the Ravens appear to be a team of destiny.

Overall, there wasn't much to separate the two offenses during the regular season with the Ravens ranking 10th with 398 points scored and the Niners a single point behind in 11th. Niners' starting running back Frank Gore is no slouch as he runs powerfully and is hard to take down while super speedy rookie LaMichael James can break a big run anytime, but I'd have to give the edge to the Ravens as Ray Rice may be the best all-round back in the league and Bernard Pierce has just gotten better all year and is averaging over 75 yards over his last five games. Wide receiver Michael Crabtree has finally fulfilled his first round draft pick promise for the Niners this year and can look across the field at future hall of famer Randy Moss. They've also got one of the best tight ends in the league in Vernon Davis and a decent #2 in Delanie Walker. Yet they don't quite add up to the balance the Ravens pass catchers possess. WR Torrey Smith is an outside burner who's always a threat to score a couple of long TDs while Anquin Boldin provides the sure hands and experience of one of the best possession receivers in the game. Surprisingly, TE Dennis Pitta actually had more receiving yards than Davis this year plus they've got #2 Ed Dickson.

Both offensive lines are among the best in the league but the Niners three first round draft picks give them a slight edge in the, ahem, battle of the trenches. While Flacco has ridden a wave to this point I think it's Kapernick's game to win or lose. He's a rookie for all intents and purposes with only nine career starts (including playoffs) under his belt. If Ed Reed or Ray Lewis get in his head or under his skin early he could get the jitters on the big stage. The flip side is his near-unlimited upside; if he gets hot, he'll be impossible to stop. Special teams could play a role as well as the Ravens boast what was by this measure the third best unit in the league but gave up a 104-yard kickoff and a 90-yard punt return against the Broncos. They also have Jacoby Jones, the hero of that same Bronco game, who brought back two kickoffs longer than 105-yards this year. Finally, the Ravens are more comfortable with it all coming down to a last second field goal as two of the past 11 Super Bowls have as they'll field undrafted rookie Justin Tucker who replaced last season's goat Billy Cundiff. Tucker only went 30-of-33 and nailed the 47-yard game winner against the Patriots. Meanwhile, David Akers inexplicably went from setting an NFL record for made field goals in 2011 to missing 10 of 19 from 40 yards or further this year and made only 11 of his final 18 tries of the regular season. What about cheerleaders? Who's got the edge? Judge for yourself.

4th Quarter - A Level Playing Field?

Having such a short span of attention, the population has all but forgotten how the season began with replacement refs, the real ones having been locked out by the owners. It was real enough at the time though as not only did the games lack rhythm, dragging on interminably with the bumbling replacement zebras, they actually managed to influence the outcome of games. Refs are those guys we love to hate until they're gone as without them the rules get forgotten, twisted or misinterpreted and without those rules the game loses meaning and there's no point in playing. Even with the refs back it's becoming clear that the rules have changed forever for the NFL no matter how much they try to change the rules in the NFL just as the rules of the world have been warped with time meaning there's no return to the idyllic 1950's.

A run of high profile NFL player suicides the past couple years have shaken most of the remaining few out of their ignorance of the dangers of the game. In May, former Charger Junior Seau, a retired sure-to-be-hall of famer, shot himself in the chest with a shotgun. Though he left no note, it eerily mimicked Duane Duerson's suicide but he left a note asking that his brain be studied for trauma. Seau's family donated his brain tissue for study and the results showed he was suffering from CTE, the most terrifying letters for any player, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy as did Duerson. Seau's family is suing, accusing the NFL of "deliberately ignoring and concealing evidence of the risks associated with traumatic brain injuries." They're not alone as 3,800 more players are involved in legal action as well. Even more frightening was the Jovan Belcher murder/suicide in which he shot his girlfriend and then drove to the Kansas City Chiefs stadium to kill himself in front of his coach and staff. At just 25 he was already showing signs of brain damage. The NFL's response a few years ago was to deny any link but they've been forced to come around and have made some rule changes regarding helmet-to-helmet hits and concussion protocols in a vain attempt to protect players' lives. All these rules do is confuse the players, who are trained to destroy the enemy and who know that admitting one can't play is weakness, weakness that may cost them their job.

Who else would the NFL partner up with to 'solve' this problem than the military? Makes perfect sense in that both institutions are suffering from a rash of suicides as military suicides now far exceed combat deaths, recording almost one a day for a total of 349 last year, up from 301 the previous year and compared to 295 deaths in Afghanistan in 2012. Military grade Kevlar has been added to the player padding in a sport that developed in an era before 300+ pound men could run sub 5 second 40-yard dashes and linebackers running in 4.4 smash full speed into returners moving at 4.3. Much as soldiers don't develop problems from one shock but the repetitive nature of the brutality they're exposed to, the danger to NFL players is being shown to not come from isolated concussions but the cumulative effect of thousands of sub-concussive hits. If we support our team while this massacre is occurring how are we any better than the hypocrites who claim to support the troops by waving flags. In both cases we are at best complicit, at worst, the cause. No fans, no game.

The standard line of defense at this point is to claim that players, just like soldiers, know what they're getting into and enter voluntarily with the bonus that NFL players get paid millions to do what they love. This is the standard American excuse for everything, it's 2013, the information is there, if they don't know they're putting their lives at risk it's their own fault. This is as absurd as war apologists who disregard the constant stream of patriotism inspiring propaganda and fear mongering from a never-ending carousel of menacing enemies: Communists, Terrorists, Latin American Tyrants, Saddam, Iranian Mullahs and Secretive Dictators oh my! It's worse than free-marketers arguing consumers make rational choices in a world designed to feed as much choice influencing advertizing into our brains as possible. The NFL may be ignoring a helmet solution offered by the Swedes yet ironically it hasn't ignored the Swedish economic model which would benefit America and much of the west. Yes, the NFL's revenue sharing and salary caps make it a socialist paradise.

