The NFL and the Politics of Lies
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit –
Strong Hallelujahs roll –“This World is not Conclusion” (373), Emily Dickinson
I taught throughout the 1980s and 1990s in my small rural hometown in Upstate South Carolina. That town literally had a railroad track separating the black and white sides of town.
The very small school district includes only four schools — primary, elementary, middle (junior, when I attended), and high — that encircled the largest church in town, Woodruff First Baptist, its steeple looming prominently over the schools and the town.
Many of my students attended that church, and for a time, virginity pledges became a thing. Sunday morning services included girls and young women coming forward to pledge their virginity until marriage.
These young women received praise and recognition throughout the town and at school. At one point when this trend was at a peak, a group of young women came to me upset that, as they explained, most of their peers taking the virginity pledge were far from virgins, before the pledge or after.
These young women taking the pledge were playing a powerful game of making public displays that gave them social capital but required in no way that they practice what they proclaimed.
The young women who had not pledged, were mostly not sexually active, and felt a great deal of resentment also informed me that one of the young women who had recently been praised in front of the student body, and was also a very popular student and cheerleader, was among a secret group of young women who helped each other pay for and acquire abortions.
I have dozens and dozens of these stories, since I grew up in the deep South and am well acquainted with the power and hypocrisy of the Christian veneer.
While I have mostly stopped watching all organized sports, college or professional, I was wrangled last night into viewing the 2019 Super Bowl. What resonated with me above the lackluster game itself and the disappointment of another success story for the New England Patriots (with a coach and quarterback who personify all that is wrong with the NFL and the U.S.) was the clear drumbeat throughout the event by the NFL that the organization is deeply committed to social justice.
Over the past few years, the NFL has ostracized Colin Kaepernick for political protests and perpetuated the vapid notion that some of the athletes have sullied the game with their politics.
This same NFL began the most recent Super Bowl, as usual, with nothing except politics, the National Anthem and a military flyover. But most disgusting of all was the use of Martin Luther King Jr., ostensibly since the game was played in Atlanta, GA, to associate billionaire owners and the league with social justice.
I have never seen anyone look more out of place than the images of Commissioner Roger Goodell touring Atlanta and marking great places and moments in civil rights.
The NFL is a master of the politics of lies, playing up its own brand while simultaneously beating down any millionaire worker who has the audacity to be anything other than a player-drone for the billionaires who own them.
I understand how many NFL players feel compelled to remain stooges for the corporation that pays many of them well, even as the evidence is mounting that almost all of them are being physically and mentally maimed, that virtually all of them are just cogs, expendable. None the less, I cringed when Marshawn Lynch showed up in one of the most popular feel-good spots portraying the NFL as all that is good and happy:
There is a world unlike this one in which I imagine Marshawn Lynch as the hero and not bent by the great burdening weight of the NFL.
But that is not this world.
Concurrent with the Super Bowl has been a brewing controversy about the governor of Virginia, which Chris Emdin confronts broadly:
Today, as everyone indicts the governor for his racism and everyone professes to stew in anger at how he has let down his constituents, I am most disturbed by the ways that we allow folks to construct progressive public personas that are allowed to mask a problematic past even as the country endorses the past and the masking. WE have allowed people to use buzzwords like equity and social justice to mask their racism. WE have allowed sitting next to the right people or hanging the right painting to erase things they have done that cause pain. WE have failed to allow folks to face their history and the part they play in what they profess to fight against. It is easy to advocate for something without acknowledging that you are part of what caused it. It is easy for the governor to denounce the hatred in Charlottesville without acknowledging that he is a branch of the tree that the hate there grew from.
Emdin unmasks the progressive veneer that works like the Christian veneer — for some. Mostly for the privileged who use that veneer to maintain a death-grip on their unearned power.
In this age of Trump politics, we must recognize that billionaire NFL owners are no more committed to social justice than Trump is to Christianity.
Billionaires have been afforded their billions because of inequity, and the only real threat to their egregious wealth is equity, the cleansing sunshine of social justice.
The NFL exists on lies, it needs lies. The NFL is a microcosm of U.S. capitalism that exists on poverty, that needs poverty.
Kaepernick was sacrificed exactly because he was the Truth, unadulterated because the banishment was swift and seemingly invisible, silent. Allowed to return to the NFL, like Lynch, Kapernick likely and excusably would have merged into the fold in some uncomfortable way — like Jim Brown’s face if the commercial above is paused just right.
The NFL’s lie is just another Great America Myth, another cultural lie. The Super Bowl was its crowning act of this year’s season of lies.
The perfect team, the Patriots, now sit on that throne of duplicity like an arrogant middle finger to all that is decent and humane.
Like the church steeple ringed by my home town’s only schools.
