It's a Guy Thing: A Visit from Football Dumbo/Legend Daryl Sanders...at Facebook

WWW--I'm on Facebook a lot (no shit Sherlock), one of many reasons I rarely post on here anymore, besides the fact that...oh, never mind.

Any reader of this blog will know that I'm adamantly iconoclastic, that I hold no sacred cows and that slaughtering them is something I excel at. Football (not the EU version, the real deal) is an American obsession to the point of being nauseating. Like baseball, it very openly wraps itself in "Old Glory," and doing so is the last refuge of scoundrels. Yes, Hunter S. Thompson was just as obsessed and it was something I could never relate to with him. I see it as a failing on his part and that of many Americans, it is a drug, literally, to socialize as well as to anesthetize the public.

Like a lot of self-destructive American institutions, I hope to live to watch it also bite the dust, and it's a roundly corporate one. People having fun is one thing. This shit isn't fun, it's a pathology.

It would hardly be the first time were I to observe that American football is equivalent to the "bread and circuses" of the Roman empire, it's literally a cliche at this point and obvious, something to take for granted. It is a distraction, one-of-many, but it's served a very central part in shaping the public mind since the 1920s, and is an adjunct to jingoism with its over-emphasis on competition, machismo, and a Manichean (us vs. them, black & white, etc.) worldview. What's more, and has many others have observed, George Carlin being a noteworthy example, football pushes a military mentality and is a cultural avatar of militarization. Anyone watching the coverage of the first Gulf War on CNN will know what I'm writing about here, but that scoreboard mentality could just as easily be applied to the current conflicts America's now mired down in. It's all part of the same moronic, wrong-headed Americanism that got us into Vietnam.

I have never, for one moment, entertained the bullshit surrounding the sport and find it unbelievably boring, as much as going to church, and that's what it really amounts to (or doesn't). This is literally institutionalized nationalist barbarism. The rest of the world fears us over how pathologically feral we are as a nation thanks to these cultural roots, never mind our entertainment output, enough to scare any normal human being into paralysis. But we're not a normal culture at all, we're a sick one, a degenerated settler state like many others. It's no surprise, then, that a sport like football is so popular here, even supported over our museums and cultural centers that are actually frequented more often.

And so, into this mix came me...and some asshole I only heard of over the years: Daryl Sanders, professional flag waver. Amazingly, he can walk upright and read and write, but his trainers had to use negative reinforcement therapy for all of that. Somehow, some way, some retard on Facebook got his ire up and thought he'd tap the "champ" (chump, chimp) to confront me over my opinions of the recent deaths of a helicopter filled with professionally trained assassins in Afghanistan. I apparently wasn't showing enough "respect" to these Einsatzgruppen-clones and he posted a comment on my wall, which was nice of him.

Next week I'll ask him to get groceries, mow the lawn, he's a rock and apparently does widow, a rarity these days. A hero isn't some oddly-shaped lummox who chases a ball around a field, little FYI. A hero is someone like Pat Tillman, a real man who wanted to protect his country, but also a dedicated leftist who wanted to go to Afghanistan to bear witness. He knew where America had been and wasn't a little child like Sanders, he was a real hero who was probably slaughtered by his fellow soldiers for seeing too much, like the fellow who recently reported the "kill team," another real hero. Heroes don't follow illegal orders. The resist, from inside of the military, putting their lives on the line in the truest sense, for the common good and the good of humanity.

That was Patrick Tillman. I don't even know or care if dumbo ever served, but members of my family did, so don't even go there, sunshine patriots.

Some of this bullshit goes back to John Wayne, a Californian (the genocide state, look at their constitution) college athlete in the 1920s who excelled at football, so much so that he landed a movie contract since if there's anything Americans value, it's the sport. That's called having your priorities out of order. "Wayne" (not his real name) became a wrong-headed icon of American manhood, machismo, just like Daryl Sanders, a little boy who I have to assume still thinks the Vietnam War "was a good idea." He also supports the illegal and genocidal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our point of entry. Sanders told me that I "have an odd sense of right and wrong." Oh really? Someone should really air-drop this piece of shit there and see if his over-sized ass could even make it out alive.

The fact is, those assassins who were killed weren't heroes, they were mindless killers who are paid to murder human beings in the service of private power, something Tillman grasped, making him that rarest of things, an intelligent and reflective American football player. Perhaps that's why he's dead and Sanders is still alive and will die at a ripe, old age. Heroes--real ones--don't live to old age, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The system here finds some way to eliminate them or to wreck their lives. Daryl's an obedient lapdog, and so his taking-up-space ass will probably continue on, contributing more sickness to our culture. He's a disgusting little man, a joke, a fraud, but then, so are most football players and phony patriots.

O.J. Simpson's memorabilia was his and yet not his...

