In which the Blob poses a question it's been thinking about all week, but which most of you Blobophiles rarely give a thought to because it's not the NFL, or the NFL Draft, or NFL mini-camps, or NFL training camps or preseason NFL football.
The question is this: Who doesn't love a rodeo?
You've got bucking broncos. You've got bullriding. You've got barrel racing, and rodeo clowns, and guys wearing belt buckles the size of serving trays, and also ... COWBOY HATS!
Oh, yeah. And grown men bashing in the heads of children who don't show proper respect for the national anthem, because Our Only Available President, the Demagogue in Chief, kinda-sorta said that's how Real Americans should behave.
By now everyone's heard about what happened in Montana last week, when a 39-year-old man with apparent mental problems started barking at a 13-year-old kid for not taking his cap off during the anthem at a rodeo. The kid, in the most American reaction possible, told him to mind his own business, though he apparently used some not-to-nice words to do so. So the 39-year-old grabbed him by the throat, lifted him off his feet and slammed his head into the ground hard enough to fracture his skull in several places.
Now the kid lies in a hospital bed, and he may suffer permanent brain damage. The perp's attorney, meanwhile, is selling the notion that his client, who's ex-military, was brain damaged himself in a car accident and considers Our Only Available President still to be his commander-in-chief. And so when OOAP started bashing African-American NFL players for kneeling with their heads bowed during the anthem to protest racial injustice, saying they should all be fired, this guy took it as an order to enforce the proper respect by any means necessary.
Now, OOAP never said to bash in the skulls of those who in his opinion "disrespect" the anthem, although he has been agreeable to protestors at his rallies having their skulls bashed in. But he did suggest those who did "disrespect" the anthem should lose their jobs, which is just about as extremist. So this guy just extraplolated that out.
The only thing he's guilty of, his hired suit says, is being a patriot.
A patriot.
Good. Lord. In heaven.
This has not been a good week for those of you who expect a lot of happy talk about Sportsball World from the Blob. For that, the Blob apologizes. But stuff happens. And among that stuff has been this "patriot" in Montana, and what he says about the country we live in now.
We live in a country now, I keep thinking, where grown men bash in the skulls of children for not being properly "respectful" to a song.
We live in a country where people who do that are called "patriots" by their attorneys.
We live in a country where other "patriots" drive 600 miles to kill a bunch of brown people, because the President of the United States, and his enablers in right-wing media, have repeatedly referred to them as "invaders" and all but openly suggested they're bent on destroying white American hegemony.
We live in a country where the president who says these sorts of things claim his words mean nothing, that they radicalize no one, that they inspire no white supremacist violence even when the perpetrators of that violence say they do.
We live in a country where arresting 600 undocumented Hispanic workers at a chicken processing plant (but not their white employers, of course) is framed as keeping America safe from ... oh, hell, I don't know. Hard-working people just trying to live their lives and feed their families, I guess.
We live in a country where lots of people actually believe this nonsense. We live in a country where you can't call a racist a racist, because then you're being racist yourself. We live in a country where you can't even do that when the President himself is telling elected representatives of color to go back to Africa if they don't like his policies.
We live in a country that used to be America.
The bad news is, I don't know what it is now.
The worse news is, or maybe I do.
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