Op-Ed

There were a couple of interesting articles that have appeared in the past several weeks that illustrate inter alia how the Israel Lobby operates when anyone dares to challenge America’s wag-the-dog relationship with the Jewish state. To be sure, the labels antisemite and holocaust denier are flung about with wild abandon as a first step, but there is a level of viciousness that goes well beyond that as the Zionists seek to ruin the reputations and employment prospects of those whom they target.

I had a passing moment of wonder the other day – as I read about the latest . . . you know, mass shootings.

Troubled souls with guns. Big problem.

My thought was simply this: What if . . .? And then I lapsed into uncertainty. What if    . . . violence were not the simplistic and obvious – and only – solution to so many problems? Violence presents itself, in our imaginations (and in our games, in our movies, in our defense budget), as consequence-free, instantaneous and, for God’s sake, necessary. It’s the essence – it’s the definition – of empowerment.

And then the headlines scream about crazy guys grabbing hold of that empowerment to escape their personal cages, their crises on the moment: Yeah, it’s the fault of . . . whoever, and then another dozen people are dead.

“Folks keep talking about another civil war. One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.”

The words — actually a 2019 Facebook post — are those of then-Iowa Republican congressman Steve King, loosing a puerile smirk as he stirred the pot of violence on the American political right. The politics of stupid has intensified since then, as white supremacy and fear of the Great Replacement Theory take over the GOP.

For many months, conventional media wisdom has told us that Joe Biden would be the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump in 2024 because he did it before. The claim was always on shaky ground -- after all, Trump was the ultimate symbol of the status quo when he lost in 2020, as Biden would be in next year’s election. That’s hardly auspicious when polling shows that the current electorate believes the country is “off on the wrong track” rather than “headed in the right direction” by a margin of more than a 3-to-1.

But now, the bottom has dropped out of that timeworn spin for Biden in the wake of the discovery of unsecured classified documents under his control, the appointment of a special counsel to investigate and the botched handling of the scandal by the White House.

It was the guacamole’s fault!

That’s the guy’s defense, anyway — that plus his right to carry four handguns, an AR-15 and a 12-guage shotgun into a supermarket in Atlanta. Oh yeah, and he was wearing body armor. This was in March 2021, barely a week after an actual mass shooting at several massage parlors in Atlanta, in which eight people were killed. And it was only two days after a mass shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, where ten people were killed.

American football has always been a blood sport.

It needs to change or die.

Tackle must end.  Flags must come.

And they will.

Why?  Because human lives are at stake…and with them, a trillion-dollar industry.

A century ago, football players were maimed and died in droves.  The college game was a cross between rugby, mixed martial arts and all-out trench warfare.

Merciless scrums brought on bloody body piles in which players did their very best to gouge and permanently harm their opponents.  Often they succeeded.

Where helmets were worn, they were virtually useless leather gloves, perhaps functional in keeping cracked skulls from falling apart during a game, but that was about it.  The death toll for a given year of the college game was substantial and undeniable.  Long-term post-season repercussions were undiscussed, unstudied…and permanent.

Two a.m. Boink! My eyes pop open. It’s Christmas Eve, but it’s not that I just heard Santa wandering through the house. It’s far more banal: gotta use the bathroom. I crawl out of bed, step bare-assed into . . . oh my God . . . a learning experience.

Another one!

The heat was off. The furnace had shut down. And it was below-zero outside – apparently way below zero. The previous day, weather advisories had flowed in: lots of snow, cold as hell. And now here I was, naked in a house that had lost its heat. Uh . . . now what?

Step one, of course, was to complete my intended task: go to the bathroom, which I did. But at 2 a.m., I couldn’t envision any further productive action. I crawled back into bed, pulling the covers around me. I fell back to sleep, returned to the coziness of dreaming, at least for a while. But eventually I got up for real. Getting dressed didn’t stop with putting my clothes on. I also wrapped myself in a winter jacket. Then I called the furnace guys. Problem solved, right?

My friend is not an elitist. To the contrary, he has spent decades of his life fighting social inequality, racism and championing the rights of disadvantaged groups. Therefore, I was taken aback when he surmised that “football is the opium of the people”. 

 The reference, which summons a famous Marxist maxim about religion written in a specific historical context, suggested that governments use mass sports events to distract from political problems or social conflicts. 

 He is partly right. Not only do governments invest in sports as a form of distraction, but they also often turn sports into a form of political legitimization. While all governments play this game, the US excels in it.  

FacebookTwitter"How exactly is ‘diversity’ our ‘strength’?”

Oh, the smug ignorance of Tucker Carlson! Sometimes, in his certainty of rectitude, he asks questions that actually matter — or would matter if they were asked with any sort of honesty. The above quote, blathered on his news show, recently started flickering again in my brain, when I read about a Florida teacher who was fired after sarcastically interrupting the prayer session of some Muslim students at their school, declaring (as per a Tik Tok video): “I believe in Jesus, so I’m interrupting the floor.”

Uh, how exactly is diversity our strength? Or is it just an infuriating nuisance?

"Ducey insists Arizona holds sole or shared jurisdiction over the 60-foot strip the containers rest on and has a constitutional right to protect residents from ‘imminent danger of criminal and humanitarian crises.’”

OK, he’s a politician — Doug Ducey, the exiting governor of Arizona, who recently began erecting “hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers topped by razor wire” along Arizona’s eastern border with Mexico, including through the Coronado National Forest. Is this not his right: to blather, lie and give his constituents an enemy? And what keeps us safer from that enemy than a wall, especially one topped with razor wire?