In the ealy 80’s when the Niners were battling the Cowboys for the best team in football – or, atleast, the NFC – I was, of course, a Niner fan. I had my reasons; good reasons. Among other things, the Niners were just a better group of human beings. At some point, somehow – I don’t have any idea of the circumstances  this was about 25 to 30 years ago – I got a Dallas newspaper and I looked at the sports section. (I think I expected to read about how great the Niners were from Dallas’s point of view.)

In the Dallas paper, I was shocked to read about how much better the Cowboys were as people. They had their reasons, good reasons! In detail. I always thought of Landry as an uptight jerk, but the Dallas paper had an article about what a great humanitarian he was and another article – or, maybe, the same one, it was long ago – talked about how uptight, how stiff, the Niners defensive coordinator, George Seifert, was. I had never thought of Seifert as uptight. Maybe a little quiet, formal, but not uptight. (I was truly taken back and – maybe unfortunately – never saw George Seifert, or the Cowboys, the same way again.) It seemed as if the Dallasonian world was completely backward from my San Franciscan world, at least as far as football goes and, I suspect, alot more. I was opened to another point of view.

I am a fervent believer in The allegory of the Cave Theory of Life in that I do believe that there is a Reality and we can only see imperfect shadows of that higher Reality. I’m a Democrt and, more importantly, a democrat. I think Obama is terrific. That is my reading and what I project on the shadows of a higher Reality. I see an Obama that is a centrist pragmatic trying to dig us out of a very deep financial and ecological hole that we have dug ourselves into over, at least, the last 16 years.  That may be the actual Reality. Or it may only be my distortion. What I am aware of, is that there doesn’t seem to be a Dallas-newspaper-analog that presents a reasoned, other, view of Obama.

I got an email, today, from an acquantance who said “Hopefully, the Marxist, Central Planning and Control Obama will wind up in his ‘Elba”; while riding with a friend – who seems conservative to me but refers to himself as moderate – about a year ago, he referred to Obama as a Trotshyite and, when I asked Tell me why you say that, he answered That’s just how I feel, I have a right to feel the way I feel ; after Obama said – in a speach at the UN – that The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied, conservative commentator Erick Erickson said In his speech to the United Nations general assembly today the president of the United States declared that the future does not belong to practicing Christians.  What? Where? How?  Oh, right. He just feels that way.

And so it goes.