Columnist – John Sammon
I’ve got a confession to make. A major one. Believe me, this isn’t easy. But I’ll just go ahead and force it right out of my lips.

Are you ready for this? Okay. Here goes.

I rooted against my own football team in high school. Bullard High School in Fresno, California, Class of 1968. I’m a traitor. A subversive. A coward. I must also be a bad American. What kind of person would root against their own high school football team?

Let me explain. Hear me out.

Some of the boys in my class had by the age of sixteen and seventeen attained the early growth of a man’s body. They looked like Brad Pitt. Towering under them was me. I looked like I was eight years old.

I couldn’t be like they were. They were men. I was a child. They dated the gorgeous blonde cheerleaders. They were big men on campus. I was afraid of them, in awe of them, a tiny big-nosed runt with pimples who was always aware of both his frailness and ugliness.

We were an all-white (no African Americans) school from the rich side of town. Our school produced some great football teams, and this was a stellar year (1968). We were undefeated, demolishing every other team. The local Fresno Bee newspaper sang our praises, the Bullard High Knights (the press nicknamed our quarterback Mighty Monty).

Now, high school for me because of my real or imagined physical infirmities and low self esteem, was a traumatic experience. We were required, forced, mandated, in other words, you had to go, to pep rallies honoring our football team.

We had to cheer these guys. Some of them had slapped me around, or threatened to. I was not allowed in their clique. I didn’t hang out with them. I was after all, a little wimp.

Why would I cheer people who thought of me as a lesser being, an underling, and who treated me as such? Cheer and worship people who got their jollies at my expense?

Why would I cheer them?

The football coach, whose real life name was Norwood Eben, also taught a typing class, and I had him for a teacher. I did something to offend him; I can’t remember what it was, so it must have been minor.

Maybe, it’s who he thought I was he didn’t like. One day, he mocked me in the class as a little wimpy coward in front of the other students. Now, in fact, I was a wimpy little coward. But this was devastating to me. The class yearbook would run a huge picture of him and describe him as “a friend to all.”

I’m sorry Norwood, I’m sorry about saying this, but you didn’t act like you were my friend. Maybe you just couldn’t see at the time that I was a frail, sensitive, somewhat effeminate, troubled, scared little boy completely overwhelmed by the pain of trying to grow up.

Maybe you just couldn’t see it from my eyes.

Maybe you had a bad day. You weren’t my friend. But you sure loved your golden god-like boys on the football team.

I tried to deal with the situation by hiding as best I could. I turned into a hermit. I only showed up to those school events I was required to. I skipped everything else, every other activity, every experience that should have brought a few fond memories (I don’t think my parents were even vaguely aware of my troubles. At the time, it was thought by many adults that teenagers don’t have troubles).

Our team continued to smash every other school. It was going to be a perfect championship season. Not one defeat. We were invincible.

For some reason, maybe my mom forced me to go; I ended up attending one game, the big game. We were facing a team from the poor side of town. They had some poorer whites, Mexican kids, and a few African Americans (some of the parents from our school referred to them as jigs, short for jigaboo).

They kicked our butts. To the astonishment of the crowd. I watched our team get slaughtered, right in front of my eyes.

This is painful for me to relate. I felt good. I enjoyed it. Sitting there, lonely, hideously ugly (I thought), I was happy, watching them get wiped out. When we chanted, “hit ‘em again, hit ‘em again, harder harder!” I was chanting for the other team. And they did hit us harder.

Why would I cheer my own guys to glory when they relegated me to the status of class nigger, when they treated me bad?

Collectively, our senior class never got over this single defeat. Our yearbook sadly, piously said, recounting it for all posterity, “the team didn’t lose, Bullard lost, and it lost to a good team.”

In other words, the entire school lost. I agree with the “good team” part, but the rest was perfectly Freudian. In other words, the aspirations and the unique differences and talents between 600 students, half of them girls who didn’t play football at all; it came down to this, the ability of fifteen hand-picked rough-neck boy-men to knock heads.

This is the same dysfunctional paranoia and mythology that leads adults who support a political party to think their party never makes a mistake, and the other political party never does anything right. It’s them against us. Unfortunately, it’s also a mentality we carry into our dealings with other countries.

Just because we lost one game, had one off-night, because we weren’t perfect, we all lost.

Well excuse my French. But I didn’t fuc.’in lose a thing. In fact, I gained.

They (the football players) didn’t represent me. I had already lost part of my humanity in high school.

