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Peter Solari Follow @4PeteSakeNY
It's time for your daily dose of stupidity...
Have you ever gone to a ballgame or other sporting event where the national anthem was sung beforehand by a law enforcement officer or member of the military? I've seen it happen countless times in New York, especially since 9/11, and never once felt offended. Boy was I wrong! Or so says one columnist at ESPN.
Howard Bryant has a column in the June 6th issue of ESPN the Magazine, with the headline, "The Unspoken Truth." In it, Bryant derides what he calls "the staged patriotism" at professional sporting events, and asserts that these "authoritarian" practices, are unjustly harsh on black athletes in the aftermath of Ferguson and other high profile police shootings.
The piece isn't available online, and the only place I've ever seen ESPN the Magazine was the waiting room at my doctor's office. Newsbusters' Clay Waters, however, has seen it, and wrote about it in his May 28th column. According to Waters, Bryant wrote the following in the magazine:
"Why don't more athletes speak out on behalf of their communities? Perhaps more of them would if there wasn't a chilling force looming over them...Policing is clearly one of the most divisive issues in the country - except in the sports arena, where the post-9/11 hero narrative has been so deeply embedded within its game-day fabric that policing is seen as clean, heroic, uncomplicated...Nobody seems to care much about this authoritarian shift at the ballpark, yet the media and the public are quick to demand accountability from players they consider insufficiently activist. They blame these black players for not speaking up on behalf of their communities, ignoring the smothering effect that staged patriotism and cops singing the national anthem in a time of Ferguson have on player expression. It's indirectly stifled, while the increasing police pageantry at games sends another clear message: The sentiments of the poor in Ferguson and Cleveland do not matter...While athletes are routinely criticized for 'not doing more,' it is conveniently ignored how deeply their employers have mobilized against the most powerless elements of their fan base."
You got that? Black players aren't free to express themselves because the white owners are honoring law enforcement and veterans at the games, and in doing so, are letting the black members of their communities know, they don't matter. Brilliant!
Bryant's whole argument lacks any semblance of logic. The NFL is one of the biggest offenders of this oppression, and they even got into some hot water over it. And, as Waters wrote for Newsbusters back in November, Bryant knows this. How then, is it possible, that the NFL is stifling the same athletes, in this case the St. Louis Rams, who are openly protesting the Ferguson police, on the field and in front of millions of fans watching on television?
Back in 2014, after Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson police, the phrase "hands up, don't shoot" became a rallying cry for anti-police protesters. At the time, the media was promoting a false narrative that Brown had his hands up and was surrendering when police shot him. In their week 13 game on November 30th of that year, several Rams players, who were being stifled by their white owners, mind you, entered the field with their hands in the air, in solidarity with the anti-police hooligans who were burning Ferguson to the ground.
Video: TOMO News US
The entire "hands up, don't shoot narrative has been proven entirely false.
Bryant isn't a journalist, he's only a social justice warrior pretending to be one, he's part of a growing fad in America. He's also no stranger to ridiculing military and police. In his December 7th piece, "Are You Ready for Some Patriotism?", Bryant wrote,
"The influence of the military represents the most significant and uncomfortable change in sports in post-9/11 America. Significant because the game, on TV and at the stadium, has been awash in military overtones since the destruction of the World Trade Center, and uncomfortable because the root of the change has been an unstable, metastasizing of fear, nationalism, patriotism -- and especially commerce."
In his piece, Waters highlights a number of other instances where Bryant has been hostile to veterans, soldiers, and cops. In what is, perhaps, the most ironic thing Bryant has ever written, his June, 2013 column, "Sports and Patriotism," laments the following:
Can not the many of the same things be said about ESPN? Wasn't ESPN established to cover sports and sports stories? Didn't it used to be a place you could go to escape from things like politics? Why then, has it evolved into a forum for left wing radicals like Bryant and Tony Kornheiser, to spew their liberal, nonsensical talking points 24/7. And why is it that they're free to do so, along as they tow the liberal line? Isn't it funny how anybody who veers from the narrative, is immediately fired? You can ask Curt Schilling all about that. He was let go for having the audacity to suggest that men shouldn't be allowed in the women's room. "The ballpark, in the time of two murky wars and a constant threat of international and domestic terrorism, has been for the last dozen years a place for patriotism. The industry that once avoided the complex world now embraces it, serving as the chief staging ground for expressions of patriotism, and has codified it into game-day identity.
A dynamic that was supposed to be temporary has become permanent. The atmospheres of the games are no longer politically neutral but decidedly, often uncomfortably, nationalistic. The military flyovers, the pre-game inclusion of the armed forces, and the addition of 'God Bless America' to 'The Star Spangled Banner' are no longer spontaneous or reaction to a specific event, but fixtures."
