All NFL all the time, without the annoying ex-jocks or football

Strange New Respect is fleeting, and with regard to the NFL owners’ remarkable commitment to “social justice” over profits or patriotism, the NYT is determined it shall have wide-receiver speed:

Beyond the appearance of unity, though, is a far different reality: The owners have done little to support players who protest to fight social injustice. A few owners have told their players that kneeling for the anthem is inappropriate.
The owners by and large are a white, conservative group of billionaires, several of them big-dollar donors to President Trump. They have generally discouraged their players, about three quarters of whom are African-American, from anything that overshadows throwing passes and making tackles.

All the talk about freedom of expression is a dodge around the fact it’s black America calling out white America as racist, and–this is the real shock to the system–the not-quite subdued half of white America calling bullshit right back.

This thing needs to end quickly for both the NFL and the Narrative.
I think it’s going to be the best season ever.

More on the NFL

The military has long used spectator sports to target mostly young white men for recruitment. This is coupled with a strong emphasis on patriotism in such as truck commercials–appealing to the fathers of those same young men. After 9/11 and through the second Iraq invasion this grew in intensity and became just one more reason, for me, to tune out. There is an obvious affinity between the military the violent sport of the NFL, which is probably second only to NASCAR in its patriotic effusions.

People have cited this in defense of the anthem protests, and if the anthem protests had anything to do with the anthem that would mean something. But that doesn’t mean it’s right. The militarization of sports hardly went unnoticed or unremarked upon, but it hasn’t been much opposed.

Today’s Washington Post reports:

A government oversight report released Wednesday by Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake offers new details about how the Department of Defense paid professional sports teams and leagues for patriotic displays honoring American soldiers.
The report expands on one that became public last May and resulted in changes to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2016, prohibiting the expenditures and calling on leagues and teams to donate the money to organizations that support the military, veterans and their families.
“What we take issue with,” wrote Flake, who, like McCain, is a Republican from Arizona, “is the average fan thinking teams are doing this on behalf of the military.”

Flake and McCain are objecting to the way the money was spent, treating it as a boondoggle for the most part, and the military does look to drive a very soft bargain:

In 2013, a roaring crowd cheered as the Atlanta Falcons welcomed 80 National Guard members who unfurled an American flag across the Georgia Dome’s turf. Little did those fans—or millions of other Americans—know that the National Guard had actually paid the Atlanta Falcons for this display of patriotism as part of a $315,000 marketing contract. 

The remunerative militaristic patriotism of the NFL is perfectly consistent with its more genuine multicultural patriotism. Our wars have served an internationalist agenda at the expense of national interest since the first Iraq invasion. It’s been especially gruesome watching this for the past decade, as that group to which globalism is overtly hostile–and, yes, those Christian-descended whites Jews like Peter Beinart find so enraging–is fed into its grinder.

It’s in those godawful commercial breaks, combining the multicultural and feminist cheerleading with crude patriotic kitsch, that you see the contradiction. Do people see it?

But the point right now is this: that anthem might represent what the players hate–white America–but it’s been used, for a long time now, as part of the disingenuous military recruitment of whites that is “paid patriotism”, to advance a worldview and agenda that has been very, very good to them.
Of course, if you can’t see the net benefit of being born in America versus being born in, say, West Africa, then you’re never going to catch on to something as relatively nuanced as that.

A Note on the NFL

But for a shocking exposure to it last Thanksgiving, I haven’t watched the NFL on television for years as part of a deliberate decision to cut spectator sports entirely out of my life, finally. Football was the last to go. Objectively I love the game, even in its perverse aspects: its violence, its physical specialization, with sumo wrestlers on the lines, sprinters at receiver, captain-archers at quarterback. It is the American sport, for good or ill.

It was the fans who drove me away at first. I found the hoopla, commercialism and what I would now identify as cuckery increasingly unbearable. Now it’s the players who keep me away. Sometimes we have to spend time away from those we love to realize we hate them–and they hate us.
Watching football on Thanksgiving was bracing for me because of the commercials, which apparently have become endless iterations of multicultural, feminist and commercial pozzing, or conditioning.

