John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN PRAVDA
“The NFL is a criminal enterprise”
I've always regarded American football as resembling imperial Rome's arena spectacles.
It's a sports culture designed to reinforce the attitudes and values of American empire.
Marching bands in the full splendor of Ruritanian palace guards, monster flags carried by an obligatory real-soldier color guard with rifles and white shoulder straps, gals in Ruritanian military caps high-stepping with short skirts, sequined panties, and matching booties while twirling batons, the unsingable imperial anthem with a loud-speaker demand for all to rise, not infrequently sung by someone who can’t sing or garbles the words, and the crowds of tens of thousands straining their vocal cords.
A big war parade before armor-clad players come out the field to hit and smash each other
They are very similar types of gatherings to those of Rome with the noise and displays and bloodlust, only football doesn't kill the players, it just hurts them.
But I'm sure if it were possible America would have a big audience for the exact Roman spectacles.
Maybe it will come to that with all the spirit of killing, from the colonial wars abroad to local cops who kill about three people a day in America, with ignoring great human misery, as in the refugees of the Middle East or in the horrors of Gaza, and with readiness to accept the violation of many traditional laws and ethical principles and agreements that today characterizes America.
After all, in America's South, well into the 1930s, while FDR was in the White House, lynchings were often treated as family picnic occasions with gatherings on the town square while a man was hanged. Eleanor complained to Franklin about it and asked him to intervene, but he said he could do nothing without losing his support from Southern Democrats.
Ah, yes, America, you do have some proud moments. The rah-rah is good for the guys you send off to places like Vietnam where you managed to kill 3 million souls or Iraq where you killed another million.
