I'm trying to think of some of the biggest wastes of time and human effort in history. New Coke. The Maginot line. The Ford administration. South Dakota. Cats. So much energy to make a thing work that was (built into the wobbly core of its very nature) an inevitable failure. It's a morbid feature of man's essential nature that, from time to time, we opt in for an inescapable doom.
Here's a recent one I just spontaneously thought of: a bunch of people sitting around a table--people who have a lot of money and assistants and business empires to run and women to sexually harass and better things to do--trying to come up with (and this is true) a rule to keep people from protesting.
Every time I try to think about it, it slips away, like trying to catch a tadpole in by bare hands, but the tadpole is actually made of smoke and my hands are tiny electric fans. It's, like, hard.
The whole point of a protest is transgression: it's an act of defiance without regard to the consequences. Or better, fully aware of the consequences but electing to go forward anyway. I'm trying to think of a protest within the rules and I can't actually think of any. Except maybe last year when the white NFL players stood next to the kneeling black players and put a hand on their shoulders or whatever instead of kneeling with them. But can you name any of those white players? Probably not really. I bet you can name at least one kneeler though.
The NFL in fact are the ones who, this week, spent actual time formulating a rule that says if a player is on the field for the anthem, they TOTALLY have to stand up. Because that was the problem last year, players were obviously under the impression that kneeling down during the anthem had zero lasting consequences on a multimillion dollar career in professional football. And owners would only see the issue as something to be dealt with within the confines of the existing NFL rules AND NOTHING ELSE AT ALL... oy.
Protesters are troublemakers. That has the benefit of being how they are dismissed by detractors while also being completely true. Disruption in the point, attention is the point, debate and awareness are more related points. That said, I actually support the NFL owners' right to make their own dumb and useless rules that will do nothing to change the behavior they are seeking to influence. It's a private enterprise* with a private rulebook they are free to fill with whatever corporate fuckery they want. It's not a violation of the First Amendment, it's company by-laws to govern the behavior of contracted employees. Fine.
...Unless some kind of public official with the executive power of the state is involved in some way in the act of restricting or prohibiting free expression. I mean, if someone somewhere in the governmental hierarchy were to say publicly that kneeling NFL players perhaps should be punished with expulsion from the country and that very specifically that he approves of the rule change to discourage or punish anthem kneelers maybe now you're starting to talk about First Amendment violations by the government of the United States.
But I guess it's fine because of the impending massive and powerful** nuclear war that seems a lot more likely than a successful challenge to human rights violations by a sitting president in the Supreme Court. I mean, the NFL players' union is mad, but we're at the end of the era of collectivized worker action in this country anyway, so I guess if I'm Trump, it's time to go all in. Let's spend government time and money stamping out some vanity coins to commemorate this shit too.
---
*The billions of public dollars subsidizing the teams, their stadiums and the logistics around staging any game for tens of thousands of people in an urban or suburban area notwithstanding
**This is the first government document of the entire Trump administration that I believe he actually helped write. The adjectives alone are so thuddingly childish, you can see his tiny fingerprints all over
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment