Ball in hand...

That’s what they call it, the folks I’m playing pool with these days.  To be specific it’s cue ball in hand, put it down on the table where you’d like, where it suits your needs.  How do you acquire such an advantageous situation?  You get ball in hand when your opponent scratches, drops the cue ball in a pocket by accident, fails a shot in some particular manner pursuant to their rules. Ok, rules of the game the way they play it.  One player’s goof becomes the other player’s gain.  Fair enough.

It’s a good game, and like most good games it’s accepted because it echoes some fact or facet of reality beyond the game.  Not that those playing the game recognize such similarities intellectually, most often they won’t, don’t, they don’t have to, that’s why it’s a game.  But still a fact, and watching the way the rules of a game influences the play gives solid clue to the way those playing will deal with what they don’t consider a game. Considered beyond a pool table ball in hand translates as a fresh initiative, a new line of circumstances and causalities, the goof broke an old line and allowed someone else a fresh start.

It’s pretty common knowledge that our society is now and has been for quite some time  pretty well polarized, two camps feuding for political power to support their vision of the future.  The question of the day is in the game of brainwashing America (ok, not a full washing, not really, just call it a light rinse) into behaving as someone else desires just exactly what is it that constitutes a scratch? If the digital spying and media manipulations of the last decade or so isn’t a scratch then just what is? From what I see one thing after another has been taken off that list to the point it just isn’t all that common for someone to scratch, not anymore.  One by one the things that enable a new line to begin have gone away to changing times, changing moralities and changing standards. I’m starting to think it’s not very likely that was anything to be called an accident. Seems to me the rules (that live in the minds of the general public) have gotten so loose as to hardly matter.

Watching the pool players watching their respective games has left me wondering just what would it take to get them to watch the world around them with even half of the intensity they watch billiard balls rolling around and vanishing off a railed table.  If, if only, they’d pay as much attention to what’s really going on in the world it would be such a fine thing, such a gain for humanities ultimate chances of maintaining real freedom.  Of course, them being them if they did pay that much attention to things the first and most likely thing to happen would be a bar brawl, and given the last thirty years of history it’s pretty obvious that’s well and fully accommodated within the tyrants strategy: once they start brawling you can kick them out of the bar where they don’t get to play at all.  Democracy... one rail, corner pocket.  *clack-thump*  Freedom, where it sits...