One could say America itself is committing suicide. No, I'm not referring to the proliferation of guns, loose laws and lack of psychological support leading to all the mass murders. The root cause of nearly all her problems is the inequality, social and financial, that has exploded over the past 30 years. While the NFL has done everything it can to maintain a level playing field among the teams to ensure a competitive product, Sunday will see the fifth different winner over the last five years (compare that with the English Premiership or the Spanish Liga), and thus success, America has done the opposite. The now-accepted mythology of job creators and trickle down economics has seen the country become more unequal than much of Latin America and yes, even that empire whose decline that of  America's is always compared to, the Roman. "So what?" Ayn Rand would ask. Well, a little study, or just a reading of The Spirit Level: Why Equal Societies Almost Always do Better by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett would tell you that once a country has reached a certain economic level, the more unequal a society is in terms of wealth, the more problems it will have in nearly every part of society: child mortality, mental health, drug use, educational achievement, teenage births, imprisonment, obesity and most importantly for our purposes today, violence and lack of social mobility.

The simple reason more unequal societies suffer from higher rates of all sorts of violent crime from homicide to rape and child abuse is that increased inequality ups the stakes in the competition for status in the evolutionary game. In such societies one doesn't need to take numerous knocks to the noggin for their brains to suffer the ill effects of the hormone cortisol which floods the brain when we feel threatened, helpless and stressed while simultaneously not benefiting from the reward chemical, dopamine, which helps with memory, attention and problem solving that we get when we feel happy and confident. As inequality rises so does the rigidity of social structure, most easily measured by intra-generational income mobility; those with rich parents are more likely to become rich and of course the poor remain poor generation after generation. Paradoxically, children in more unequal societies report higher future aspirations while facing a world in which they have less opportunity probably due to the fact their career choices are dominated by star-struck ideas of financial success coming with images of instant wealth or the glamor of celebrity, images the NFL and the Super Bowl do their best to promote.

Of course most of these kids will never become Beyonce or Colin Kaepernick, thus the military may indeed be the only career option for those for whom there are few better opportunities. For such enlistees, military service can open opportunities that would not otherwise be available. Once they've signed up, those of low socioeconomic status are more likely to be assigned to combat roles within the military than those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, becoming in effect, cannon fodder. Oh, many will dream of football glory until their dreams die sometime in high school or maybe even college, by which time their brains will have taken such a beating they'll be much more likely to suffer from a variety of ailments from memory loss, aggression, confusion, depression, vertigo, disorientation, headaches, poor judgment, slowed muscular movements, staggered gait, impeded speech, tremors, deafness and finally dementia. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, has even recently been linked with ALS. As CTE can only be diagnosed after death, it's hard to tell how early it can set it. The earliest known football case to date was a 17-year-old.

President Obama recently weighed in on the issue saying, "If I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football" but luckily for him, he probably wouldn't have to make that choice. Mary Ann Easterling, wife of Ray Easterling who committed suicide last year, said that her husband felt “used,” and that if he could go back, he wouldn’t have played. At the very least, Obama's son wouldn't have to rely on the scholarship that is the only ticket to college which could offer any chance of future success for students from low income families. Student loans you say? Yeah, right. The NFL and its guaranteed contracts is the lottery ticket out for the economically disadvantaged. It's no coincidence that blacks are disproportionately represented among the poor and the NFL (67%). Seeing as more income and wealth is concentrated at the top than any time since records have been available (1913 thanks to federal income tax), and the divide is widening as 93% of new income is flowing to the 1%, no wonder more and more people, players and non-players, are turning to god and Vegas.

Overtime - Wide right?

Any Super Bowl party worth its salt will feature some kind of square board where wagers on the score will be laid. For the serious gambler though, or the desperate indebted student hoping to pay next semester's tuition, there's no better place to be than Las Vegas for the Super Bowl. The prop bet has evolved from the benign, heads or tails for the coin flip, to the tedious, such as the length of the national anthem or Beyonce's hair style or outfit color to the ludicrous, Ray Lewis tackles in XLVII versus Ray Lewis in XXXV or Kaepernick versus Steve Young in XXIX. About the only one I'd want any action on is the over/under on how many times Ray Lewis will mention god/lord if he is interviewed after the game. It's set at a ridiculously low three when I'd be tempted to bet over at ten - take the free money and go all in on over. After all, we're talking about a country where 27% of the people believe god "plays a role in determining which team wins" sporting events. Just another anomaly that non-Americans will shake their heads at in disbelief, just like the rise in belief in creationism along with its teaching in schools and museums devoted to it or their refusal to accept scientific evidence no matter how hot it gets. Unfortunately, it's more than a bug in the system, it's a feature.

As America lurches from crisis to crisis, their responses, from war to bank bailouts and doubling down on the carbon economy, may seem irrational to an impartial observer as they aggravate instead of solve the problems but are simply part of a natural pattern. Civilizations tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. As collapse becomes palpable, societies in distress retreat into what anthropologists call "crisis cults." Witness the reaction of gun freaks to mass-murders as they clutch the Second Amendment tighter and demand more guns to stop the killing; the attempt to put an end to financial crisis by further enriching those institutions which created the problem while impoverishing the engine, the middle class, that could return economic health; dealing with having been led into war on false grounds by expanding conflicts and further empowering those same positions to determine who lives or dies without oversight; convincing people that torture is justified by glorifying such atrocity in Hollywood blockbusters. The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.

No Super Bowl has yet been decided in overtime. The closest finish was the famous "wide right" Giants victory over the Bills in XXV, 20-19. Baltimore (as in Colts) beat the Cowboys in Super Bowl V 16-13 on a field goal with 5 seconds to play, while the Patriots did the same to the Panthers with 4 seconds left to win 32-29 in XXXVIII. Adam Vinitieri also won it for the Patriots as time expired in XXXVI against the Rams making the final 20-17. In XXXIV Tennessee Titans' Kevin Dyson was memorably stopped a yard short from scoring a touchdown which would have tied the game with a conversion, the Rams won 23-16. Hoping for such an ending as exciting, I'll once again do my best to ignore the risks the players are subjecting themselves to but it'll be hard to ignore the flyovers (at a cost of half a million to the taxpayer), shots of genuflecting players, recruitment ads and shout outs to the troops who are risking the same degenerative brain disease as the players on the field as roadside explosions injure the brain the same way as explosive tackles. I doubt this year's match up will provide us with the first extra period as I've got a feeling Kaepernick and the Niners may blow the Ravens out. Yet, I've always been a fan of the black swan, the fat tail and maybe a little divine intervention, so I'm taking the Ravens, in OT, 26-23.

