“American” used to be a synonym for tough. Hard. The cowboy. The explorer. The frontiersman. George Washington. Old Hickory. John Henry. Paul Bunyan. Ernest Hemingway. The list goes on.
Like a mansion hewn out of raw granite by hand, this country was built by men with solid gold balls and battle-hardened muscles, whether from battling with the British, battling against the wilderness, battling against machines, or battling against everybody.
American is no longer a synonym for tough.
As our society becomes more and more adoring of gentrification and what is incorrectly considered civilization, we begin to negate not only our humanity but our place in the natural world from which we sprung as we negate our toughness. We fall in love with grace, inoffensiveness, softness. And when the barbarians storm the gates, we’ll be slaughtered as we shriek out unanswered pleas for mercy. Because as we grow softer, the world does not follow.
I’m writing this in response to two things – the huge debacle of the Saints’ bounties system as well as the article written by JasonGay in the Wall Street Journal. To both the NFL and Gay, I have only this to say – you are just two more reasons we Americans are becoming softer at alarming rates.
Now there are plenty of other reasons. Recently plenty of books have been published about how other cultures raise their children. The ones I find most interesting are about French parents. It’s well-known the world throughout that American kids are brats. They run around touching everything, expecting people to listen to them, to give them what they want when they want them, dominating the lives of all around them as the world kisses their powdered little tushes.
Plenty of other smart tips aside, one of the biggest differences I was reading was how they deal with pain. American parents often apologize to their kids when they get vaccinations, “I’m so sorry baby.” French parents say “Shots are a part of life and they hurt; therefore pain is a part of life. Learn to accept it.” If you believe pain’s not a part of life, you spend life avoiding it foremost and in doing so softness sets in.
Even more, there is the evolution of youth sports into little more than cuddly teddy bear-trials of fitness. “Make everybody feel good about themselves” is the battle cry, sports being more about building confidence than about winning.
Here’s a little quote from a book called DUMBING DOWN OUR KIDS (which you may have seen incorrectly ascribed to Bill Gates):
“Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.”
Convincing everybody they’re a winner is just a step away from saying competition is bad and once you say competition is bad you literally disavow everything that made America great. We were built on people constantly pushing forward; even the disgusting acts of war and slaughter in subjugating the natives, which has allowed America a cross-country highway system and built one of the most geographically diverse nations in the world, is little more than evolutionary competition.
This is tragic considering what we did to the noble natives. But as Wallace Stegner said (to paraphrase), inherent in the American dream is the death of the noble savagery that makes it so beautiful. Or something along those lines. So competition and battle and victory, no matter the cost, is American.
Gus McCrae said it in Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer-Prize-Winning novel LONESOME DOVE, that while he was making the wild west safe he hadn’t realized what he was really doing: opening it up for all the bankers to move in. What does this have to do with the New Orleans Saints and bounties, you’re screaming, yes? Trust me, I’m getting there.
So anyway, in the name of progress we’ve been trying to wipe out the tough guy ever since he was no longer useful. The small farmer who still rounds up free-range cattle on horseback is being replaced by factory ranches where cows are packed in like the elevator to an Old Country Buffet and when rounded up it’s done on ATV’s or by helicopter. Engineers no longer want to build skyscrapers or bridges, working on those grand steel girders like in that picture every New Yorker hangs on his wall, but prefer to build software that allows us to communicate with our friends much easier without having to ever see them. Our smartest minds don’t want to build elaborate trading routes through the wilderness or lead our army to victory but prefer to figure out new complex ways to hedge risk. And now the powers that be are trying to clean up and pussify football. For shame.
America has grown pretty soft. There’s no denying that. We have it easier than the rest of the world, just like a king sits on velvet pillows while his subjects sit on wood or stone. Not to dismiss the fact that times are tough here – especially with our poorest citizens living in caves in their neighborhood park (seriously, look at Griffith Park, illegal or not they’re technically citizens) or abandoned houses and lean-tos (while the poorest in most similarly-developed countries have much more assistance from their governments without being labeled communist) – but in the grand scheme of things, human life has never been easier. Drive to the store for food. Put in a few hours in front of computer for money to spend on said food, air conditioning, a vehicle that can take you up to 90 miles or more in an hour.
