Answering Madness with Madness
The Elixir of Escape
The finest madness is the kind you get to prepare for. I curate madness every March, studying team records and relative strengths and weaknesses, carefully analyzing and filling out brackets on various websites – then watching my lovingly engineered post-season predictions get shredded faster than a letter from Jeffrey Epstein.
That’s why they call it March Madness.
Let the light of your madness shine.
- Carl Jung
“March Madness is an incredible three weeks,” proclaimed Dick Vitale. “I firmly believe it’s the greatest three weeks in sports.” While that may be debatable – there are lots of different sports – March Madness is a high point for me every year. Retirement was made for the first weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament. Freed from the confines of a 9 to 5 downtown office, I camp in my home office facing four screens displaying four college basketball games simultaneously. I have a March Madness NCAA Tournament tan.
Is it important? Yes and no. Yes, because I grew up on the University of Arizona Campus (my mother was on the staff) and earned all three of my degrees there. My wife received her master’s degree from the U of A and our daughter graduated cum laude. My father was a member of the freshman basketball team. So, when the Wildcats compete in March Madness, I enthusiastically go nuts.
No, it’s not important because winning or losing a basketball game is not a matter of life or death. No government will fall nor leader be toppled. Those who pay no attention to March Madness are unaffected by it, except for wondering why so many of us take it so seriously.
But it’s important simply because it’s not important. It’s a diversion, an escape, a safe harbor from a world caught up in turbulence. When I was absorbed in a Sweet Sixteen or Elite Eight matchup, I wasn’t thinking about Iran, Ukraine, Venezuela, or Russia. And I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about Donald Trump.
Which brings us to the other kind of madness, the unwanted kind erupting from trauma, disease, or an overdose of crazy in our national leadership. March Madness is choreographed and inspirational. King Donald’s madness is dangerous and unpredictable. More ominously, it’s a contagious form of madness, threatening to metastasize into a global orgy of shared annihilation.
On February 28, as the Arizona Wildcats and other college basketball teams were winding up their seasons before running the gantlet of conference tournaments and, for some, the NCAA Tournament, Mr. Trump took America to war. He never consulted with nor sought authorization from Congress and failed to explain to the American people what he was doing or why. His Iranian escapade (he calls it an “excursion,” as though it were a Princess cruise), seems impromptu, whimsical, and inspired by fantasy.
The fantasy was Trump’s belief that Iran would be conveniently pliant, like Venezuela’s craven leadership. As soon as Nicolás Maduro was abducted and removed, his vice-president and others engaged in a calibrated capitulation, sacrificing their revolutionary fervor in the interests of self-preservation. Trump’s Venezuela-inspired fantasy, with nudging by Bibi Netanyahu, led him to attack Iran.
“Trump proved to be a willing and full partner,” wrote the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He was risk-ready and caught up in a self-generated aura of military power and invincibility after taking President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela.”
Iran is not Venezuela. Maduro’s successors and Maduro himself inherited their power from a minor league dictator named Hugo Chavez. Iran casts a shadow that stretches back more than two and a half millennia, while the United States is puffing up for its semiquincentennial. That’s why Iran believes it can outlast the Americans. Its power lies in patience and endurance. Trump has none of that.
“[Trump] is getting a little bored with Iran,” an administration official told MSNOW. “Not that he regrets it or something — he’s just bored and wants to move on.” Perhaps that’s why aides show him combat porn to salvage his interest. “President Donald Trump,” reports Yahoo News, “watches a daily video briefing about the war in Iran curated by U.S. military officials, who show him a reel of ‘stuff blowing up,’ fueling concerns that he ‘may not be receiving or absorbing’ the full picture of the conflict, according to a report.”
The 4th day of the 4th month of this year is the 440th day of Trump’s second administration. It’s also the first day of the Final Four. The Arizona Wildcats are participating for the first time in a quarter century. They are playing the University of Michigan, a relentless basketball machine that shows hints of invincibility when playing at its best. The escape will be a blessing.
The last time I needed an escape into March Madness this desperately was in 1997, when my father was in St. Mary’s hospital, recovering from a major stroke. The Wildcats won their only national championship that year. I watched the game on a small, wall-mounted TV, in Dad’s hospital room. It was a therapeutic break from the reality that would come rushing back into our lives – a life that, for my father, had a year and half remaining.
When the game ends on Saturday, I will pour a glass of wine. Whether it will wash down heartbreak or ecstasy depends on the result. But, for a little more than two hours, my reality will be confined to Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis and pair of college basketball powers trying to win a game.
Sure, it’s only a game. But as I’m watching it, while Trump and his demons stalk the landscape, I won’t care about them at all.