It's Not The End Of The World

Whether by rapture, nature, or computer there have been countless predictions of the end of the world over the past three millennia. These harbingers of doom have had many sources, from scripture to soothsayers, but all have been shown to be nothing but conjecture as the world has continued to revolve, the sun to shine and man to (de)evolve. Unless you've been living under a rock, don't get out to see movies nor have a Facebook wall to tell you, you probably heard something about the Maya calendar ending on December 21, 2012 augering the end of the world. Meanwhile, after a temporary break to obsess about the fact that they like to own a lot of guns so they can kill each other and anyone else they feel like, America's propaganda machine will go back to heralding the financial end of the world, the fiscal cliff. Like all good myths, both harbingers of doom freely mix fact and fiction to produce a potent brew believable enough to intoxicate the masses while ensuring the real moral of the story and a chunk of change will be lost in the panic to the propagandists.

Many Romans believed 634 BCE would bring the end based on a story in which twelve eagles, each representing ten years, revealed the lifespan of Rome to Romulus. Most religions have their own eschatological doctrines but it's the crazy Christians who have the longest list of false prophets. Harold Camping was simply the latest in a long line Christards to predict the end such as Paul the Apostle, Hilary of Poitiers and Martin of Tours. Perhaps tired of just killing infidel Muslims in the Crusades, even Pope Innocent III got into the act by adding 666 to the year Islam was founded to determine the world would end in 1284. Theology and astronomy have always been a toxic mix, but when Johannes Stoeffler used them to predict a worldwide flood he convinced many to move to higher ground and invest in boats before February 1, 1524. As many as 100,000 'Millerites' were moved enough by William Miller's preaching of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844 to sell all their belongings. Like Camping, when the world woke up the next day to normality, Miller just moved his date back; his followers were so fervent they went on to form the Seventh-day Adventist movement.

Sowing panic in the markets has always been an easy way to make a mint for some and to steer economic policy for others. Stories of the so-called fiscal cliff are another textbook example. Nathan Mayer Rothschild’s riders and messengers were able to get news of Wellington's defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo a full day in advance of the government’s own news carriers. As the story goes, Nathan convinced the rubes he had knowledge of Napoleon's victory by selling heavily on the English stock market. When panic ensued, Rothschild had his agents snap up stocks for pennies on the pound, entrenching the family banking dynasty. Many claim the Panic of 1907, the United States' first modern financial crisis, was engineered by JP Morgan to implement certain financial regulations and ultimately the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. Newspaper reports of the days ahead of the panic seem almost comical in their propagandizing prose describing the health of the financial market only to be proven completely wrong when the crash led to a drop of 21% in commodity prices, a 47% spike in bankruptcies and a rise in unemployment from 2.8 to 8%. Lucky these things could never happen today!

A simple connection can be made between today's supposed harbingers of apocalypse, the end of the Maya Calendar and the US fiscal cliff: both are completely made up and being used for gain by the mythology makers of our day. The Maya understand 17 different calendars, some of them accurately charting time over more than ten million years. The one causing all the hub-bub is the Long Count which is an astronomical calendar based on the cycle of Pleiades used to track longer periods of time. Just as with other calendars, the end of the old signals the start of the next. Americans on the other hand created the fictitious fiscal cliff just last summer when the federal debt level was about to hit the imaginary debt ceiling. Imaginary in that a limit that can be extended is not a limit but a gimick which in this case proved a useful opportunity for fearmongers. As a deal couldn't be struck, an agreement was reached for automatic spending cuts to kick in come the end of 2012 thus the name fiscal cliff was coined to scare the people into believing cuts need to be made to avert financial disaster in the new year. However, just as we can go out and buy a new calendar, the US government has the power to simply go out and 'buy' more dollars whenever they need to.

The reason it's so important for the elite to sow fear among the infotariat is that both imaginary apocalypse makers are in fact opportunities to reshape the world we live in. The current Long Count cycle finished December 21st when it reached the end of the 13th b'ak'tun which themselves are made up of 20 k'atun cycles composed of 20 tun each of which last for 18 winal cycles that are about a year long. The end of the Long Count has nothing to do with death but everything to do with rebirth. The true meaning is transformation not conflagration. According to the correlation between the Long Count and Western calendars accepted by the great majority of Maya researchers, the starting-point of the just ended Long Count cycle is equivalent to August 11, 3114 BCE. This date marks the creation of the world of human beings according to the Maya, the last great transition.

Coincidentally, we are told by textbooks that civilization began around 3,000 BCE in Mesopotamia as the Sumerians simultaneously developed all the traits of high civilization: the wheel, metallurgy, astrology, astronomy, calendars, taxation, bookkeeping, an organized priesthood and of course written texts. Ancient Egypt as we know it came into being with the union of Upper and Lower Egypt and the start of the First Dynasty under Menes somewhere around 3100 B.C. Should we go on about the significance of that time? Stonehenge has been dated to around 3000 B.C. It was also around 3100 B.C that stone circle building and other types of megalithic structures were being built throughout Britain, Scotland, and Ireland. Newgrange, the large passage-grave in Ireland, is generally dated to about 3200 B.C. More? Civilization is said to have begun in China around 3000 B.C. with the emergence of the Yang-Shao culture. All very important, but not as big as what it all brought about. Yep, the whole system of modern slavery. Debt.

Even before there was money, there was debt. The arrival of civilization, agriculture and all its benefits also brought the plague of credit. The ancients learned to control it through systems such as the Jubilee, but in modern times we have forgotten the lessons of the past and let it become the system for the powerful to control wealth and therefore society. Nowhere has done a better job than America where the debt figures boggle the mind. Credit card debt has lagged since the financial crisis and sits a bit under a trillion but student loan debt has more than made up for the slack, powering past the trillion mark last year helping push consumer debt to $2.7 trillion. Total household debt is over $13 trillion, just a couple of trillion shy of total yearly economic output. But we better be sure not to mix these figures with the 'real' problem facing America, the federal debt. 

Yes, like the rogue planet Nibiru predicted by the Mayans, serious people are warning us the federal debt will obliterate us all. Wait? What's that? The Mayans never said anything about Nibiru? It was just dreamed up in 1976 by Zecharia Sitchin in his book "The Twelfth Planet" using his own unique translation of Sumerian cuneiform to identify a planet, Nibiru, orbiting the sun every 3,600 years? Then several years later, Nancy Lieder, a self-described psychic, announced that the aliens she claimed to channel had warned her this planet would collide with Earth in 2003? After a collision-free year, the date was moved back to 2012, where it was linked to the close of the Mayan long-count period? So, it's just a mixture of science fiction and psychics? Wait. Science fiction and psychics sounds suspiciously close to the definition of economics to me. 

Even though they agree on about 99% of things, Democrats and Republicans still manage to come to loggerheads often enough to make for good kabuki theater. Last year's debt ceiling fiasco not only cost the US it's AAA credit rating but also set the cuts and tax increases to go off around the end of the year. The name 'fiscal cliff' is an inapt metaphor for many reasons, but the $500 billion in tax increases and $200 billion in spending cuts represent about 4% of the US economy and would probably push the US into recession. It's a hodgepodge of policy decisions that Congress has made, or better said, not made, over the past two years, piled onto a single deadline. It's not a cliff but self-induced austerity crisis, theater designed to pressure policy makers into a deal such as the grand bargain whose ultimate goal is to dismantle social security and medicare while continuing at least a portion of the tax cuts for the rich. Despite the many other problems that exist, the added bonus of this approaching apocalypse has been that it has completely paralyzed the lame duck Congress and the status quo usually benefits one group, the plutocrats.

The simplest option is to do nothing and go over the 'cliff' but this is unlikely to happen as not only does it harm everyone but it hits the rich, the military and corporations disproportionately. While it would cut defense spending and allow taxes on the rich to return to Clinton era levels, it also would see benefits cut and taxes for all others rise as well. Additionally, with the debt ceiling fast approaching again, some kind of deal will avert the next crisis. However, the tax hikes and spending cuts are spread over two years so there isn't really any urgency. Another possible scenario is to just kick the can further down the road by simply extending the deadline by a year or two. This is what policy makers usually do from climate change to war related troop draw-downs, so don't be surprised. Finally, some kind of deal may be reached, ranging from some kind of small deal in which some tax cuts are allowed to expire along with some spending cuts to the plutocrat preferred 'grand bargain'. The media is undoubtedly pushing this as their overlords will be better able to disguise the savage cuts to the social safety net among all the other hoopla of a deal within the framework of the Simpson-Bowles plan, or the Domenici-Rivlin plan.

A healthy democracy would use this moment to its advantage by diagnosing the disease and taking its medicine. A rotten one will use it to make things worse for most while benefiting the few. Sequestration will see a range of spending cuts across the board (ie. defense and non-defense) in discretionary spending as mandated by the debt ceiling compromise, the Budget Control Act of 2011. Cutting doctors pay and unemployment insurance at a time of record low employment don't sound too bright but slicing a portion of the $300 million a day to fight an unwinnable war in Afghanistan sounds pretty good, but unfortunately war costs are exempt. Speaking of the unemployed, maybe increasing taxes on the 'job-creators' isn't such a bad idea. The secret is the rich aren't creating jobs at all but stealing them. Only 3.6% of the top 0.1% income earners are entrepreneurs, the majority rely on extracting rents from the rest of us. Their tax rates have fallen while the working class are paying more via payroll taxes. The other supposed engine of job creation, corporations, have done a pretty good job of avoiding paying their fair share as well. Just as the top 1% of breathing people have taken 93% of income growth since 2008, corporate non-breathing people saw their profits quickly rebound following the downturn to the point where their profits are at a record level when compared to the whole economy. Charts? You want graphs? Well, here's a few:

The Real Cliff - Employment has fallen and can't get up!

Surprisingly, cutting top marginal tax rates increases the income share of the rich!

The slow shift in tax burden from non-breathing 'people' to working class people

You might say the crisis was pretty good for corporations

The term 'fiscal cliff' was coined by none other than Ben Bernanke. You may remember him from such heists as the 2008 bank bailouts (TARP) when he helped Hank Paulsen bully Congress into handing over $700 billion to the banksters. That $700 billion sure is a familiar sounding number, isn't it? Well it should be seeing as it the amount of 'forced' austerity being brought about by bailing out banks, something that research shows predictably happens. An IMF paper showed bailouts lead to austerity. That IMF paper examined 42 banking crises between 1970 and 2007 but there's evidence all around us today from the UK to Spain and Greece. It's all so sickeningly predictable. Whatever you want to call them, the elite, oligarchs, plutocrats, Bilderbergs, they behave just like the borg from Star Trek TNG, methodically extracting all the wealth they can before moving on to the next source. The last forty-odd years were spent laying the groundwork for the biggest transfer of wealth from the bottom up the world has ever seen; the tax burden has been shifted away from the rich and corporations onto the backs of the working class, 'think tanks', 'research centers' and Faux News were created to tell the people this is normal, unions were devastated, consumerism as self-actualization became the mantra, corporations were turned into people and rewarded for shipping jobs overseas to the lowest wage countries they could find. Uh, I could go on but I already have.