But how many of you out there have ever worked on your car with your own hands? Built your house, or even a shack behind it? Worked until your palms bled or killed an animal and ate it or even just spent a few days living away from a nice bed and running water? I admit, I haven’t done half of those things either. But I long to. Because they’re part of the human tradition, part of what aided our rise from berry-eating monkeys to the kings of the world that we are today. And what would happen should natural disaster render parts of our infrastructure useless, like electricity or running water? No marketplace. No way to cook your food. How would you get water? How would you fight off the thugs rising from the chaos? Even more, how would you kill a man with your bare hands if you had to since your whole life everybody has lectured to you that violence, even in athletic competition, is evil? You wouldn’t. Because you’re soft. So am I.
So back to football. If you don’t know what I’m talking about with “bounties”, it’s just come to light that the New Orleans Saints’ defensive coordinator Gregg Williams was paying his players bonuses for knocking people out of the game. Suddenly all these asshole are getting all up in arms about this, calling it barbaric and obscene, saying that hurting people ISN’T a huge part of football. Either these talking heads are extremely stupid, extremely soft, or are trying to convince women that football isn’t a big meathead sport (which it isn’t, at least not exclusively). But regardless of why, I know one thing: people watch football to see violence.
As Jason Gay says in his WSJ article, “As much as we’d all love football featuring clean, hard contact without dirty plays, that sounds a little like the magical cheeseburger tree.” To him I say no, I wouldn’t love that. Gay over here seems to think that football should be about polite takedowns and technical throws. The Tom Brady game. Take all the dirt out of it, take the macho “I’m stronger than you and I’ll prove it by crushing you” element out of it and that’s a game he’d want to watch. But I’ll tell you what, if they took out game-ending hits, if they crack down on these teams for having bounties which, when broken down, simply prove one player is tougher than the next, if they try and fucking gentrify football like they’ve gentrified everything else, from Times Square to rock n’roll, there’s no incentive for the real men in this world, including myself, not to just change the channel to Lingerie Football League. At least it’d arouse something like emotion in our increasingly sterile, Stepfordian American lives.
Football and rugby and soccer all came from the same place, the same evolutionary tree. The Europeans wanted a more sophisticated sport and as such they played soccer. The Aussies wanted something that was a bit more disorderly and sloppy, just like a prison colony would. In America we wanted it to be like war. 2 sides lined up, ready to punch through the enemy’s line, looking to punish the weak and leave only the strong surviving, a mixture of precision sniper shots and hard-nosed tanks.
Greg Aiello, NFL spokesman, talked about the NFL’s "responsibility to protect player safety and the integrity of the game." Player safety? How about each player workout to the point of invincibility, like Ray Lewis, like LT, like Herschel Walker, like Elway, like all the hard-ass motherfuckers who hit and play like fucking animals. Integrity of the game? How is taking away an incentive system that in no way violates any rules but actually harkens back to the game’s roots – back when skills were often overshadowed by a colossal battle of toughness – how is getting rid of that legacy “keeping the integrity of the game”? Hell, in 1904 14 people died in one season and in general the game is already the safest it’s ever been, ever . If anything, the more rules they pass for player protection the further they get from the essence of football. Just look at most of the players’ opinions – they know it happens, they’ve accepted it as part of the game, and all view this whole witch hunt with a fair share of incredulity. It’s football.
Per an interview the AP had with Tony Dorsett "I think a little bit too much is being made out of it, personally. If it was me, and I’m a defensive player, and I’m playing against the Dallas Cowboys, and Tony Dorsett happens to be one of their best players, it would be to our best advantage to get him out of the game. If it’s within the rules of tackling and contact, so be it. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. ... They’re not telling a guy to mangle somebody or kill somebody. It’s: ’Get him out of the game.’" Dorsett is suing the NFL for some of his injuries/concussions and I have to wonder if maybe this whole bounty thing is the NFL trying to cover up its much worse practices of shooting injured played up with cortisone or giving them smelling salts and sending them back out to get even more fucked up. This feels a bit like a smoke screen, blaming people for an incentive system that everybody who ever played a contact sport is familiar with (I got stickers on my helmet when I laid somebody out in lacrosse) to distract folks from the corrupt practices of pushing injured players back out on the field and running them into the ground, then throwing them aside like a lame race horse when they could no longer perform. With the NFL treating people like commodities, it makes some sense that the NFL would fine folks for rewarding their players for conducting what amounts to industrial espionage - though on the other side it makes no fucking sense at all.