One standard format television commercial now goes something like one I recall for a VR headset: we are treated to a series of families, each a different ethnicity with whites deliberately not prominent, enjoying the product to what is supposed to be heartwarming delight. Watching what was supposed to be the Muslim family I was repulsed by their very joy. Not because I’m ignorant–precisely because I’m not, and I understand the threat Muslims represent to me.

 It’s a sick feeling, in part because their joy isn’t any less human, isn’t any less valid and does indicate a common bond. The effect on me is only to emphasize their role in replacing me; they will have grandchildren, they will experience joy, they will see the wonders the world we created produces. And we won’t.

Because we will not be.

Am I alone in feeling this way?

24:44 I am master of my domain.

25:40 Frapping and the Single Goy

26:55 Phillip Roth

30:05 Hillary’s Book

32:10 Regina Spektor song Laughing With

1:04:45 Make America White Again, after a fashion

1:08:50 Us, Us, Us, and Them, Them, Them…

Oregon Oddities

The hike around Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey in rural Oregon is fittingly peaceful and doesn’t feel like the geography around the Columbia River Gorge where we’ve done most of our hiking this (very) warm season. It isn’t dominated by the towering evergreens that are everywhere here. (Not so towering in our Gorge stomping grounds now, after a massive forest fire set off by a kid with fireworks took out tens of thousands of acres a couple of weeks ago.)

Apparently the monks are out there on riding mowers maintaining the broad lawns that buffer the retreat from the forest:

These fields would otherwise be tall, dry grass right now, so mowing them is probably a wise fire control measure. The effect is lovely either way:

We came upon something strange while we were there. Someone had set up a small camp/shrine of sports memorabilia, cut-out silhouettes of children and religious objects:

Inside the tin was a pristine copy of a sports magazine.

All this appeared to have been out there in the elements a while and was just off the trail. For some reason the monks allowed it and leave it alone. The effect is unsettling.

All I could think of was Ace Ventura: “Finkel, Einhorn, Einhorn, Finkel…”

Take my Culture, Please

Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles might be the funniest movie of all time, unfortunately. One of the more enduring anti-white, anti-American cultural tropes, the cool black guy (here leading a diverse gang in) outfoxing the dim white rednecks, around which the story is based, derives from this wellspring along with others. An enduring attitude can be seen taking shape in this movie. Now Brooks says his film couldn’t be made today, and it seems undeniable.

It’s important to note what’s happened: the film contributed about as much as a film can to the shaping of the present cultural and political milieu. And that milieu is one in which it could never possibly be made.

When Harvey Korman’s villain sends a motley horde of Bad Guys (bikers, Nazis, pirates, etc) forth to “stamp out runaway decency in the West” I can’t help but find it ironic, now.

Mel Brooks was never a guy you suspected of malice. He went after what was essentially the pc of his time. And that pc ain’t nothing like our pc. Our pc rules. With an iron fist.

Brooks likes to tell the story of how he got away with simply ignoring the studio’s instructions to edit out certain scenes. When the film was released and became a hit, no one at the studio so much as mentioned it.

Today if he somehow got it past the studio in the first place, the industry as a whole would come down on him, along with polite society, cable news, militant protesters and an outraged Jewish community. Moral and financial shake-downs would ensue. The term “political correctness” really does indicate something fundamentally different from the usual restrictions on expression a society and culture might impose on opposition.

This is a whole new world. Virtually all of Hollywood now is on board with the presumed objections to a Blazing Saddles in the Current Year. More remarkable: Blazing Saddles’ Current Year equivalent could not occur to the well-conditioned mind of any Current Year Mel Brooks.

We shouldn’t lose the narrative thread: cultural-sexual revolution assails prevailing order through free artistic expression, becomes prevailing order, restricts artistic expression.

