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I think I hurt universally acknowledged commentor Raven‘s feelings by forgetting that this would be the first weekend for college football. Sorry, dude! (I’ll probably hurt them again next year by forgetting all over again; apologies in advance.)
These funnies seemed worth sharing, though. Dave Roth on “Colin Kaepernick’s Protest, And What Values Are Worth“:
On Thursday, Colin Kaepernick issued a statement regarding his socks. The public was owed nothing less. The public was very concerned about—or pretending to be very concerned about—the socks in question. The socks had little pig faces on them, and each pig was wearing a policeman’s hat. Kaepernick had worn the socks at 49ers training camp on August 10, which was four days before he first sat down during the national anthem before a NFL preseason game, and more than three weeks before Steve Wyche asked Kaepernick to explain why he had been sitting during the national anthem…
This story is not just another humid August News fartwave, because what Kaepernick did and why he did it are more serious than that. More than that, the actual seriousness of Kaepernick’s protest has blown a hole, deep and wide, right through the pomp and pretense and vast self-seriousness of the NFL and the conversation it wraps around it. The result has been a pitched battle between Kaepernick’s protest in itself, and the forces of that goonish rhetorical universe in which it occurred.
The protest itself is telling. Kaepernick sat through “The Star-Spangled Banner” several times before Wyche asked him to explain why, and Kaepernick has not stopped explaining it since, explaining and re-explaining it concisely and coherently and with startling patience. That explanation resolves to Kaepernick’s wish to bring attention to various longstanding national disgraces that, because they tend disproportionately to victimize poor people and people of color, are viewed by some people as more of a disgrace than they are by others. This is a wide-ranging critique—wide-ranging enough to include pointed criticism of both Presidential candidates, among other things—but not a terribly complicated one to understand…
The NFL has always been weird, in ways endearing and not, but it is never weirder than its most powerful people and their most powerfully weird beliefs….[T]he defining aesthetic aspect over the league’s ascent over the last decade and a half is the extent to which the NFL has come to see itself as a sort of unofficial auxiliary branch of the armed forces, and the attendant tendency to treat its games—which are, at the risk of belaboring an obvious point, games—as campaigns in an elaborately staged play-war.
A state of permanent war is not healthy for any political body, as you have probably noticed, and the NFL’s state of play-war has been corrosive in ways that parallel the broader culture’s. In the same way that America is more sentimental than serious about the people that fight and die in our abstracted and boundless and endless wars—quick to pay solemn and tearful tribute to the heroism of The Troops, but notably less keen on paying for their more mundane and more concrete and more vital needs—the NFL is more sentimental than serious about its own vaunted values. The league’s belief that it is important and stands for something important is unmistakably sincere; we might as well take at their ridiculous word the anonymous NFL execs who called Kaepernick a “traitor” and suggested they’d sooner resign than have him play for their teams. But just because the NFL believes its own wild rhetoric doesn’t mean that rhetoric is believable. The NFL hasn’t ever been very serious about defining what those important things are, or about actually standing for them. It has always been much more committed to gesture than actual action. This is a defensive instinct dressed up as a series of bold stances and statements….
(Kinda like the GOP presidential campaign?)
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