[Newspoetry] AfterMath, Try SomeLogic.

[Donald L Emerick]

AfterMath, Try SomeLogic.

The taste of loss is our mouths
scrapes palate by dental floss,
becomes the loss of taste,
for sorrow and sadness,
the much hackneyed bitter cups of tears,
the overflowing of hacks on knees,
despair, dejection, desolation,
glowering gloom and unflowering hopelessness
seem to be ways of traditional contrition,
to say that you must have done wrong
because you did not triumph,
you failed or failed to win.

And, I would be arrogant, so they say,
were I to take this larger defeat
as one more sign that I am wholly right.

Ye gads, yes, we made mistakes,
but it was not the things that we did
and it was not the words we said,
and it was not the things we did not do
and it was not the words we did not say.

We always make mistakes,
so did and does everyone else --
even our opponents made many mistakes,
whose total numbers and sizes,
at the time of their happenings,
were just as large as our own mistakes.

There is one mistake
we should not make
which we have yet time
to make or not to make:
the mistake of self-defeat,
to assume that what happens
(or, usually, has already happened)
was more or less wholly
within your power alone
to cause to be "success" or "failure".

In a widely known skit,
when the press interviews sports figures,
after a ("losing" or "winning") game,
the sports figures attempt to prove that
they knew how to win, though they lost,
or that they were both skillful and lucky
not to have been the losing team,
though both sides will interjectionally say,
not inconsequentially, but acknowledgingly,
"the better team out there today won today".

It is wrong to let ourselves think
that election competitions may be,
degenerately, compared to sports contests,
for then we let an entertainment become our standard,
for pleasure or pain, as to what is good and bad for living,
we then allow standards from one possible pleasure
to become the universal criterion of value and valuing.

The contest of public offices does not guarantee
that the playing fields will be fair to the players...
for that contest concerns the unfairness of playing fields.
And, a campaign is not a playing field,
but a one-sided series of responsive moves,
to convince the public to behave itself,
to be responsible, to care for the world.

One party will always suggest
that what has been done
was almost good enough,
under the circumstances,
while the other will prattle on
on what needs to be done
and how dire it is that it is not,
being not yet things being done.

In game theory,
gridlock is possible,
stalemate may happen,
and, if you don't like it,
then don't play any game
that may have no winners or losers:
game theory does not forbid games
from being exactly what they are,
by virtue of their structure as a game.

To say that a game has a structure
is to talk about its determinate quality --
what the playing standard for the game is,
against which one may judge excellence of play,
as culminating, perhaps, in wins and losses,
as resulting in potentials from payoff matrices.

Indeterminate games have no such structure
from the given rules for playing the game:
and this indeterminacy does not spring from chance,
for we could always style chance as a rule of the game.

Indeterminate games, then, require
some other ideas of what winning and losing is,
or are (for "is" is a very narrow conception).

One of the things about claiming, ideally,
moral stances is that winning and losing
are never criteria for judging victory or defeat
because moral stances are personal positions
on public issues, as to what ought to be done,
regardless of how popular with publics
some position may happen to be:
a moral position is never ephemeral.

After the election, Gebhardt tried to say
(1) if we had taken any other position on Iraq,
we would have lost more seats than did;
(2) if we had taken a harder line on Bush's tax fiascoes,
the public would have rejected us more than they did;
(3) and so on...

Now, clearly, Dick's message here says:
we were just playing games with the people:
we Democrats had no moral stances
by which we decide what is right and wrong for the people:
and Dick appeared to be accustomed to playing the game
for the margins of power, marginalizing morality, itself.
You did not hear the GOP talking about winning by a nose,
though nose-counting rules always force wins by a nose.

Four successive times he stood on the brink
of a marginal majority which stood for nothing much,
nothing more or less than more marginal calculations,
and more lessonings from marginal miscalculations
are precisely what we do not need to guide us,
so Pelosi is now in, Gebhardt is out,
for teams most often fire managers,
it's just one of the rules of the game.

I liked Dick -- and he was often quite right,
and sometimes, like me, often quite wrong..
He doesn't make many more mistakes,
nor any fewer, either, than anyone else, even me.

My question, for that is what I am probing,
is whether we ought to show how moral we are,
by returning Gebhardt, willy-nilly,
to continue his job as Minority Leader.
Why should we seem to confess
fatal moral failings by ousting him?

We shall not have lost until we do decide to be lost,
nor yet shall we win because we get home safely.

We win when we take risks larger than life,
when our moral stances matter
more to us than all else,
more than life and death,
more than winning or losing,
in the eyes of the world --
and when we stand that high,
on the highest moral grounds,
we shall only risk forgetting
what winning and losing is,
we shall have then risk the loss
of taste for mortality, itself.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick