Real majority of Americans probably want Trump to shut up about football

I’m sure that in the mindset (as delusional as it is) of President Donald J. Trump, the masses of “America” have risen up in support for his rants against professional football players who dare make gestures of support for those concerned about police brutality and other racially-motivated unjust acts.
 

Had to walk back his presidential talk

Yet I find it intriguing that the reaction of many National Football League players to Trump’s trash talk that those players ought to be “fired” from their jobs is to see the many hundreds of players, including some entire teams, that chose to join in the gestures of support against Trump. Even NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell spoke out against Trump.

WHICH PRETTY MUCH makes it impossible for any football team owner to contemplate releasing players. Unless they’re prepared to let everybody go, and reduce the quality of play in the NFL to below that of the Canadian Football League.

In some cases, the team owners whom Trump tried claiming are his friends and would do his bidding chose to join the players in their acts of protest – including Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Who’s going to tell the alleged “America’s Team” owner he should be “fired?”

Even John Fox, coach of the Chicago Bears, joined in with his Bears players last Sunday when some of them chose to show support for the protests and snub Trump.

FOX: Joined in with players

I don’t doubt some Bears fans booed such acts. But I also expect those same fans would get all worked up if Trump seriously tried to do anything to interfere with the quality of play. They just want everybody to pipe down (including Trump) and play ball.

 
IF THERE’S ANY sign that, to me, makes me think the masses of our society aren’t with Trump (no matter how much he claims they are), it may well be the recent remarks of Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon.

For right after Trump made his initial remarks about “firing” disrespectful athletes, Maddon was asked for his reaction. Which is sort of relevant, because the Cubs got caught up in the Trump mess this summer when some of the team made a repeat appearance to the White House to be honored for their World Series victory of 2016.

Colin's protests now bigger than taking a knee

Maddon made a rather-generic statement about how people should be respectful of the White House and the president, which some interpreted as him sticking up for Trump. Which also resulted in him feeling compelled the next day to make “clarifying” comments.

 
In which he admitted he hadn’t heard yet what Trump actually said, and now realizes why many people are offended by Trump’s trash talk against people who express their opinions (which is, in reality, a very “American” thing to do).

NOW, MADDON IS saying, “it’s just unfortunate we’ve arrived at this point where it’s so uneasy to have this dialogue between the highest office in the country and everybody else in such a negative way. That’s the part that’s disappointing.”

I doubt he would have felt compelled to say anything more on the issue, if not for realizing his moment of cluelessness with regards to Trump put him in an awkward position – and one in which the real majority of our society would turn on him.

As for my own thoughts about this issue, which began with last season’s protest actions by now-retired (because nobody wants him) quarterback Colin Kaepernick against police brutality and racial injustice, I believe that merely dropping to one’s knee during the playing of the National Anthem prior to the game is about as minor a statement as one could make.

Trump 'trash talk' began long before inauguration

It in no way disrupted the anthem, or the game itself.

AND AS FOR the notion espoused by Trump that expressing such thoughts is disrespectful, I'd argue that respect is something that has to be earned. Which may be why many people are now showing respect for the players willing to make a statement, rather than for Trump.

By the way, Trump’s own approval rating (as of Monday) was at 39 percent, according to the Gallup Organization. Although I don’t doubt that Trump – the man who only got 46 percent of the vote in the last election – is delusional enough to think those 39 percent are the only people who should be paid attention to.

To alter the sentiment expressed by Trump himself last week in Alabama, “Wouldn’t you love to see (the American people), when (the president) disrespects our flag (with his nonsense talk), say, 'Get that son of a b---- (out of the White House) right now.' He’s fired! He’s fired!”

Because as I see it, the real majority possibly is annoyed by this issue being brought up at all, and wish that Trump himself would just “Shut Up!!!” And not just about football.

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You’d think a batch of people singing the national anthem in unison very poorly would be considered criminal?

I enjoy watching a ballgame as much as anyone else, but one thing I don’t expect is political statements of any sort from professional athletes.

 

Protesting racial inequality with his behind

Either they’re so wrapped up in the minutia of the game itself, or else they’re so tied into the establishment that regards their acts as “heroic” that they’re openly critical of anyone who would think of being critical of our society.

HECK, THE KIND of “statement” usually made by professional athletes is something along the line of the Chicago Cubs, who recently made a point of wearing “onesies” in public. Cutesy, colorful and gaudy pajamas.

The sight was meant to give us a chuckle, and that’s it.

So it is in that context that someone like Colin Kaepernick comes off as unusual. The quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers is making a point of refusing to participate at the beginning of games when the “Star Spangled Banner” is played.

While many fans sing along with the awkward anthem very poorly and most ballplayers do a poor imitation of a military-style stand-at-attention, Kaepernick sits. Which he may well do come Dec. 4 when the 49ers take on the Chicago Bears at Soldier Field.

 

Would Curt's political rants be praised by right?

HE SAYS IT is meant to be a protest against what he sees as a tolerance by some in our society for racial inequality. Which, of course, offends the bigots amongst us because they want to believe their constitutional right to look down on other people is somehow being trampled upon by his parking of his kiester.

You go to various social media sites, and you’ll find some people now willing to trash Kaepernick for using his status in life to make such a statement. Although I suspect if he were to keep his mouth shut, or spew off conservative ideological nonsense like one-time Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling (with his dreams of challenging “President Hillary Clinton” in 2020), they’d be praising him.

Will Hillary swat aside Curt come 2020?

I have to confess that I always found it ridiculous that the national anthem kicks off ballgames, as though you’re trying to turn a sporting event into a political rally. I realize it is a tradition going back to the days of the Second World War. But let’s face reality.

War’s over. We won. Let’s move on, already.

I DON’T SEE that the anthem’s being performed really adds much to the ambiance of a ballgame – which already comes across as gaudy enough when you think about the sight and sound of pudgy, out-of-shape people wearing replica jerseys so they can fantasize they could have warranted a place on the playing field.

Add to it the fact that they’re now singing an awkward song that they probably don’t really know the words to, and they’re doing it out of key?

Regardless of what one thinks about the issue of racial equality in our society, you have to admit the way we treat the anthem (as though it is a prelude to chants of “Go team, Go” and “Packers suck” if you’re at Soldier Field) is rather disrespectful to the image we’d like to have of our nation.

So what should we really think of Kaepernick and his insistence on sitting his behind on the bench during the national anthem ritual? I don’t want to blow it out of proportion. Because as far as political statements go, he’s really doing nothing.

IT’S THE INSISTENCE of certain ideologically tainted people in our society (the kind who want to demand total allegiance to themselves in a way that is un-American, if you think about it) who would make an issue of his preference to sit.

 

Will this alleged soldiers' memorial be the sight of protests come Dec. 4?

The kind of people who would prefer to ignore racial inequality and would try to argue that drawing attention to it is the real act of a racist. Similar to how Donald Trump these days is trying to take votes from Clinton come Election Day – because the last thing he really wants is to have black people voting for him in significant numbers.

Because that would scare off many of the white voters whom he’s counting on to be his voter base on Nov. 8.

And they’ll probably insist on using the national anthem as part of their own rituals to try to justify their own fantasies of a nation that puts their interests over all others.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: I also wonder about government meetings that begin with the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance. Nothing wrong with the pledge itself, but how often have government officials recited the ditty as a praise of our democratic ideals, then went ahead and committed acts that deliberately ignored the public interest?

A trend? Or just a quirk?

Let me state up front that I have never attended Goshen College, nor do I know anyone who ever had a connection to the school in Goshen , Ind. And my exposure to the Mennonite Church (with which the college is affiliated) has been minimal.

So I don’t have a personal reason to want to praise that rural Indiana school that is going to find itself gaining national attention in coming days, and may well find itself becoming a target for the conservative ideologues who are determined to stage a cultural war to impose their sense of morals upon us all.

WHICH IN THIS case may be appropriate, since the issue we’re going to be fighting a “war” over is a “war” anthem.

Specifically, the Star-Spangled Banner, our nation’s anthem since 1931, which is based off an 1814 poem that tells the tale of how Fort McHenry near Baltimore sustained an attack from the British Navy and didn’t surrender – with the flag still flying high in the morning when the battle was complete.

Which may be an ideal worthy of mentioning – we don’t surrender.

But let’s be honest. It is an awkward song to sing, with a first verse of lyrics that way too many people manage to butcher and three more verses of lyrics that most people don’t even pretend to care about.

THERE HAS TO be a better song by which we can celebrate our sentiments about our nation than this one.

What is going to get ideologues worked up is the fact that Goshen College, following three years of debate, made the call to do away with the anthem being played prior to the ballgames played by the school’s athletic teams.

The Goshen Maple Leafs will no longer stand attention prior to a sporting event while a recording of the "Star-Spangled Banner" plays. Not that they’re going music-less.

Instead, the Associated Press reported Wednesday that the school will use "America the Beautiful" as a patriotic song to inspire us behind our country, before watching the Leafs take on their competition of other schools in the Indiana-based Mid-Central College Conference.

I CAN ALREADY hear the rants and rages from the ideologues about how this school is being disrespectful to the "Star-Spangled Banner." In fact, some of the student-athletes have already said they’re not thrilled about the change.

But no matter how much those individuals want to believe their thought represents the entirety of ideas on this issue, they don’t. There are those of us who realize that life will go on without the "Star-Spangled Banner," and who have become offended at the way the song routinely gets mangled prior to sporting events.

If not playing it prior to a ballgame means I no longer have to hear some third-rate singer try to pretend she is the Second Coming of Mahalia Jackson, I think we’d all be better off if sports teams followed the lead of Goshen College.

In the case of Goshen, they say their primary objection to the anthem is its war-like imagery (the Mennonites are pacifists). Hence, "America the Beautiful" is a more pleasing image – considering that it honors the physical beauty of our nation.

NONE OF THAT “rocket’s red glare, bombs bursting in air” stuff that dominates the U.S. national anthem. Although it’s not like the U.S. is the only nation on Earth that has a martial overtone to its anthem.

Just look to the south to Mexico, where “Mexicanos, al Grito de Guerra” tells of the roar of the cannons and how Mexicans will rise to fight off any, “enemy outlander (who) should dare to profane your ground with his sole.”

Get into the more obscure verses of Mexico’s national anthem, and you learn that those same enemy outlanders will have their blood spilled all over the land and will be devastated for trying to invade the Mexican homeland.

By comparison, Francis Scott Key composed a virtual love poem.

BUT MY REAL objection to the "Star-Spangled Banner" as an anthem that must be played prior to ballgames is really in the fact that so few people really know the song. They butcher it so badly that I can’t help but feel those moments when sports fans try to sing along are the most dreadful of any event.

I wonder at times if people really have any clue what it is they are supposed to be singing, and if they’re all so incredibly tone-deaf that they don’t realize how badly they’re singing it?

Besides, it’s not like the anthem has been around forever. There are generations of people who lived their full lives in this country of ours who would have thought our current obsession with singing the anthem prior to drinking a beer (or three) while the New York Yankees beat up on the Boston Red Sox is bizarre.

Our nation went for just over 150 of its 235 years of existence without the "Star-Spangled Banner" as its anthem, and the idea of a ballgame requiring the anthem is a product of World War II that probably should have withered away with the WACs.

FOR LET’S NOT forget that our nation’s “anthem” used to be a song called “Hail, Columbia,” which now is regarded as the theme music for the entrance of the Vice President.

Perhaps Goshen is giving us a nudge in the direction where someday, the "Star-Spangled Banner" becomes the theme for the Secretary of Defense – while the rest of us celebrate the “spacious skies” and “amber waves of grain.”

Except maybe for the atheists, who will be offended that the song says “God shed His grace” on “America! America!” Or maybe the American Indian tribes who will resent the reference to “pilgrim feet” whose “stern impassion’d stress, A thoroughfare for freedom beat, Across the wilderness.”

But those are commentaries for another day.

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Some of us haven’t learned a thing

It has been nearly one-third of a century since that moment when the segment of our society that likes to believe they’re the only “Real Americans” got itself all worked up over the sound of Josè Feliciano performing the National Anthem at the baseball All-Star Game in something other than a martial manner that made you expect cannons to be firing, off in the background.



This particular tattered piece of cloth inspired the song that now causes so much anger in certain people who hear it at sporting events. Photograph provided by Smithsonian Institute.



The ideologues of the day got all upset (anecdotes of military veterans throwing their shoes at the television screen in disgust can be found all over the Internet), people claimed it was a disgrace, sounded foreign to their ears (Feliciano is Puerto Rican) and that people who had served their country in military service – particularly during a war – were somehow being disrespected.

YET TO LISTEN to Feliciano’s rendition today (recordings of his performance can be found in various places on the Internet) makes it clear that what he did was a stripped-down version of the song – just his voice and his acoustic guitar.

Compared to the over-bloated wailings that we now routinely hear at sporting events (which are less an offense to our country and patriotism than they are to the concept of music and being capable of carrying a tune), Feliciano’s version is fairly pleasant to listen to, and certainly nowhere near as radical (yet intriguing) as the take on the anthem given to us by the late Jimi Hendrix.

Most people listening today probably can’t comprehend why there was ever a controversy (which there certainly was, as it took Feliciano’s career a few years to recover after some stations tried boycotting his recordings on their airwaves).

The key to that last phrase is in the first two words; “most people.”

FOR THERE ARE some who are still stuck in the ideological ramblings of a past generation that have long been found to be absurd by the bulk of our society.

Take as evidence a recent incident in Indiana – one which ought to be sufficient evidence to anyone seriously thinking of leaving our state how silly it would be to live in a place where people willingly call themselves Hoosiers.

Bloomington North High School (which also is the home city of Indiana University’s main campus) has a teenage girl among its students who has become the person they turn to when it comes to performing the National Anthem at local sporting events.

Sometimes, she even goes on the road with her school’s teams to perform the song at their games elsewhere. That is where things get sticky.

FOR WHEN SHE performed the song prior to a game in Martinsville, Ind. (a town of just under 12,000 people – or about one-quarter the size of a single Chicago ward), the locals became upset.

The Herald-Times newspaper of Bloomington, along with the Associated Press, reported that the locals said the song was “unrecognizable,” and that people who had served in the military had been disrespected by her performance.

The only thing missing compared to Feliciano were the shoes being thrown at the teenage girl’s image on television.

Although there is a video snippet of the girl’s performance posted on YouTube. For all I know, there are ideologues who are going out of their way to log onto their computers and play her snippet, before hurling epithets at her image and trying to figure out ways to send her nasty (and anonymous) messages in return.

WHAT IS MOST pathetic about this new affair is the reaction of school officials, who instead of defending their student from abuse (they were the ones who invited her to sing) decided to go along with those people whose view of the world is warped enough that they see her as the problem

She was told she would not be allowed to sing the anthem any longer, unless she did a “traditional” approach. In all fairness to the school, officials there have since recanted and issued an apology to the girl for not offering her more support.

Now there also is the angle that the 16-year-old is of African-American lineage. Which means there may be part of the audience that had their sensibilities offended by her performance being upset more by her appearance, causing them to mentally insert elements into her performance because of their own racial hang-ups.

Then again, Feliciano all those years ago had some people screaming that he ought to be deported (even though as a Puerto Rican he is a U.S. citizen, just like any Indianan).

SO WHAT SHOULD we think of the fact that some people in our society are stuck in modes of thought that, quite frankly, were ridiculous even back in 1968 (seriously, Kennedy and King were assassinated that year and several cities were literally ablaze – yet Josè Feliciano was the subversive element?) and are just pathetic nowadays?

If anything, I wonder at times why we cling to the idea of the National Anthem before sporting events. It didn’t take place on a regular basis until World War II. For many decades, it simply wasn’t done. It would have been viewed as an event to politicize a ballgame – which I prefer to think of as a place to escape such serious matters for a few hours.

I literally find it ridiculous at times to see thousands of overweight people clad in athletic jersey replicas (as though they could take the playing field right there and then) singing along with the anthem in an even worse tone of voice than the person on the field who has the microphone.

That is what we should be offended by, not a 16-year-old girl from Bloomington, Ind.

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