THOSE WAYWARD DECISIONS

Oh, the federal appellate courts. Where would newspapers be without their
more wayward decisions to chronicle? Where would politicians be without
them to kick around?

This week the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in (where else?) California came
up with a truly nutty decision, and the United States Supreme Court saved
for term's end a couple of hot-potato rulings inviting opinion.

The "under God" case was of the type that trivializes our protection of
freedom of religion, such as attacks on city seals, city Christmas
decorations and other routine traces of civic deism. Congress may have
intended to make a constitutionally dubious point when it added the phrase
in 1954, but it is now a part of the background noise of life. It can truly
offend only a tiny fraction of the citizenry. Overturn 'em, High Court!

As for the high court, its extension of drug testing to band members, math
teams and other participants in non-athletic extracurricular activities is
one more chip off the edifice of liberty. Testing athletes might be
justified in the name of avoiding sports-related abuses and injuries, but
no such rationale is apparent in this case. Indeed, active students are the
least likely to be abusers.

We're on the slippery slope toward requiring every last adolescent in the
land of the free to urinate in a paper cup daily right after he or she
passes the metal detector at the door of good old Zero Tol H.S.

School vouchers? I'm ambivalent. Confined to the situation of giving poor
children a lone hopeful option in a failing school system, they seem
defensible. But this could constitute an opening wedge into draining
resources from our embattled public schools and into supporting religious
enterprises with tax money. I fear what might follow.

Last week's column about what it's like to get a new knee resulted in some
questions. If you have a weak stomach, skip the next two paragraphs:

What does the operation really entail? I understand they cut off the ends
of my thigh bone and my shin bone so as to remove the old knee. Then they
cemented a metal shell on the end of the thigh bone; over the end of the
shinbone went a metal and plastic trough for it to move in.

Finally they smoothed off my kneecap and put it back in place along with
the muscles and ligaments that had been pushed aside.

Why is physical therapy such a big deal? Without it, the knee wouldn't
work. During your week in the hospital, the therapists focus on seemingly
opposite goals: getting it to bend more than 90 degrees and helping you to
get it completely straight. Your muscles (mine were messed up by five years
of favoring the bad knee) have to work hard to meet those goals. Sometimes
they gang up to fight against meeting them, which hurts.

My outpatient therapy with Lew Wilson and Kelly Argo at Macon Northside
rehab, has involved working on different groups of muscles in the leg,
knee, hip and back. It's amazing how repeatedly tensing and loosening a
single set of muscles can become hard work and leave you sore. But my
therapists have good equipment and spend a lot of time with their clients.
Truth is, I look forward to the sessions except for the knee-icing afterward.

You also do some of the same exercises (and ice routine) at home twice a
day. So getting back in shape becomes pretty much of a full-time job. Just
four weeks after the operation, it's a good feeling to walk a couple of
miles comfortably without a cane, or to turn over in bed with the feeling
that your own knee is turning with you, not some awkward foreign object
you?re dragging around.

And that's enough about knees for this decade, OK?

Ed Corson, whose column runs every Friday, is an associate professor of
English at Georgia College & State University.