Color War

If you went to summer camp, know someone who loved camp or have seen the classic Meatballs... you know what Color War is. For those of you who don't, the gist is this. You've got a campful of, well campers and counselors that are divided into two teams, two "color" teams - blue team vs. the white team is pretty standard. It was the highlight of the summer. Everyone knew approximately when the 'war" would start, but not exactly, so the anticipation of when and how it "broke" was huge. And when it did, everyone was told which team they were on, directed to their team meeting place and then began five days of intense competition, where pretty much everything you did was about getting points. The team with the most points at the end, naturally won. Wars were battled over everything from sports competitions, clean-up inspection (whose cabin/cubby space was the cleanest), all-camp relay races (better known as The Apache Relay), to Rope Burn (too bizarre to explain), to a big culminating Song Night competition. It sounds so kumbaya, especially with the song bit, but it was serious shit. During those 5 days, your loyalty to your team absolutely superseded a friendship or sibling relationship, if they were on the other team. It was totally awesome, and not for the meek of heart. Although everyone of us seemed to have been built from that cloth and loved it.

Games were played all day all over camp with each age group from each team battling it out. Throughout the day, you'd hear bits and pieces of info about who had won & lost. But it was after dinner, over the loudspeaker, that the real tally count was revealed - who won junior boys kickball, or senior girls basketball, the amount of points each team had won for the day and what the total count was up to that point. It was intense. Everyone hushed each other so they could hear. Half the camp would break into loud cheers, while the other half hung their head in dejection and shame, hushing the winners to quiet down to hear the next round of scores...

So tonight, when I came home, I turned on CNN to watch the poll results of today's primaries in Louisiana, Nebraska, Washington and Kansas (republican) caucus. Admittedly a bit tired, slightly buzzed and simultaneously reading newsfeeds from the laptop perched on my lap. But when I looked up and saw the smug Wolf Blitzer reporting on the day's events, pointing to his big colored maps talking in that serious pompous tone he's got, analyzing numbers - who's up, who's down, poll numbers, percentage points, delegate tallies... all i could think about was Color War. The intensity, the details, the number tally. And basically the fact that it all felt strangely and bizarrely familiar. If it was a close one, we'd be counting the numbers too, determining the mathematical possibilities of the points left to win. True, the outcome of these races, and ultimately the general election, is no game. We've seen George Bush and his feckless gang of yes-men decimate any advantages we had at home and abroad, so getting the right person in there who you can curtail the damage and hopefully reverse it is fairly urgent. Though, in all fairness, back then Color War felt like a life and death struggle too.

To this day I can still remember the name of the teams I was on 30-35 years ago and scarily enough still know the lyrics to those fight songs we sang on Song Night. But sitting there on my sofa, thinking I should just turn off the TV, get in bed and finish the crossword, I couldn't help wondering what it is that I'll remember about this war. If you're a political operative or media pundit, you remember those details and reel them off like a sports fan who remembers the score of a game or lifetime stat of a player from 30 years ago. But the general public, not so much. I find it a stretch sometimes to remember who battled it out in past general elections, let alone who the contenders were in each of the primaries. Though I'm pretty certain I'll remember 2008 as the year of the historic match up between a black man named barack and a white woman named hilary, it's highly unlikely i'll remember who won which state, what the percentages were, who got whose endorsement, who said what about whom...

I am as guilty as the next political addict of getting wrapped up in the minutia, analysis and "game." So getting a chuckle out of somehow seeing Color War results in Wolfe's colored pie charts, was me laughing at myself as much as at the media. Of course, making fun of the process and the media is hardly original. The (A) Daily Show does it beautifully almost every night. This was just my own personal Jon Stewart meet summer camp moment. And, being a Jew from New Jersey, he probably knows exactly what I'm talking about. I'm just thankful we didn't have nightly pundits back in camp analyzing each kick of every soccer game. It would have taken the fun out of it.