Sadly, much like the end of the Long Count Mayan cycle, the fiscal cliff is being sold as disaster instead of an opportunity. The cult leaders aren't named Jones, Hubbard, Koresh, or Jouret nor were they dressed in flowing robes but garbed instead in suits and named Rand, Greenspan, Friedman and Hayek. Worse, their preachings aren't responsible for the deaths of tens or hundreds but thousands, millions and possibly eventually billions. We get to see their converts every day in our classrooms, on the streets and most often, on the TV where a parade of hucksters trying to convince us the debt was caused by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and needs fixing before anything else. The propaganda becomes transparent when you consider a group such as Fix the Debt, which is the loudest of the fearmongers, is composed of CEOs with ties to 43 companies with over $43 billion in defense contracts. They're strangely silent about the fact that the debt is largely due to the recession, the two Bush tax cuts while paying for two wars which have caused defense spending to double since 2001 putting US military spending equivalent to the next 26 nations combined.

It's telling that as the 21st of December neared more effort was expended dispelling the Mayan apocalypse myths than extolling the possibilities that a new era of peace and unity could bring. Bolivian president Evo Morales marked the winter solstace and auspicious calendar date by extending an open invitation to the world to celebrate "the end of the Macha and the beginning of the Pacha, the end of selfishness and the beginning of brotherhood, it is the end of individualism and the beginning of collectivism." Similarly, as we near the so-called fiscal cliff, more energy is being expended to convince us the end is near if we don't make fixes which will exacerbate the problems rather than solve them. Every challenge we've faced this millennium has been made worse: 9/11 led us into a never ending global war on terror, climate change has brought an endless parade of broken promises and conferences, financial crisis a perpetual bailout for the perpetrators and sellout of the people. No, just as December 21st wasn't the end of the world, the fiscal cliff won't bring about the apocalypse but the majority of us would be better off if we turn off the current disastrous path.
Update Jan.22 -

The Audacity of Dope

There's a million and one reasons Willard Mitt 'Mittens' Romney shouldn't be elected the 45th President of the United States November 6th, but only one reason he won't when looking at the presidencies of the past 20 years. Unfortunately, being a flip-flopping liar who will shapeshift into anything the polls say will help curry favor with a few voters won't hinder him as Obama has proven. Being a plutocrat whose success was solely predicated on winning the genetic lottery thus helping dispel the illusion of the American Dream of social mobility won't hurt him either as the silver spoon he was born with in his mouth was only slightly shinier than Dubya's. Nor will his business record of buying up companies with borrowed money, loading them with debt in order to siphon off as much cash as possible before breaking them up to sell off the pieces and ship the jobs overseas disqualify him as an entire economy based on this kind of short term financial gain for the few at the cost of long term wealth creation for the many is exactly what Clinton created during his time in the White House. Not even belonging to a crazy cult that believes wearing magic underwear marks them off from other mere mortals will make a difference in the land of religious fanaticism. No, being a man around fifty years old with an Ivy League degree and having been a governor or senator, Mitt near perfectly fits the job description to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet Mittens won't win as he hasn't broken one federal law that all three of his predecessors did; he's never smoked a joint.

Who's to say if it was the stoner vote that put Clinton, Dubya and Obomber over the top, but it's as likely as anything else to have swayed the few votes that actually matter in the undemocratic electoral college system of selecting the US president. Bill Clinton may have claimed he didn't inhale, but he did enjoy pot brownies. Dubya never denied it, saying, "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible" meaning he did plus lots more. Obama came right out and said, "When I was a kid, I inhaled. That was the point." In fact judging by the legendary exploits of Dubya and the fact that Obomber and his buddies smoked so much ganga they nicknamed themselves the Choom Gang, the next president in 2016 is probably going to be chronic.

Of course Americans have a lot of practice dealing with the cognitive dissonance involved in having a president who has broken the same law that sees about 750,000 people arrested every year. War is peace thanks to such mental gymnastics as preemptive, preventive or preventative war, freedom is slavery thanks to the debt servitude necessary to propel an economic system dependent on financialization and ignorance is strength thanks in large part to the informational overload of the technological revolution. Thanks to the primacy of obedience and the related reverence for authority drilled into them at a young age they don't mind casting their vote while blindfolded to the other choices whose beliefs most likely better align with theirs thus turning their election into a quadrennial Pepsi Challenge where choosing Coke or Pepsi doesn't matter as either way you're still going to get diabetes and die.

Sure, much of the US election circus is nothing but a choreographed carnival to coronate an Obomney or Robama, where only a handful of votes in a thimbleful of states will matter, but Americans in many states do have direct democracy: ballot initiatives and referendum. This November 6th there are ballot measures in seven states to either legalize the sale of medical marijuana or legalize it altogether if you're over 21, taxing and regulating it as they do with alcohol. This is an issue where representative democracy is clearly failing the American people, but fortunately direct democracy takes the power out of the hands of vested interests and returns it to the people. Washington (Initiative 502), Colorado (Amendment 64), and Oregon (Measure 80) will decide whether to legalize the drug's production and sale for recreational use. Massachusetts and Arkansas (first in the south) will vote to catch up with the previous trio and the 14 other states where medical marijuana use is already legal. Meanwhile, in Montana they will be voting to reinstate the 2004 citizen-approved medical marijuana law the state legislature recently repealed. Legalization just missed getting on the ballot in Michigan so the City Commissioners in Kalamazoo voted unanimously to decriminalize weed, saying the new ordinance will help police respond to serious crimes even faster than before based on how it has gone so far in Chicago. Detroit, Flint and Grand Rapids will also ask their citizens whether they'd like to decriminalize possession

How did we get to this wacky world? Constructing elaborate Rube-Goldberg machines to destroy our planet or Nobel Peace Prize winners composing kill lists and remotely killing American citizens, innocent women, children, wedding guests and their rescuers with drones in faraway lands without any declaration of war are less controversial than letting people smoke weed to improve the quality of their lives or just for fun. Even when laws have been passed to legalize medical marijuana and with a president we believed to be progressive sitting in the Oval Office, medical dispensaries and training schools are raided by the feds while state troopers stand by and wave good day to the staff, clients and students. Despite Obomber's 2008 promise "I'm not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws [on medical marijuana]" his Attorney General, Eric Holder has been doing just that. It was the same Eric Holder who may have helped sink California's Prop 19 to legalize marijuana when he vowed to "vigorously enforce" federal marijuana laws and warned that the government would not look the other way and allow a state marijuana market to emerge a month before the 2010 election. In a rational world we'd design laws that improved our society, finances and health but far too often, and especially in the case of cannabis, it seems these ideals are trumped by politics, emotions and special interests.

"Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could."
- William F. Buckley Jr

While hard numbers are hard to come by, the drug war costs well over 6,000 lives a year in the US while in Mexico drug cartels have killed more than 55,000 people in the past six years. Prohibition not only raises prices thus increasing incentives to capture market share, it renders contracts unenforceable and makes it impossible for competitors to use the courts or the police to challenge intimidation or settle disputes; the war on drugs has given us decapitated corpses hung from bridges while the cola wars has simply given us all diabetes. Worse are the number of lives lost to the prison system as half of the 2.5 million behind bars in the US are there for drug offenses, many of them of the low-level, nonviolent variety. In 2010, 1.64 million people were arrested for drug violations - 80% of them for possession. Even worse, it has become a new form of Jim Crow as though blacks use and sell drugs at the same rates as whites, thirteen of them go to jail for every white person who does. It seems obvious but many still don't get that sending potheads to jail destroys lives and families and creates hardened criminals who get turned by the prison culture. Members of the now militarized police force see the senselessness close-up which is why Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a national organization of cops and criminal justice experts dedicated to “speaking out about the failures of our existing drug policies” have become legalization advocates.

Costing this war is as slippery as those waged in Iraq and Afghanistan but it is every bit as expensive. According to Harvard drug economist Jeffrey Miron: "Legalizing drugs would save roughly $41.3 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. Of these savings, $25.7 billion would accrue to state and local governments, while $15.6 billion would accrue to the federal government." Yet according to The Economic Impact of Illicit Drug Use on American Society, last published by the Department of Justice in 2011, enforcing illegal drug laws imposes an annual cost on the American criminal justice system of $56 billion; while incarceration of drug offenders imposes an annual cost of $48 billion for a total of over $100 billion. Back to Harvard's Miron who claims drug legalization would yield tax revenue of $46.7 billion, annually, assuming legal drugs were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco. Approximately $8.7 billion of this revenue would result from legalization of marijuana and $38.0 billion from legalization of other drugs." Whatever the exact figures, in these times of austerity in which California spends more on its prison system than all higher education this is a huge burden. So big in fact that many states are turning to privatization of prisons which will guarantee occupancy rates, forcing states to maintain or toughen drug and immigration laws in order to keep the beds filled.

Here's what we know about marijuana's impact on our health. Not much thanks to prohibition. In fact we were more aware of its benefits over a century ago. Sure there seems to be a few negatives, heavy use in your teens may shave a few points off your IQ, smoking has been tied to testicular cancer and 9% of those who try marijuana eventually fit a diagnosis of cannabis dependence. But few would advocate teens smoking a few joints a day, cannabis compounds have been shown to stop metastasis in aggressive cancers and the corresponding dependency rates for alcohol and nicotine are 15 and 32%. The "gateway" drug argument claims use leads to more dangerous substances as most people who use other illicit drugs had used marijuana first. Not to bore you with the old causation is not correlation trope but the illegality of weed forces people to come into contact with harder drugs in their illegal dealings and don't forget people often smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol before they latch on to marijuana. Meanwhile, marijuana has significant upsides for individuals with certain illnesses. In glaucoma patients, it can reduce the dangerously high eye pressure that can lead to vision loss. In addition, pot can provide relief from chronic pain, reduce nausea and vomiting from cancer chemotherapy, and limit the severe weight loss that results from AIDS and other diseases. Alcohol abuse kills 75,000 people a year. Legal prescription drugs kill 100,000 people a year. Marijuana kills zero. The statistics for violent crime and accidental death follow the same pattern.

"Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country."
- Thomas Jefferson

The path from being a simple plant mandatory to grow in 1619 Jamestown colony law to Samuel Caldwell and Moses Baca becoming the first Americans busted for pot just over 75 years ago, Oct 2, 1937, is as hazy as the air at a Dylan show in 1966. In between, hemp was the principal crop at George Washington's Mount Vernon, secondary at Jefferson's Monticello, used as part of medicinal preparations beginning in 1839 and "fashionable narcotic" by 1853. Control came slowly over the next 80 years, culminating in prohibition with the passage of the federal Marihuana Tax Act in 1937. First came poison laws in an attempt to regulate pharmaceuticals through labeling to indicate harmful effects of the drugs or prohibiting sale outside of licensed pharmacies and without a prescription. Basically, trying to combat this type of snake oil salesmen.

At the turn of the 20th century, between 2% and 5% of the US population were drug addicts, more than today, the majority hooked on morphine, a legacy of the Civil War and bored housewives duped by door-to-door con artists. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 did more than any subsequent law to fight addiction. In addition to creating the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) it also said certain drugs could only be sold by prescription and habit forming drugs had to be labeled. As Congress did not possess the power to create general criminal laws, a plan was devised to masquerade the regulation and persecution as a tax, leading to the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. It created the template for using criminal sanctions to deal with the non-medical use of drugs but only applied to opium, morphine and its various derivatives, and the derivatives of the coca leaf like cocaine; there was no mention anywhere of amphetamines, barbiturates, marijuana, hashish, or hallucinogenic drugs of any kind. More importantly, it did nothing to outlaw possession but set such a high tax on non-medical exchange of the drugs that it made it defacto illegal to have certain drugs.

