Is That The NFL? Or Just A Brilliant Disguise?
Good news if you took the mujahideen and the points in Afghanistan Bowl. If you’re playing something closer to home, however, the NFL put its oar in the water this weekend for another season. All signs point to a year with fans in the stands and the traditional enthusiasms for Tom Brady’s House League.
But, of course, there are a few new wrinkles— including playing the BLM anthem Awake And Sing before games. Player militancy doesn’t appear to have been cooled by the ascension of Joe “Ten Offensive” Biden as president. The league’s enforcement of the new Woke pieties on white privilege and gender flexibility continue apace.
Thus the “why is Player X in the league but Colin Kaepernick is not?” debate. Player X is now former QB Tim Tebow who is trying out for Jacksonville as a TE while Kaep is still just a shill for Nike. (The answer BTW is Tebow is playing for league minimum at another position while Kaepernick— who was 2-16 in his last NFL gig and turned down a contract offer— wants to be a QB paid like Brady.)
There is also confusion over just how much to bend to the governments’ latest Covid-19 remedies. It appears that the Delta variant means it’s masks on again. There is also the possibility of vaccine apartheid with the vaccinated being separated from the unwashed rabble in sections. While some stadiums will be full of fans still others will look like the daily flight into Kabul with rows of empty seats to be hidden from TV cameras.
Everyone at the NFL prays that traditional fans will just bow their necks and accept it all as a price for seeing their favourite teams on the field once more. And, in the beginning, that resolute defiance of the times will be the norm. But, as we noted just after the final game of last season, the political and Covid exertions just may exhaust even the most loyal fan. See: NBA TV/ digital ratings.
Those exertions won’t come from just the players but from Corporate America, which has taken out membership in Critical Race Theory College. While it stood back from the culture wars of the 1960s the titans of industry and communications have wholeheartedly adopted the radical agendas of the Democrats left wing. They’re slinging it now like it was 50-cent beer.
In our February piece we called it “We Interrupt This Lecture To Bring You A Football Game”.
“You know you’ve just blown a wad of dough on a Super Bowl commercial when @washingtonpost is talking about how Bruce Springsteen hawking your Jeeps is killing the planet. In the middle of a blowout win by Tom Brady.
It was two-for-one for viewers at #SuperBowlLV . You got a football game and a lecture on Wokeness from Springsteen, BLM and the NFL. A little bit of sports and a lot of coercion. But as Time magazine tells us, the ruling class has made an alliance with people like the NFL to keep the 2020 election campaign going forever.
Sunday was Exhibit A. You could’ve cut the faux-gravity with a butter knife, The Super Bowl LV commercials on Sunday were mini moral parables from gigantic global corporations that were long on Joe Biden talking points (unity, climate, BLM) and short on actual products like beer, cars and Cheetos.
(We played a drinking game. First one to guess what product they were hawking got a free shot. There were many occasions when no one knew the product even after the commercial finished.)
The Bruce-Springsteen-as-Pete Seeger spot was typical. Only at the end of the Boss’ litany of Woody Guthrie dirges about the soil and churches in Kansas did we find out this paean to Woke America was for Jeep— a company owned by French and Italian interests.
The guy who was Born To Run now cruises the streets of privilege. (His daughter won a silver medal in show jumping at the Tokyo Olympics—[ed.) There were plenty more such lectures to a population that has been isolated and incarcerated for much of the past year. Tone deafness understates the effect. No wonder the public has retreated to watching Netflix to get away from the hectoring of network TV and its howler monkeys.
Cynically the NFL can fall back on its true-blue base— the betting crowd who wager on games, play fantasy sports and, now, soon play single-game betting in Canada. But how long the tolerance exists for an NFL promoting BLM/ CRT and AOC feminism in between plays is anyone’s guess.
When does Joe Fan realize the people he’s cheering for hate him? Or as Bruce Springsteen might sing, “Is that you baby? Or just a brilliant disguise?"
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx