Roman Around The Mind – We Had a Deal, Roman!
By Andrew Roman
Posted On September 15, 2005

I’m getting older, and my brain and I aren’t as affable as we used to be. Fortunately, we’ve managed to reach a deal whereby I agree on a daily basis to immediately retire my body at the first signs of fatigue while my brain consents to grant me six to eight hours of deep uninterrupted sleep. As a result, I’m out of commission before the echoes of my slamming eyelids have finished resonating. Essentially, I’ve sacrificed the sacrament of toiling through the world’s absurdities and profundities at bedtime for a decent night’s rest.

Before the deal, for example, I might spend countless ticks of the clock trying to understand why some believe that children under the age of eighteen are mature enough to make their own decisions when it comes to aborting a baby without parental notification, but are somehow just “kids” when they volunteer to serve in the military.

Equally perplexing to me is how one can believe that these same “kids” have no idea what they’re getting into when they enlist - particularly when the media make it their primary order of business to not only broadcast images of bombed out vehicles and carnage from Iraq at every opportunity, but to gruesomely keep a running tally of the dead, like it was a Labor Day telethon or something.

Luckily, I can get right to sleep these days and not have to wrestle with these things at bedtime anymore.

My brain and I made a deal.

I recall when I would lay there trying to rationalize the concept of professing undying support for my favorite football team – the New York Jets – while ardently opposing them actually playing a football game. To voice my support for the Jets as individual football players while arguing they shouldn’t take the field for fear of losing a game or sustaining serious injuries seemed to be a camel’s nose-hair shy of absurd. Even if I harbored some doubt about the Jets facing a given opponent (which I don’t, by the way), wouldn’t I still root for the Jets to win?

Try this logic on for size: “I support you as a football player and all, but please don’t go play football. It’s barbaric and senseless. I don’t even like this game. Of course, I do support you.”

In the old days, another glass of warm milk might have helped.

In my “tossing and turning” days, I could see myself kicking the sheets around while grappling with the whole idea of nuance being the mark of a smart politician. Back during the election season of 2004, Senator John Kerry was too nuanced – and therefore too intelligent – to come right out and explain exactly what his plan of action would be as it related to the war in Iraq. It was our problem if we couldn’t pick up on his finer distinctions. Yet, I kept arriving at the fact that it was President Bush who correctly understood the war to be global in scope. To fight the war and define success as the pursuit and capture of one man hiding in some cave somewhere, as Bush bashers apparently conceived it to be, seemed to me to be something profoundly void of nuance.

I might keep myself awake at night wondering how many of the people who want President Bush strung up by his ankles now wish that this war really was all about oil. As gas prices soar, will any of the Bush haters secretly complain that the United States should have taken over at least some of the oil fields in Iraq?

I also wonder if seeing the vastness of the destruction of the Gulf Coast thanks to Hurricane Katrina puts into some sort of perspective how insignificant the proposed area of drilling in the wasteland of Anwar is. If a voice could be attached the vast reserves of oil lurking beneath the barren frozen surface, it would probably be screaming, “Hey! Here I am! Come get me! What’re you waiting for? I haven’t seen a polar bear or a goose in these parts for ages!”

And speaking of Hurricane Katrina …

Certainly, it is not unreasonable to ask why the mayor of New Orleans had not stepped up and mobilized the scores of buses that are still sitting under water in New Orleans to help with the evacuation of the city’s poorest residents. But why is it that people of little substance and relevance, like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, are still given even a mosquito’s spitball worth of credibility when he suggests that the Mayor could not use the buses for evacuations because there was simply no place to take these people.

What?

Isn’t it better to have, say, an interstate highway rest area full of buses, somewhere outside of New Orleans, filled with people recently evacuated from an oncoming catastrophic storm, with no set place to go as of yet, than to have these same people left stranded and dead?

Ask the relatives of those killed that same question.

Imagine if Mayor Giuliani had decided against asking people to get out of lower Manhattan after the attacks on the World Trade Center because he was unsure where those people would be able to go.

Try this logic: “I can’t ask people to leave the area south of Canal Street in Manhattan, even though it is obviously a dangerous situation. Where will they go? Chelsea? The Bronx? Forty-forth Street? There’s no one to receive them.”

It’s a good thing I don’t keep myself up at nights anymore, thinking about this stuff.

Of course, as I write this, it’s way past my bedtime.

(Uh,oh).

I can definitely expect hate mail from my brain.

“We had a deal, Roman!”

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