Control was tightened ad hoc, state by state to restrict all narcotics, including cannabis, as poisons and limit their sale to pharmacies requiring doctor's prescriptions. From 1915 to 1937, some 27 states passed criminal laws against the use of marijuana driven by three factors. Racism, fear of substitution and religious fanaticism. Out west, the influx of Mexican immigrants made them easy prey for populist politicians. Overheard on the floor of the Texas Senate, "All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff [marijuana] is what makes them crazy." Proponent of Montana's first marijuana law said, "[g]ive one of these Mexican beet field workers a couple of puffs on a marijuana cigarette and he thinks he is in the bullring at Barcelona." In the northeast of the country, the fear was marijuana would be taken up by those who could no longer drink or do morphine. And of course the religious fanatics were in Utah, where the Mormon Church's opposition to euphoriants of any kind was codified by the state legislature as the first criminal law in the US against the use of marijuana in October of 1915. On what should be known as international drug cartel day, the turning point came February 19, 1925, when the International Opium Convention was revised to include among other things, Indian hemp, while leaving the low-THC European hemp uncontrolled.

"Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men."
 - Harry Anslinger; US Drug Czar

The mythology surrounding marijuana prohibition has only grown with time. Who hasn't run into a conspiracy theorist blaming it all on William Hearst's use of Yellow Journalism to protect his lumber interests (hemp can also be used to make paper) or a hippie happy to harangue Dupont and the cotton industry for their role in demonizing the hemp plant (yes, makes pretty good clothes, too). The fact is marijuana's current status in America and the world has more to do with one man than all else combined. Harry J. Anslinger was the drug czar under five presidents becoming the first the first Commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) on August 12, 1930 and serving until May 1962. By 1936, Anslinger was convinced that America was under assault by a reefer invasion and therefore launched a two-pronged counterattack: a legislative plan to seek from Congress a new law that would place marijuana and its distribution directly under federal control alongside a media campaign to turn a near-harmless, potentially life saving plant into loco weed. His gore file was filled with stories of mild-mannered youths being turned into axe-wielding mass murderers, white female students into sex slaves, and of course Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers seeking the company of those innocent white girls after a single puff of the stuff. The culmination of this propaganda was of course the now infamous film, Reefer Madness.

His legislative assault led to a hearing on national marijuana prohibition in 1937 in which three bodies of testimony were given; Anslinger himself representing the government as head of the FBN, spokesmen from industries that would be affected by a ban on hemp, and representatives from the medical profession. Anslinger's testimony is easily summed up with "Marihuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death." There were three industrial spokesmen, from the rope, paint and varnish, and birdseed people. The first testimonial irony came from the rope people who told of the cheap supply from the Far East making homegrown uneconomical. Of course shortage of rope to supply warships less than five years later required the government to become the biggest growers in history. The paint and varnish folks said "we can use something else" while only the birdseed people balked and gave us irony number two. When asked "Couldn't you use some other seed?" the birdseen man said, "No, Congressman, we couldn't. We have never found another seed that makes a bird's coat so lustrous or makes them sing so much." For this reason, birds, not people, have been able to enjoy some of the benefits of the plant under the name "denatured seeds".

The two pieces of  medical testimony prove the most puzzling, one from a pharmacologist, the other, a doctor/lawyer representing the AMA (American Medical Association). The former claimed to have had three dogs die after he injected the active ingredient in marihuana into the brains of 300 canines. Unfortunately, the active component, THC,  wasn't isolated until 1964, so who knows what he shot into their craniums. When asked by a Congressman, "Doctor, did you choose dogs for the similarity of their reactions to that of humans?", the pharmacologist replied, "I wouldn't know, I'm not a dog psychologist." The latter medical testimony, from Dr. William C. Woodward was short, sweet and succinct, "The American Medical Association knows of no evidence that marihuana is a dangerous drug." To understand why the two Congressmen then told him, "Doctor, if you can't say something good about what we are trying to do, why don't you go home?" and "Doctor, if you haven't got something better to say than that, we are sick of hearing you", one must remember the political situation of the time. Both Congressmen were Democrats who held a grudge against the AMA as they had opposed every piece of Roosevelt's New Deal legislation introduced from 1932 through 1937.

It was August 20th at 5:45pm in the pre-air-conditioning world of Washington, DC when the debate on national marijuana prohibition took place in Congress. No one was there. Well, a few Republicans, one of whom from upstate New York stood up before the bill was passed on "tellers", "Mr. Speaker, what is this bill about?" To which speaker Rayburn replied, "I don't know. It has something to do with a thing called marihuana. I think it's a narcotic of some kind." To which the New Yorker, a Republican as much on the side of the AMA for the last 5 years as the Democrats were against, followed up, "Mr. Speaker, does the American Medical Association support this bill?". At which point a committee member jumped up and said, "Their Doctor Wentworth [remember it was Woodward] came down here. They support this bill 100%." Good enough for the Republicans. Good enough for America as the bill then passed on and when the bill passed the Senate without debate or recorded vote and President Roosevelt signed it, the US had national prohibition with the federal Marihuana Tax Act.

More irony? Well, the La Guardia Report (yeah, the mayor of NYC La Guardia), the first in depth study into the effects of smoking marijuana came out just seven years later, it systematically contradicted claims made by the U.S. Treasury Department that smoking marijuana results in insanity, and determined that "the practice of smoking marihuana does not lead to addiction in the medical sense of the word." The next big surge in this war came with Nixon who not only upped the ante on the war in Vietnam but more egregiously committed the country to wage "total war against public enemy number one in the United States, the problem of dangerous drugs" regardless of the cost, in dollars or lives. Not only did he oversee the implementation of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, he also ensured the war would be well funded and armed with the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 1973. Republicans continued to bask in the law and order glory under Reagan, when Nancy was handed the skillet in the Just say no, This is your brain on drugs campaign. The same story continues to this day with millions of lives lost or destroyed simply to uphold an outdated, falsely propogated belief that profits the wicked, just as any war. Despite all the propaganda, a record-high 50% of Americans said last year the use of marijuana should be made legal, up from 46% the year before.
 
