Rush Limbaugh said that he did not want the NFL to become insignificant. He was replying to an interview with Sean Hannity, regarding the brouhaha over the NFL’s problem with the honoring of the National Anthem. This is, I think, the dreamy little world that Rush and his entourage live in: That world of his and Hannity’s and D’Souzas’ and the neo-con bubble.
Let’s take first things first: Mr. Limbaugh, the NFL is, has been, and always will be insignificant. It is a damn game. And for the most part (at least today) it is played by insignificant meatheads who went to college via taxpayer sufferance to play football while taking such scholarly elations as General Studies or Poetry for the Nonpoetic or Education for the Uneducated Feminist i.e the contemporary standard of: “Create your own degree.”
To that end college football, once a delight in competition of young men for their locale: state, city, etc. is now, while as insignificant as the “pros,” a nationwide mass of unmanageable, tattooed ,mumbling morons often exposed on T.V. in interviews as lost mental horizons hoping to sign for a large (not insignificant) cash bonus so they can immediately spend most of it on expensive cars, jewelry, additional tattoos and generally bad investments in order to file for bankruptcy before reaching the age of 30. All of this, has evolved to a large extent due to the grand world of public education, which has plenty of money to spend on high school sports, but has few teachers who have any more smarts that their students. And, so it goes Horace Mann.
Meanwhile, as the neocon world of Limbaugh et al of historical lampoonery thrusts its pseudo -educated spear into the heart of the monster, the aforementioned public approach, (resulting in eighth-grade level skills for college students) these same neocons acclaim the so-called conservative approach as the solution. But what they really mean is, the Republicans approach.
These critique masters of the wasted minds (“a mind is a terrible thing to waste”-remember that?) have themselves little knowledge as they constantly remind us when discussing everything from the “Founding Fathers” up and through the “Civil” War (whatever the hell that was). The Republicans, they claim, saved the “nation” while the Democrats hated and spent blacks lives via the white man’s mischievous slavery; the tool of Southerners to build fortunes and wreck the lives of black human beings in the process–God Bless Southern America. And remember, Republicans are conservatives.
Modern Republicans have learned at the beckoning ersatz historicism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the lurid libretto of The Battle Hymn of the Republic that they are, indeed, conservatives and that so-called gentlemen of the South while, perhaps, outstanding military-engineering virtuosos, were, as book marketer Bill O’Reilly said, “On the wrong side.” Ah, thank you Mr. Bill. Your doctrinal research is boundless, as well researched via Neo-Con U.
To create in the mind of the mindless a devotion to tradition, dignity, grace and a reverence to an old British Beer drinking tune wrapped around a poem written by a slave-owner and slave repatriation supporter is no more than an effort to light a match in a vacuum. The tattooed generation in its search for universal knowledge via the “degree” has sought wisdom from the American progressives and their conjoined neoconservatives. This TG is searching the desert for water.
I have never stood for or saluted The National Anthem. I have never failed to stand or salute The Star-Spangled Banner.
To explain this concept to Rush and Sean, or Bill and those other guys would be beyond my reach. But if anyone’s got a match, give it a try.
PS: I still stand when Dixie is played, if there is a band courageous enough to play it.
Perspectives expressed in op-eds are not those of The Daily Caller.