WWW--This trial has been very interesting to me for a number of reasons. My brother has worked for over a decade in advertising and had the misfortune of meeting a lot of Northern Indiana businessmen over the years (hint: car dealers think "Top Gun" is the "greatest film ever made"--wrong again).

As one might vividly imagine, most of them are antisocial turds with less personality than a houseplant, but a few of them actually wanted to chum it up with "the help," so my brother had to oblige their overinflated egos.

One of these clowns was a very big O.J. fan. He took my brother down into the basement den of his very expensive and poorly-designed-and-built clapboard where there was a wall literally covered with sports memorabilia.

And there it was, it even had its own display-nook: O.J.'s 1968 Heisman trophy.

"He lets me keep it for him, and I give him money every once in a while," he said (I'm paraphrasing now, isn't it thrilling?). This was within the last eight years. Yeah, it's crazy, but these things just have a way of coming to me and not the reverse, a kind of "Jungian" latticework of coincidence that's plagued my life from its inception.

What is there to gather from this? That O.J. has such an enormous ego that in his mind he wasn't "selling" anything, but "allowing" fans to "rent" his memorabilia in return for an audience with him, to be on his "good" side. I won't even go into what it must have been like to have been on his "bad" side, that's now a foregone conclusion after this trial.

In 1999, O.J.'s Heisman was sold to a Philadelphia--that wonderful town Poe loved so much--businessman named Tom Kreissman, except that he went and sold it to the man who O.J. and his co-conspirators attacked in a Vegas hotel, Alfred Beardsley:

Nevertheless, it’s believed that he bought the 1968 Heisman trophy -- the first and maybe only one ever to be auctioned — from the winner of that 1999 sale. The trophy was originally sold to Tom Kreissman of Philadelphia at Butterfield’s auction house on Sunset Boulevard for $230,000. But a source at Butterfield’s says Kreissman returned and sold it a couple of years later. It’s thought that Beardsley was the buyer. ("O.J. Simpson's 'Victim' Part of a Long-Running Feud," Foxnews.com, 09.20.2007)

And why wouldn't Beardsley have "sold" or rented the thing out to raise money for himself and "the Juice"? Why not?

The unintelligent businessman told my brother, "I went to USC when O.J. was playing there, I've known him since then," and "I'm actually borrowing it from another collector." He exhaled on and on, painting a scenario in which all of these successful old school fans of O.J.'s were shuffling these artifacts around to hide them from the Goldman and Brown families who were doing their best to track down all of the assets he was selling off to pay them from the 1996 civil suit ruling ($33 million).

Hey, who says once something's sold that it's really "sold"?

Over time, O.J. had a number of folks around him who felt he "owed" them money, and the trophy changed hands several times before 1999, and likely afterward:

The man Simpson accused of stealing the items from him is Mike Gilbert, another one-time associate. As Simpson's licensing agent in the late 1990s, Gilbert admitted snatching Simpson's Heisman Trophy and other items from his client's Brentwood home as payment for money he said was owed to him. He later turned the items over to authorities, save the trophy's nameplate.

Gilbert swore he'd go to jail before turning the nameplate over to the Goldman family, which was trying to collect on the $33.5 million civil judgment won against Simpson. Gilbert later surrendered it under court order. ("O.J.'s Vegas Accuser Says He Wants Charges Dropped," Foxnews.com, 09.15.2008)

Yeah, real class act folks there. After 1999, the trail appears to grow cold, wikianswers-be-damned, the Wikiuniverse almost never being correct about anything.

I think that the Goldmans had a good idea this kind of shell game (aka "three card monty") was going on with wealthy fans of O.J., a constant shifting of the memorabilia around with a rental fee and lots of broken promises. Egomaniacs like Simpson can convince themselves of almost anything, the same applying to pea-brained American businessmen with penis envy.

My feeling is that these people aren't mere fans, but criminals--all of the players involved in ferring around O.J.'s memorabilia. Beardsley is just a flash point. I hope that this verdict smokes the rest of them out and that they pay the price of aiding a vile murderer simply because they love football too much. To these clowns, the murders don't even matter--only football does. What a pathetic bunch. I wouldn't use that Heisman for a doorstop, although it would make a great lighter/ashtray combination with a few modifications.

None of it matters, the game is over, finally, at long last. But I still have to wonder: where's O.J.'s 1968 Heisman...and why would anyone in their right mind want it? They may as well buy one of those lousy John Wayne Gacy oil-paintings while they're at it.

"O.J. Simpson's 'Victim' Part of a Long-Running Feud," Foxnews.com, 09.20.2007: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297400,00.html

"O.J.'s Vegas Accuser Says He Wants Charges Dropped," Foxnews.com, 09.15.2008: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,296934,00.html