Marijuana prohibition keeps police officers busy on the beat, courts jammed with marijuana offenders, and jails packed with prisoners convicted of violating marijuana laws. Unquestionably, these laws have helped make America great, nay, the greatest in the world... at penning people in cages. Not only does America lead in sheer number of prisoners, it has the highest incarceration rate in the world, too. The prison-industrial-complex that has grown to catch, judge and accommodate the millions behind bars along with the tobacco, pharmaceutical and alcohol industries, have a lot of profit incentive to keep things the way they are. It should come as no surprise that the biggest financial contributor to Smart Colorado, the supposedly family-friendly group leading the fight against the marijuana legalizing Proposition 64, is Save Our Society from Drugs, a Florida-based nonprofit founded by Mel and Betty Sembler who once led drug rehab centers shut down over wide-ranging child abuse scandals. With the coming votes in the western trifecta of states comes the hope of a domino effect and an end to a system that destroys lives to fill up treatment centers and pad private prison profits.

Alcohol offers a good parallel with weed though its trajectory from legal euphoriant to not and back again was much steeper. Though the US didn't go completely dry until the 18th Amendment came into force at midnight, January 16, 1920, after being ratified by 36 states, about 65% of the country had already banned alcohol. Just as alcohol can lead to strange bedfellows, so did the prohibition movement: xenophobes, industrialists, women's rights activists and religious zealots. Anti-German wartime sentiment tied in with the push to use grain to make bread for soldiers instead of beer turned Milwaukee's brewers into "the worst of all our German enemies," and the Anti-Saloon League dubbed their beer "Kaiser brew." Henry Ford described prohibition as "the greatest force for the comfort and prosperity of the U.S." while John D. Rockefeller saw it as a way of strengthening the monopoly of his Standard Oil by eliminating the alternative of ethyl alcohol to power cars. Alcohol's obvious link to wife beating and child abuse drove the development of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. 

Of course history has shown that turning temperance into prohibition was a big mistake as thirteen long violent years followed in yet another sad parallel with modern drug policy. While most of the gangland style violence and overt corruption spread by bootleggers of the prohibition era played out at home, most of it that has resulted from drug laws takes place south of the border, out of sight of middle America. Perhaps this explains why the anti-prohibition forces only took thirteen years to win while the perverse drug laws have been around almost a century. The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA) formed in 1919 even before prohibition and was so successful that by the time the 21st Amendment ending national alcohol prohibition went into effect December 1933, more than a dozen states had already opted out. This same slow creep is hopefully being emulated by the marijuana legalization movement. A final parallel: the spark for the repeal movement was the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. Could the not-so-great depression do the same? "Beer For Prosperity" became the anti-Prohibition battle cry as few could deny the obvious truth that legalizing beer would create thousands of new jobs virtually over night. At the same time, desperately-needed new government revenue would be generated in the form of beer taxes. Sounds kind of familiar doesn't it?

If legalization comes to the US, they won't be the first. Everyone knows about the Netherlands being a drug haven but few speak about the annual prevalence of marijuana use for people age 15-64 being just 5.4% there compared to 13.7% in the US. The contrasts in figures are even starker for heroin, cocaine and opiates. Even fewer talk about the success of decriminalization in Portugal. Quietest of all is the revolution being seen in Central and South America, where most of the loss of life in this war has occurred. It's not just the leftist governments either; Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, a 30-year military veteran whose campaign slogan was "Iron fist, head and heart", angered Washington in September by proposing drug legalization at the UN General Assembly. This came on the heels of a dozen Latin American leaders avoiding using the term legalization by calling to reduce demand for drugs by exploring "regulatory or market oriented options", an act of linguistic prestidigitation favored by Mexican President Felipe Calderon to avoid pissing off Uncle Sam. Even President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, which has received almost $9 billion in aid from the US to fight the cartels, has said he's open to legalization. However, the race to sanity seems set to be won by Uruguay where a bill has been introduced to legalize the production and sale of marijuana under a state monopoly thanks to its flower-farming former leftist guerilla president, Jose "Pepe" Mujica.
 
So while the world watches the presidential returns November 6th to see who will be sleeping in the White House for the next four years, the people of Colorado, Oregon and Washington will be choosing whether to not only make their lives better but also those in Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa, the three Mexican states where drug cartels will be most harmed by legalization, losing up to 30% of their earnings from traffic to the US. There's a few other interesting citizens' initiatives to keep an eye on, particularly California's Proposition 37 which would require products containing GMOs to be labeled. Opponents, Monsanto that is, are spending millions to argue that giving people information would scare them into buying non-GMO products. Well, um, yeah, I guess that's the point. Maine, Maryland and Washington will be having up-or-down votes on legalizing same-sex marriage while Minnesotans face a measure to constitutionally take away gay couples rights as 30 states have already done. And don't forget Florida and Maine choose whether to tighten control over women's uteruses (uteri?). 

"When you return to this mundane sphere from your visionary world, you would seem to leave a Neapolitan spring for a Lapland winter - to quit paradise for earth - heaven for hell! Taste the hashish, guest of mine - taste the hashish!"  
 - Alexander Dumas

Polls show Washingtonians and Coloradans likely to vote yes while Oregonians might not be ready to make the leap. What will it mean if these states legalize marijuana? The Obama administration has already showed its disdain for the will of the people by raiding medical dispensaries all over the west, so one can imagine an even stronger reaction to people smoking pot for recreational purposes and given his religious zealotry, Romney has predictably made it clear he'll fight weed tooth and nail. While parroting the same old refuted marijuana myths,  former drug warriors predict a constitutional showdown between the states and feds. With so many powerful forces profiting from prohibition, yes votes in any or all three states will only be a victory in one battle with many more to come. Hopefully the anti-prohibition movement will continue down the same successful path as the last 70 years ago when Beer Day parades saw 100,000 turn out in NYC and 40,000 in Detroit to cheer the legalization of beer, Obama will magically turn into the progressive we believed him to be four years ago and the media will turn from demonization to pressing for legalization. Just as scientists are now restarting research into LSD, MDMA and psilocybin (found in magic mushrooms) after a 40 year federally imposed hiatus and discovering new benefits, new medical uses for marijuana will also help the push. Regardless of the vote, it'll be a cat and mouse game for the foreseeable future in which the cats have the guns but the mice have the reason...