A Little Karma

I'm not particularly religious, not too religious at all actually. However, like a lot of other Gen X'ers, I think, I do believe in karma, that you should treat others as you would like to be treated, whatever package you want to put that in. My aunt The Spunky Nurse told me one time that she believes strongly that what goes around, comes around, and I guess I believe that as well. This kind of stuff goes back at least as far as the Greeks. Agamemnon got his after agreeing to sacrifice his daughter to get favorable winds to get the Greek fleet out to Troy, and then ignoring Cassandra, when his wife Clytemnestra did him in as soon as he got back from Troy. That's some serious karma for you.

I'll give you a really minor example of karma. Last week, before one of my team's softball games, I was talking to The Muse about how my most basic goal in playing softball is to not strike out. I mean, in slow-pitch softball, I feel like I should be able to hit the damn ball, even if it just rolls out to the pitcher. Then I said the magic words: "and I haven't struck out yet." So that night, we're getting killed, but, in the last inning, we get a couple of hits and a couple of walks and the bases are loaded when I come up. I had two hits in the game and was feeling a little cocky. Man, I was going to get a hit and at least two RBI's. So I get one strike, which is no big deal, just didn't like the pitch. So I've got one strike left (to speed up the games, you start every at-bat with one ball and one strike). The next pitch comes in, it looks good, I try to swing for the 25-run home run that we need to win the game and just miss it by a mile, I think. So, there you go, there's my first strikeout, the same damn night that I was talking about how I had never struck out before. You just don't tempt the fates like that.

There have been two much more prominent examples of karma lately.

Rafael Palmeiro, of course, is one. I believe that this guy started racking up some karma debt a few years ago when he was doing advertising for Viagra and presumably making serious bucks doing so, but somehow got it out in public (at least as I recall) that he didn't really need the stuff. Anyway, that was just a prelude to wagging his finger at Congress and telling them that he had never done steroids. Well, he did them somehow, knowingly or unknowingly, 'cause he got caught. Now it looks like his career, and probably his chances at the Hall of Fame, are cooked.

It is important in karmic terms to compare Mr. Palmeiro's performance to that of Mark McGuire. Mr. McGuire was roundly ridiculed when he kept answering questions about whether he had done steroids by saying that he didn't want to talk about the past. Was that lame? No doubt. What it wasn't, though, was a big display of chutzpah and hubris like wagging his finger at Congress and saying he never took them. McGuire didn't dig himself a karma hole.

The other big display of karma lately has been in relation to our president. I'm not saying that he personally has done a good job or a bad job with Katrina. Here's what I'm saying. In the 2000 campaign, his campaign made a big deal about how, during the first presidential debate, Al Gore said that he had gone to Texas with the FEMA director after some disaster when he actually hadn't. This was said to be an example of Gore stretching the truth in a manner similar to him saying that he had invented the Internet. (Remember the great Snickers commercial that year with the elephant saying "These are my dad's pants" and the donkey saying "I invented pants"?) This episode ended up hurting Gore pretty significantly. So Bush gets elected, does what he does and then Katrina comes along. What federal agency completely and totally screws up and makes Bush look worse than just about anything else in his presidency (I think this point is pretty well undisputed)? FEMA, of course.

To paraphrase the Doors, there's some mojo rising there.