June 24, 2014
No, the patent office’s ruling is a major shot fired in the cultural war of the asses against the masses. Football (real football, not that game they”re playing down in Brazil right now) is America’s true national pastime, still the most popular way for us to while away a Sunday. As such, it has a decidedly redneck (or at least “silent majority”) character to it. It’s not the “exxxxtreeeeeeeme!” masculinity of MMA, nor does it carry the same urban edginess as the NBA. Football is, despite the growing presence of reprehensible subhumans like Michael Vick and Aaron Hernandez, a conservative game, traditional even, a throwback to a time when men still worked in meatpacking plants and steel mills; a time when Buffalo was still kind of a big deal.
An attack on the Redskins name is not just a ruling in favor of a tiny, tiny minority”the type of people who get their knickers in a twist over what a football team is called, some of whom are Native Americans, most of whom are not“at the expense of the 80 percent of Americans who think the name is just fine, as well as those who don”t care. It’s a volley fired at the type of people who remember the old America fondly, or those who identify more with it than with the America whose chief exports are the victim mentality and self-loathing. It’s the patent office throwing up a huge and blatant middle finger to working-class Americans.
More than that, however, the ruling gives America an extra shove in its headlong rush toward totalitarianism. While people have been stripped of their property for thought crime before, there’s generally some other actual crime involved. The Redskins ruling, by depriving a major franchise of its property on the sole basis of nonconformity with prevailing norms in a limited segment of society, ratchets up the process to a whole new level.
This ain”t pork rinds.
