Or, "How to Defame the Name of a Great Patriot in 30 Years or Less."
If you're anything like me, you've found yourself a slave to CBS Sports television for the last week or so. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing quite as magical in the entire American sports world as NCAA March Madness. College basketball is alive with a level of team-based competition in a way professional basketball never can be - where the real payoff of a championship victory is best served at the pinnacle of teamwork, as opposed to the standard self-serving quest for the ever-increasing salary payouts that accompany star status; an issue which plagues all but the luckiest NBA teams (and a political party or two, come to think of it).
And you can't help but fall in love with the perennially over-hyped, yet tournament-making Cinderella stories. Last Sunday afternoon, I watched with great pleasure as the erstwhile never-been George Mason Patriots skillfully dispensed with the monolithic former champion UConn Huskies in overtime to solidify their first trip to the Final Four. This is the type of magic you see in professional basketball so rarely, if ever. Unless you're a UConn Husky, you've gotta love it. Well, maybe.
I should say maybe not. In the case of GMU, I found that the elation really just doesn't last very long, at least not for me. I just can't get over how disappointing it is to me that GMU has become a right-wing funded university, home to the right-wing noise-machine Mercatus Center - which was fairly well-noted by Markos and Jerome in Crashing the Gate for the role it plays in the interconnected VRWC:
...These idea factories include think tanks, state-based policy organizations, and campus-based institutes and centers: The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Council (ALEC), the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and so on...
...Both Cato and George Mason University receive funding from the big conservative families - Scaife, Bradley, Koch, Olin, and Coors...
Yes, the Scaife's. The name sounds like a skin disease for a reason people. Hardly the type of folks that come to mind when I think of George Mason, the man.
As I see it, there are few individuals who have been more important to the development of our American constitutional democracy that have also been so equally forgotten - an issue of which is driven-home in my mind more heavily every time I visit the George Mason Memorial, which I try to do every time I visit D.C.
To put this in perspective: I generally hate memorials to politicians. I believe they have little to no place in a democratic society - the false idolatry inherent in raising million dollar monuments to men (mostly) who should be considered no greater or wiser than the people who consented to put them in office strikes me as contradictory to the principals of a free society. The fact that the right-wing blowhards who openly ridicule authoritarians such as Saddam Hussein for plastering their graven images all over their nations are the very same people who just can't wait to turn around & name yet another airport or Federal building after Ronald Reagan involves an irony that shouldn't be lost on anyone here. The real heroes of American democracy are the people who've held our politicians to account, and made this messy democratic process work for the betterment of society - for example, the veterans who've fought for this nation without question, and especially the Susan B. Anthony's and Martin Luther King's of the world. Those are the people who are quite literally "monumental" in my mind.
George Mason is one politician for whom I feel quite differently. I try to visit the George Mason memorial whenever I have some free time in the capitol. It's a great place to sit down and read your favorite new progressive political treatises without being bothered by large crowds - if only because, sadly, few people really know or care who Mason was.
My last visit to the monument, late in the fall of 2005, was really disappointing. I've watched over the years as the memorial has grown more and more neglected - weeds popping up out of every crack in the pavement and trash-filled shrubbery that had become so over-grown you couldn't even walk around the back anymore. Being a die-hard environmental nerd, I'd normally find this state of being quite a compliment - after all, the standard pesticide-laden, pumped full of nitrogen fertilizer, overly-manicured museum-look common to monuments is certainly indicative of a number of our culture's ecological short-comings. But this is a monument designed to be walked around; it's a place to hang out, and its overgrown status isn't complimentary in any context - it's just straight-up forgotten, and Mason is someone who shouldn't be forgotten.
Some will say the fact that Mason's memorial is so neglected is yet another sign of the natural decay of our infrastructure that inevitably occurs after years of Republican management. But worse, I feel the fact that it's so easily forgotten in the shadow of the big monuments surrounding it is a sad metaphor for the collective forgetting (by an American citizenry with very little concept of our history) of the role he played in assuring us the rights that are so often taken for granted.
But what's even more upsetting to me - the really unforgivable part - is the egregious slander that's been committed against the good name of George Mason by these fanatical right-wing creeps who've taken over his namesake university.
The disrespectful neglect of Mason's wonderfully and appropriately modest little monument pales in comparison to the astronomical damage that has been done by the maniacal right wing overlords who now use GMU as a pad from which to launch the most egregious assault on his legacy - the Bill of Rights - that this nation has ever witnessed!!! I get so entirely enraged when I think about it that I begin to lose clarity of thought. The devastating irony is thick enough to put a Greek tragedy to shame.
The man who helped cement the concept of individual liberties into our national bedrock deserves so much better than these anti-liberty Republicans and their ilk, all of whom are responsible for the rise of the authoritarian Bush administration and its rubber-stamp Congressional cohorts. George Mason would never stand by as the Republicans conduct their slow and steady assault on the freedom of the press and freedom of speech. George Mason would never stand for detaining prisoners of war for years without the rights to a trial whether they are citizens or not. George Mason would never stand by as the Republican Party continues to chip away at individual's right to privacy. And you bet your sweet ass George Mason would never stand for a unitary executive illegally spying on American citizens.
So when I inevitably become glued to CBS sports yet again this weekend, I'm going to do my best to isolate my negative feelings for what the right wing has made of GMU, and keep my mind on the players - people like Jai Lewis and Lamar Butler - who are living the dream of a lifetime, and who realistically hold no fault for the sins of their administrative fathers (who I just hope are too mired in their hateful conservatism to even enjoy the team's victories for even one moment). And even more so, I kind of hope that if they continue to win, it'll be in the spirit of George Mason himself, a man for whom the team name "Patriots" is no misnomer, and a man whose mark can never truly be erased by the wing ideologues at today's GMU. Especially not if people like us don't let it.
Although it's sometimes nice to devolve into the world of distraction that sports entertainment provides from 24/7 politics - and lord knows we need it - I personally feel I've come out of this ugly head-on collision between the two worlds in my mind with a little bit more energy to take on this ugly conservative movement. On a personal level, I've let all of my mixed feelings about GMU serve as a reminder for what Mason's Bill of Rights has meant to me, my family, and every other American, and that I have to fight all the harder to battle back against the destruction wrought on our liberties by the Republican Party. It's driven home to me, even more so, the importance of reforming this floundering Democratic jugger-not for which we all so passionately advocate, because as infuriating and incompetent as it can be, it's the only chance we've got.
Having said all that... I think the boys from Florida are going to whip some little Republican ass on Saturday. That dude Noah is unstoppable.