free variable

The Green Bay Packers, no longer able to keep newly-unretired quarterback Brett Favre from reporting for training camp, have issued a statement about Favre and their intentions for him. The release is not kind to the quarterback and looks to me like a craven attempt to maintain some trade value for a disgruntled player, but one image stands out in a morass of clumsy public-relations cant:

As a result of his decision, we invested considerably in a new and different future without Brett and we were obviously moving in that direction. That’s why this wasn’t easy. Having crossed the Rubicon once when Brett decided to retire, it’s very difficult to reorient our plans and cross it again in the opposite direction – but we’ll put this to our advantage.

One wonders where Packers president Mark Murphy acquired his cultural literacy. The entire point of crossing the Rubicon is that one can’t cross back. (Perhaps, after Murphy is done playing in the Rubicon, he will re-tie the Gordian knot.)

Whether or not the management team of an American football franchise were aware of the provenance and implications of the Rubicon idiom, it seems unlikely that comparing one’s self to Caesar is rhetorically wise. Very few press releases imply that the writers will be hailed as victors in the near-term but establish a dictatorship and then be brutally murdered by former allies.