It was already cool in the Seventies to look down your nose at your “racist” white parents; but they were still in charge, too. That’s why comedy was still possible:

The 1974 comedy western starring Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder featured a black sheriff in a racist town. Brooks said it was the racial prejudice portrayed within the film that was the mechanism behind its cultural significance.
“Without that the movie would not have had nearly the significance, the force, the dynamism and the stakes that were contained in it,” he said.

Presumably the setting-up of the white fall guys as bigots would be too much now–a grandmotherly type, for instance, greeting the black sheriff with an unexpected “up yours, nigger” certainly wouldn’t fly. Making light of lynching. Anything that might disturb white liberals, er, black folk. None of this would be allowed. The film’s essential message, summed up by Gene Wilder’s description of frontier settlers as “…people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know . . . morons”, is safe. It would have to be magnified, perhaps. There would be issues around casting maybe. The routine about the busty secretary…are you kidding?

What Brooks is (or should be) getting at here ultimately is that comedy requires a shared point of view between audience and performer. Shared frames of reference, assumptions, language, culture. Comedy is bias. Drama too relies on these shared biases.

Blazing Saddles skewered “racism” but it was made when the country was overwhelmingly white and even in its transgressions assumed a point of view that was white American. And that’s precisely the part that would make the film so objectionable now.

Basically, take out the point of view, the bias, the prejudice, the identity of the audience really. We’re left with empty gags and sentimental kitsch with nothing to latch on to.  Instead of shared values we have shared cliches.

The film has its own dynamic narrative. It began as an impulse in the same narrative that will (if left unchecked, I assert) eventually require its censoring. Gotta love it.

Mr Brooks shouldn’t feel bad. Yes his work would be rejected now. But that’s only possible because of his work.

[title lifted from a Bumbling American tweet]

Next stop Chi Town, Lido put the money down…

They’re building the Barack Obama library on Chicago’s South Side where he started out as a community organizer. The project is being challenged by community organizers.

They’re seeking some sort of comprehensive agreement of set asides for local activist groups. This common practice is something the Obama Administration effected from above when in office. Barry’s enthusiasm for the practice has waned.

Obama opened the door to the backlash when he appeared on a video at the foundation’s first public meeting last week and said flat-out that there would be no community benefits agreement.
Such a legal document, he said, would force the foundation to side with certain activist groups and leave others out. And, he added, it would open the door for other groups to step up and start making demands.

Some things are too important to be bogged down by every one with a gripe. Sure, let them line up to carve up Silicon Valley, the Ivy League, corporate America, but this is the One’s legacy here!
Furthermore, they only have a half a billion dollars to build something for which no one has any real expectations.

I suspect citizen Obama won’t be doing a lot of interaction with the Community, and that it will be of the alienating type as his video remote. Obama will likely lose his sainted status with black America with surprising speed because of the very same furious, militant state his eight years left it in. Black America’s anger isn’t waning any time soon.

Indeed, Obama’s long demagogy ensured two things: Donald Trump’s rise and the violent reaction to it. Barack Obama will likely live to see his own image thrown into the fire from which he’s drawn so much warmth.

At a community forum Wednesday night, a discussion about the proposed agreement morphed into a shouting match over whether Obama actually loves black people. One man in the audience yelled, “No,” while others said he wasn’t necessarily “their brother.” 

 Hip-hop artist and community activist Che “Rhymefest” Smith tried to defend the president — but only to a point.  

 “I’m not saying he understands everything … I believe the brother is reasonable,” Smith said. “When you marry a black woman and have black children … she is going to talk to her man and say we have got to do something.” 

 While Smith said he doesn’t believe Obama has ill intentions, he said South Siders have to hold him accountable.  

“Not as a God, but as a politician,” he said. “Not as a king, but as a politician.”
That’s a hard concept for a lot of African-Americans to grasp. But it’s time for blacks to accept the truth.

The truth comes a lot easier when it doesn’t cost anything. Barry is going to learn that the “inheritance” in his “race and inheritance” comes with a tax, and it grows, over time. First off, don’t even think about divorcing Michelle…