Those guys, the big men, they lost. They were the ones who practiced and reaped the glory, and reveled in their superiority. It’s only justice they experience a lesson in humility.

I’m sorry, but I loved it!

I think the one valuable thing to me that I came away from this is, that ever since, I’ve had a well-developed empathy for the underdog, because of my own painful experience as one.

In the end, this was better than scoring a touchdown.

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   Columnist – John Sammon
Okay, I’ve figured it out. I’m on to you guys. This is an end-run, a Plan B, an alternate strategy, an, if you don’t succeed try try again, a never-say-die.

Marijuana growers, frustrated in their attempts to legalize the drug, have decided to promote pot under the legal umbrella of providing medicine to prevent pain from little medicinal pot shops.

These are in reality a brand new kind of health care speakeasy.

Though medicinal marijuana remains illegal under federal law, it is legal in states like California because voters passed Proposition 215, titled “The Compassionate Act,” in 1996.

For those of you too young or un-learned to know, a speakeasy was a secret bar in the 1920s where a person could go to purchase an alcoholic drink during the decade when alcohol was declared illegal by the U.S. Government, titled “Prohibition.” A person would go to some obscure door in a hidden-away alley somewhere and knock. A tiny slit in the door would open revealing a peep-hole with a pair of eyes. You would say to the pair of eyes, “Joe sent me.”

The door would then open, and you would be gained admittance to enter and have your illegal booze cocktails.

The police sometimes raided these establishments, but often as not took kick-back-payola bribes from the gangsters who ran them. The government in its usual wisdom failed to understand that not only would Prohibition not end drinking, but it would be a cash bonanza to the gangsters who eagerly supplied the illegal hooch. Prohibition, enacted in 1920, didn’t work and was repealed in 1933.

Today, instead of Joe sent me, you go to your little neighborhood pot shop and say, “I have a note (prescription) from my doctor.”

I’m not against the use of marijuana to treat chronic pain such as that faced by someone who has cancer. However, it’s become pretty obvious that pain isn’t the only means or reason for the distribution. Narcotics growers and users have learned the value of deviously claiming they are providing a health care service to the public.

It is eerily reminiscent of the time gangster Al Capone indignantly said his activities amounted to a public service, that he was only providing the public what it wanted (booze).

Pot proponents who view the drug as a recreational cocktail have seized upon a loop-hole, that of providing it under the false guise of medicinal-only, and then supplying it to whoever wants to use it recreationally.

How do I know? An acquaintance of mine. Her teenage daughter and friends got the pot they smoke on the college campus for fun through a medicinal pot shop.

It’s pretty simple. You open a pot shop in your community usually without the permission of the local city council, or by a subtle subterfuge. The organizers of the shop misleadingly describe the proposed business to the city council in vague terminology like, “it’s a herb shop.” What type of herb is often left unspecified.

After the medicinal pot shop is open for business and supplying pot to those who have pain and teens who want to get high, the city council finds out about it, but is unable to shut the shop down. A period of legal wrangling then ensues as the city council tries to close the pot speakeasy. This is just a variant of “I’m providing a public service for people in need” that Capone spoke of.

California voters didn’t realize their 1996 votes were providing pot proponents a golden loophole dropped right in their laps.

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Like a typical GOP politician, congressman lived a “full and married” life as a closeted homosexual, constantly deriding and beating on fellow gays legislatively …..until he was caught — arrested for a DUI after leaving the gay nightclub FACES, in Sacramento, CA. When the police stopped the state-issued vehicle, there was an unidentified man (lover) in the passenger seat of the car.

LOL!

Yesterday, he came out — a freshly minted “Gay American,” like the former New Jersey governor, James McGreevey, who announced his resignation in 2004, revealing that he is gay and that he had an adulterous affair with a man.

The difference between the two cases, is that McGreevey never bashed fellow gays, unlike many of his Republican counterparts — several of whom have been caught; one, a Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) in a Minnesota TOILET.

Asked when did he know he was gay, and if he had come out to his family, Senator Roy Ashburn said “That’s my private life and that’s personal,” “I don’t think it’s relevant to how I do my job,” “my personal life is my personal life, I’ve already said that I’m gay.” “The facts are what they are. I acknowledge what I DID and I’ll pay the consequences for that.”

Yes, once again, another “holier-than-thou,” “sexual pervert,” — a member of the “GOD people,” the “Moral Majority,” has fallen flat on his “moral ass.”