In fact this is absurd, the idea that the league will fine or punish anybody for such behavior. How does this happen, yet nobody fines Goldman Sachs, AIG, or JP Morgan for doling out bonuses for essentially misleading clients via overvaluation of toxic assets and then convincing the government to spend our taxpayer money to bail them out? That shit led to suicides, to failed retirements and no doubt plenty of heart attacks and strokes. Or actually, to put it another way, it’d be like fining Wall Street firms for making their new hires work 80-100 hours a week for the first year so as to weed out the weaklings from the tough ones. It’d be like Hollywood fining producers for hiring actors due to their physical attractiveness instead of their acting ability – in fact, this analogy is even more valid because just like many NFL players, most actresses have a short window during which they can get jobs and when they get old and their bodies give out they’re no longer able to work. It’d be like fining a company for putting together an ad campaign that ruins its rival. Because there’s a certain level of unfairness to all this that ruins careers and, in some cases, minds (nervous breakdowns at Wall Street), bodies (anorexic washed up actresses) and families (daddy’s company went out of business so we’re gonna have to move to a townhouse in the ghetto and survive on tuna fish for a bit).
Which brings me back to football. I’m going to say something that people will protest, that will offend folks, will paint me as a Neanderthal or a caveman or whatever – I watch football to see people get hurt.
I do. I like to see great passes connect, sure. And when some back jukes out other players that’s cool. Especially if it’s my team getting the gains. But what do I get loudest for? When somebody gets lit up. So do you. Don't lie. You like to see that shit, when a big component of your enemy squad gets taken out of the game. Crushed. Hobbling off. What does everybody remember Joe Theissman for? That hit LT threw down and, once his career ended, his commentary. Why does everybody have a special place in their heart, or at least respect, for the late 70’s/early 80’s Raiders? Because they were like animals, a team of high-powered mongols pre-gaming by sipping gasoline cut with cocaine and charging the field like the barbarians of yore, looking to punish all who got in their way. People used to speak affectionately about football players like they were gladiators. Why gladiators? Why not Olympians? I mean the technical finesse parts of the game have more in common with track and field than battles to the death in the Coliseum. No, people called it gladiatorial because both sides wanted to subdue their enemy and would do whatever it took to accomplish said goal, even if through physical superiority. Like WWII. Or the Spartans. If it’s allowable by the rule books, why is the encouragement of violence in football a bad thing? Am I wrong in saying this? Please explain why. I don’t get it. I’m not politically correct enough.
We need to get back to what we were. We were doers. We were fighters. We believed in combining brains with brawn, we believed that the most beautiful thing is a combination of great skill with indomitable strength and, when directed at one’s competitor, even if only to subdue their enemy through brute force, that was the American way. We were tough cowboys and proud soldiers. Now we’re soft fatcats and peace-loving hipsters.
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| Hard-ass New Orleans Hero Old Hickory Jackson |
We need to tell the NFL we’re not gonna take this bullshit. We want to see our enemies vanquished. We want the great American sport to set a trend for America going forward – not that we’re gonna get softer but that we’re gonna get tougher, harder. That if you're our enemy, whether on the field, the boardroom, or in the desert we will be coming in to take you out. Because America without balls is just a bunch of entitled assholes. And football without rewards to those hard-hitting D-men who vanquish their enemies will soon become football that punishes hits that take enemies out of the game; it will become football that rewards the pretty boys of the world while the hard hitters, the ones who make football into an epic juggernaut of titans, fall to the wayside. It'll become soccer and I know you bastards hate that.
And even more that’s just soft. Don't be soft. Support your local bounty hunter.
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| Boba Fett, bad-ass bounty hunter, hated by the NFL |
- R
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