I was on a flight from Albany to Burbank the other day with a brief stop in Las Vegas.  For one thing, I was the only through passenger.  For another, the flight was packed to the gills with testosterone oozing, mostly overweight, forty-somethings who could all easily pass for Peter Griffin on the Family Guy, headed to Sin City to cement their fortunes by laying it all on the line in some garishly-lit, free-drinks Sports Book lounge.  The continuous soundtrack, (which incrementally increased in volume from push-back until the last of them had deplaned), was a study in sport-speak psycho-babble, complete with verbal charts and graphs and the unflinching declaration by each pseudo Peter, that theirs’ was the definitive pick of the Final Four and that, (insert any one of twenty choices here), was the odds-on, Cinderella, long-shot, upset, algorhythmically absolute NCAA champ.

I like basketball…a lot.  I didn’t understand a word.

In relating this anecdote, (I’m not sure if it qualifies as an anecdote, but I would like to think that I occasionally relate something as uppity sounding as an anecdote), to a few friends, it began to dawn on me that I may have just peripherally participated in a living metaphor for political interaction, circa 2013; lots and lots and lots of loud talking; an occasional grammatically correct sentence, albeit lacking in substance; endless declarations of unsubstantiated, (make that out and out fabricated), statistics; and the relentless innuendos comparing penis size, (generally through unexposed braggadocio, but somewhere over the Grand Canyon, descending into a side-by-side foreskin vs foreskinless pissing, [not literally], contest).  Neither the multi-layered arguments of my travel companions, nor anything that they said, did or prayed for will have anything to do with the actual outcome of the tournament that so passionately consumed them.  None of the energy or the money that most of them will squander will have a positive effect on themselves, others, (I suppose the owners of the Sports Books may get a rise from relieving the boys of their cash), or the planet and, not unlike the Rubio’s and the Bachman’s and the Cruz’s the utter uselessness of their rhetoric and their actions never seems to be a deterrent.

Go Gophers!