If you are gay, you are gay ….no ifs or buts. Just be who you are and roll with the punches! There is really nothing to be ashamed of — because shame will not change your orientation. You are stuck with it, and the demeaning opinions held by some — especially the “Religious Hypocrites.”

Lastly, a man not true to himself, cannot be true to anybody else — his constituents, “wife,” friends and sundry.

I can imagine how “ghastly” the cheated wife feels right now.

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   Columnist – John Sammon
The news yesterday that Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer’s opponents are trying to make hay out of a remark she recently made to a general asking him not to call her “ma’am,” but to call her “senator” instead, sparked personal memories of Boxer of my own.

I had a rare, momentary insight into Boxer, and the kind of ego and strokes it takes to make a national candidacy. I did this by doing as was my habit at the time, and still is, by standing in the wrong place (for Boxer) at the right time (for me).

I have never related it until now.

This is not about politics. I have been an avowed enemy of the right wing of late.

Nevertheless, when Boxer was running for the US Senate in 1992, I was a reporter at a small-time newspaper in Placerville, California.

Boxer came through for an appearance.

It was apparent she was too busy to stay long in this town of about 8,000. Small-town reporters like I was got used to this. It’s a huge moment for us when somebody famous comes to visit, but often a non-event for the bored celebrity.

It was apparent she would not grace her Placerville supporters with a speech. She was in a rush. She had to get to Sacramento, a much bigger town.

A bunch of the local party faithful munched what looked to be stale salad in a ground-floor hotel activity room while Boxer breezed in, exchanged perfunctory greetings with a select few local yokels of note, and then headed quickly to a second-story hotel room. She had a retinue of females surrounding her who appeared to be hangers-on accompanying her on the campaign.

Politicians always say how much they love allegedly common-as-dirt people, but when push comes to shove, they often give away their actual in-person disdain.

There was obviously something important going on upstairs, so I let myself be swept, jostled and bumped along with the group. I have this unique ability to blend in despite my size, almost like I’m one of those tropical fish that can change color to match the surrounding corral rocks.

Maybe it’s because I’m a non-entity.

As an example, on one other occasion I innocently, not knowing, entered a top secret meeting where the press was supposed to barred, and I didn’t know it, and I listened to the whole secret meeting before its horrified organizers discovered I was a reporter. They screamed at me. I thought they were going to forbid me to leave, make me a prisoner and lock me in a closet.

But that’s another story.

Anyway, back to Boxer.

She jostled through the excited crowd with her female retinue and pushed her way into the small hotel room. The door closed. There was something on television much more important than the small-town political rally going on down below.

They were watching her be interviewed on (I think) the TV Show 60 Minutes. The door opened a crack. There she was, seated on a bed, surrounded by her worshipful retainers. They were laughing at every supposedly clever pithy thing she must have been saying on the TV. Their eyes shined with wild excited delight. Her sycophants were literally chortling along with her at everything memorable and witty she must have been saying on the TV screen.

How wonderful they all thought she was (including herself).

It must be thrilling to be a star.

I got the idea from watching it for just that moment, seeing what I wasn’t supposed to see, that here was a supreme ego and its admiring adherents at work.

She maybe stayed all of 10 minutes and then left.

I have never forgotten seeing that brief secret glimpse of a candidacy. It bothers me still because I think it shows our elected officials are subjected to a grandiosity they find it hard to control or to play down.

It’s easy in these cases to lose touch with reality.

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USAToday: “I don’t get the hard fouls I used to,” Obama said — talking to Leno about pickup basketball games under the watchful eyes of Secret Service agents.

Obama, the first sitting president to appear on the show (The Tonight Show With Jay Leno), told Leno he was stunned when he learned of the bonuses that insurance giant AIG was paying to retain certain employees as it goes through a restructuring with taxpayer money. Obama said the payments raise moral and ethical problems and that the administration’s going to do everything it can to get them back.

As he did a day earlier at a fairgrounds meeting in Costa Mesa, Calif., Obama encountered largely adoring and enthusiastic crowds at the Miguel Contreras Learning Center in downtown L.A. Attendees had placed their names on an online site and were selected by lottery.

“I was inspired,” said Tonantzin Castro, 31, of Pasadena, who said she was unemployed and looking to Obama for help for the jobless. “He’s not a miracle worker; it was just his general ideas of hope. Watching the news is so demoralizing, and you start to lose that hope.”

Across the street from the school’s gym where the president spoke, several hundred people waved a variety of signs in favor of legalizing illegal immigrants. [ READ MORE ]

Keith Olbermann Previews Obama’s Leno Visit With Craig Ferguson

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