DAY AFTER DAY, ALONE ON A (GRASSY) KNOLL

Two odd happenstances to report on. First, a visit to that bacchanalia of excess and welled up emotion that is an NFL game, followed today by a viewing of the docu-flick, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Sandwiched in between, a viewing of the "Decider" letting us know how content he is to "educate us" on why his "Plan in Iraq will succeed, and why that success is so important for 'Merica."

Seventy thousand people dressed in partisan gear, most liquored up enough to be healthily buzzed, and all screaming and waving in unison for the same thing - for a team of exhorbitantly paid men who barely made it out beyond high school to achieve a higher score in a game that won't matter at all in 5 years. These people paying 115 - 300 bucks a head for the privilege do so so, plus all the cash associated with the trappings - food, booze, parking, apparel. Quite an investment for such a transient passion. How many of these folks would expend a tenth of that effort to vote? To write a Senator or Congressman? To write a letter to the editor and lodge a complaint or protest about some universally bad idea - like adding more cannon fodder in Iraq? It isn't that damn hard to visualize, is it? It shouldn't be out of peoples' minds, right? After all, there's part of the Marine Band on the field. There's a multi-dimensional military color guard on the field, accompanied by dozens of other uniformed personnel to attend to an oversized flag. There's a squadron of jet fighters overhead, after the National Anthem. Would it be too much to ask for this crowd - or even half of it, to gather and petition their government for redress- to ask for sanity, for pause?

Juxtapose that with the "Electric Car" movie. A great idea catches on with a consumer public in Southern California. A public sick of poor air quality, foreign oil dependence, and maybe, just maybe, a little tired of having American manufacturers lag behind their world competitors. Presto, here comes a car from what once was the biggest company on earth - it has zero emissions, it has a 120 mile range between charges, it's quiet, it's fast enough for freeways, and it can be re-charged at home, and its maintenance costs are significantly lower. But, uh-oh, with it comes public expectation - if you can do this with one car, you can do it with ALL of 'em, right? So what do to? Make it impossible to buy, and difficult to lease. Publicize it with commercials that are ominously frightening, and lacking the allure of all other car come-ons (no girls, explosions or peppy music), co-opt the key people who can block the path, and then litigate, litigate LITIGATE! When it is all done, the car goes away, replaced by a "new," unattainable technology that is "better," but far off on the horizon - like the rising moon. And every last bit of the effort is done in plain sight - in the daylight, with nobody covering it, no pre- or post-game show, no detailed analysis, no TV network devoted to dissection, just a handful of docu-pic film-makers covering a group of diehard activists who can be easily labeled as crackpots. The air quality deteroriates, GM almost literally replaces the EV1 with the Hummer, the Government gives monster tax breaks to the businesses who buy the Monster truck, and billions get shoveled into a new research boondoggle.

Why does the game get the Network, the big money and the screaming horde, and the good idea car get the "move along, nothing to see here" treatment? It isn't just money, or power, or influence, or gullibility, or desire to escape/de-stress, or control. Its all of these things and several others. But it becomes abundantly clear that if these things can co-exist side by side this way - with one crying out for exposure and the other being devoid of all but the most fleeting significance - then some group really could have been on the Knoll in that Dallas November, or in Los Angeles on a sweaty night in June, or in Memphis in an early Spring evening nearly 4 decades ago, using only their fear as cover, and taking from all of us a real chance for something different, something better, something, perhaps, more meaningful than simply whose team won this week, and moves on to the Bigger game next week. It could be done, and the doubters simply shouted down.