Time warped

 By now you may have seen the photo, which comes to us from a time forever stained with  shame. It's 1957 in Little Rock, Ark.; the good old boys are out in force, and the news cameras, too, because it's the day six black students are supposed to desegregate North Little Rock High School.

Two of them are in the photo, surrounded by the good old boys and the cameras. In the front row, two of the GOBs stand out; one, a cigarette dangling from the left side of his mouth, glares at one of the black kids with a try-me look on his face. Next to him another is laughing and taunting. You can almost hear him saying "Where you think you're goin', (n-word)?"

And then there's the boy at the back of mob, behind the cameras, clearly younger than the others. He's not doing or saying anything. He's just watching the whole deal, rubbernecking, a look on his face that at worst can be described as curious.

That boy owns the Dallas Cowboys now.

Jerry Jones was just a 15-year-old boy then; he's an 80-year-old mega-mogul now. He's not a racist, by any reasonable assessment. He's just an old man who owns the most saleable product in the National Football League, mostly with little noticeable success outside the financial ledger.

Now he's being compelled to apologize for a 65-year-old photo that hit the interwhatsis the other day and got a bunch of folks riled up, as the interwhatsis tends do with matters both great and small.

Color this one small. As in "microscopic."

The Blob holds no brief for Jerry Jones and never has, but to call him to account for getting caught up in an eddy of history 65 years ago is patently absurd. He was a white teenager who grew up in the South in the 1950s. It's therefore hardly shocking that he was watching black kids get harassed. Hell, given the place and times, it showed admirable restraint that he didn't get in on the "fun."

But he didn't. He wasn't the guy with the cig in his lip. He wasn't the guy next to that guy. He didn't bully anyone that day, or on any other day to the best of my knowledge.

Which still hasn't stopped some folks from wondering why he hasn't apologized yet.

The Blob's response to that is this: For what, exactly?

Just for being there? For being alive in Little Rock, Ark. in the 1950s? Or for not suddenly jumping in a time machine, traveling to 2022 to borrow some of its sensibilities, and then traveling back to 1957 to step in and stop the bullying?

Patently absurd, as noted.  

Look. Sixty-five years is a long damn time, and people change. Jerry Jones surely has. I suspect he's no more what he was in 1957 than he is a Rottweiler. Even George Wallace, America's pre-eminent race baiter, eventually repented in the fullness of time. By the time he died, he was a far different person than when he was running for president in the 1960s on the tried-and-true White Resentment platform.

So, no. The photo circulating on the interwhatsis is just a moment from a dark time when America betrayed itself. It's not an indictment of an 80-year-old football team owner, but a time warp that's now being time warped by people who should know better.

Or so it says here.