You Can Look it Up
I predicted the Redskins would draft into a position they already had covered, and what do you know but they did. This team will be truly mediocre this fall.
Then I went to the Wizards game tonight. Phew. Haywood has to go; so does Etan. And Hayes. Stevenson wouldn't be missed. This is a terrible bench. Plus, I was told that Gil Arenas isn't enough of a leader to save the team next year.
Oddly, I bet the Nationals shape up fairly quickly.
The Republicans, meanwhile, have a dreadful roster compared to the D's at their debate. With one or maybe two exceptions, the D's presented a flock of people who could be great presidents. The R's need to draft one or two new candidates: I bet they do.
This is the news from the D.C. sports scene. We know nothing about money, by the way, in this town.
Comments (7)
I agree. Except for Biden and Clinton, everyone else seemed fine.
April 29, 2007 11:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Biden, Clinton and Kucinich.
April 29, 2007 12:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Racism in conservative American discourse is a repugnant tradition extending back from Imus to Rush to Ann Coulter screeching about ragheads to Saint Ronnie kicking off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi ranting about state’s rights and long, long, before that. Its persistence in contemporary America is a national disgrace.
So it is with a heavy heart that I witness this very disgrace in an article in the TPM Café.
The question of naming sports teams after Indians is open to some debate. The least offensive end of the spectrum is probably Florida State, who solicited input from the Seminole Nation about their team’s nickname. But there’s no room for debate about the name “redskin”. It is exactly equivalent to “nigger”. If anybody who believes in the first line of the Declaration of Independence can defend its use, under any circumstances, I’d love to witness his logical gymnastics.
Teams claim that using Indian names is honoring their courage and their warrior tradition. I don’t think so, I agree with the guy who said it’s like someone in Germany naming their soccer team “The Jews”.
Nobody would consider calling a team “The Dancing Darkies” or “The Tightfisted Hebes”. Can anybody explain what’s different about the case of Native Americans?
I can. They have practically no wealth and aren’t a sizeable voting bloc.
While this might, just might, be the land of freedom and equality, it’s undoubtedly the land where money screams. The level of respect we give ethnic minorities is in direct proportion to their political and economic power. The weakest, American Indians and Arabs, can be caricaturized without a whole lot of stink, while we’ll do linguistic backflips to avoid offending blacks (remember niggardly), and Jewish people are the only ethnic group to claim a special label for racism directed towards them, anti-Semitism.
The NCAA has taken action about the practice among college teams. Even here in Nebraska, the reddest red state there is, the Lincoln Journal-Star took the sensible and painless step of not printing team nicknames depicting Native Americans.
Racism is racism, a slur is a slur, and simple human respect is simple human respect. I really expect better from TPM.
April 29, 2007 1:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
With all due respect for the souls and honor of Dale A. and all the oppressed minorities he is intending to respect, this is a bit too politically correct to lay on TPM as a whole.
The sin of naming a sports team the Redskins is not the sin of TPM as a whole, nor the sin of Reed Hundt. It was the sin of the team founder/owner, and if you want to yell and scream about something you can go after the current owner who maintains it.
You say the Nebraska newspaper "took the sensible and painless step of not printing team nicknames depicting Native Americans" . If you want to be constructive and educate us to your level of sensitivity, please tell us, how do they refer to the pro football teams in Washington and Kansas City, or to the pro baseball team in Atlanta, or to the college teams of Florida State and other schools? What do they do if the AP runs a sports story, say from the Kansas City football team's playoff game last January, and uses the team's name? As a writer myself, you've got me really curious, what convolutions do they do thru to make sense over this?
Reed Hundt did nothing wrong in trying to talk to us in a lighter tone, making sports references as an easy conversation entry point such as American guys often do. (Indeed, I myself had an awkward job situation a couple of years ago, where I tranferred out of one unit where I thought a female manager had mistreated me -- and ran into her husband often at the new unit. Yet because he was a big fan of the Washington football team and I was able to impress him with my football patter, I made it all work out and not be a problem.)
Reed Hundt used the actual name of the team. (And some of us writers think that's how we show respect, by referring to things by their most official, and most commonly recognized, names.)
You can have your sensitivity at whatever level you wish, that's fine. Yet if you have a beef, it's with the owner of the team and a culture within which he, and the whole notion of a pro football team, exists. I am not going to think any less of either Reed or TPM just because you have a highly developed case of sensitivity, which you can't manage to express in a positive or appropriately-focused manner.
If Native Americans were demonstrating every game day at every stadium and they were concerned enough to make it a bigger stink than it is, then Reed would have said something about "the local team with the controversial name," because it would have been an issue. I understand that in Florida, the Native Americans interceded with the NCAA to have the team keep the Native American-themed name.
April 29, 2007 10:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Certain cultural images (Redskins=Native Americans) have become cartoons. In my view, these cartoon images have become so cartoony they've lost almost all connection to the original group. A century ago, redskins was an insult to Native Americans. Today, the concept of Redskins applies to a professional sports team. I'm of Irish-German ancestry and I think The Micks would be a good name for a Boston team or the Krauts for a Milwaukee team.
April 30, 2007 5:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
I do wish to make it clear that I have always thought the name of the Washington pro football team was absurdly anti-historical, as D.C.'s main relationship and association with Native Americans was in repressing them, deceiving them and, in essence, killing them with alleged kindness and supervision.
And in light of the current owner's reputation for having more bucks than brains, I would gladly join a campaign to pressure him to change the name of the team to the Vastly More Appropriate "Washington Greenbacks."
April 30, 2007 12:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
The first draft of the political game in the post-dubya era, is the ethos of sportsmanship itself, with moderates acting as referees. Blood sports and cheer leaders are out.
If politics are like Lucha Libre (possibly the best sports analogy) Dodd, Gravel, and Kucinich are exhibition matches. They'd be the rudos in exhibition matches, allowed to use some bad moves before being defeated, to establish the qualities of the tecnicos.
Only Clinton and Obama, are the tecnicos with a chance at winning, the people's favorites.
I'm doubtful of them forming a tag team, even though they're the strongest and it hypothetically appeals to many now. They may be redundant and mutually canceling on some regards, especially against opposition, hard to say how that may change though.
Biden, Edwards, and Richardson may be good VP choices, though I'm betting the VP will be a new fresh faced luchadore.
April 30, 2007 4:58 PM | Reply | Permalink