Values clarification for football fans

Values clarification for football fans
by David Benjamin

“You can’t fine somebody for a peaceful protest. We’re not out here holding signs, saying we don’t care about the troops or we don’t care about our country or whatever. It’s a peaceful protest, and it’s something as simple as people just expressing themselves and how they wanted to do it.”
— Davante Adams, Green Bay Packers

MADISON, Wis. — Before Gerald Ford, in 1975, officially ended forced military conscription in America, the Draft was a powerful catalyst for what came to be known in the Sixties as “values clarification.” During the bloodbath in Vietnam, every Draft-age male had to decide, unequivocally, how he felt about fighting, killing and waging war — and probably dying in a rice paddy — 8,000 miles from home in a conflict ginned up by a cabal of geriatric Cold Warriors for whom the body count in Khe Sanh and the fluctuations in the Dow Jones were pretty much the same thing.

Me? I knew right away. I told my Draft Board. They said they could send me to Leavenworth if I refused. I said I’d pack my toothbrush. Instead, they sent me to work in a hospital for two years.
I don’t know if I won or lost that one. But I was clear on what I believed.

The owners of teams in the National Football League, with a blustering assist from the wannabe tyrant in the White House, are providing the players in the NFL with a similar — but less dire — opportunity to clarify their values. Under pressure from the president — who should have bigger fish to fry but can’t find the skillet — NFL owners have ordered all players to stand at attention during the pre-game rendition of the national anthem, if they’re on the field. Players have the option of staying in the locker room ’til the fat lady stops singing. If so, they won’t be punished.

As dumb as this rule is, it has the virtue of simplifying a two-year clash between the all-white and cloistered NFL owners (a group demographic identical to my Draft Board in 1969) and the majority-black players (again, similar in composition to the cannon fodder fed into the Vietnam meatgrinder in ’69).

First, let’s dismiss two red herrings. Although the original protest, launched by blackballed NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016, was about police violence against African-Americans and racial inequality in America, it has run its course without affecting social justice to any discernible degree. Its most tangible results have been Kaepernick’s vindictive (and collusive) banishment from pro football and Donald Trump’s propaganda bonanza.

Which is the second red herring. Because the mostly-black NFL dissidents inspired by Kaepernick chose to “take a knee” during the anthem, Trump cunningly — and mendaciously — styled the protest as proof of a vast negroid conspiracy against patriotism, Old Glory, America and the sacrosanct military, not to mention Jesus, Mom and low-carb apple pie. Trump’s ravings about the flag and the honored dead drowned out the stated reasons for protest, leaving the whole situation without any political, intellectual or — especially — athletic foundation.

It all boiled down to a nebulous Us versus an imaginary Them. Again, shades of Vietnam: Who are we fighting and what the hell are we fighting for?

Thankfully, the NFL oligarchs (with the notable exception of dissenting Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeff Lurie and the Green Bay Packers — who have no owner) have rescued us from the morass by appeasing the bombastic fruitcake in the Oval Office. They’re gonna nail any player who does anything during the Star-Spangled Banner but stand stock-still with “hand on heart.”

I have to digress here, if only to note that no other professional sports league has anthem issues. The even blacker National Basketball Association tolerates all sorts of individual and group protests but prudently leaves the Star-Spangled Banner alone. An even better example is baseball, in which the anthem plays while both teams are still mostly hidden in the dugout. If a few players sit, kneel or handle a body part other than their heart, who can tell? And who cares? After all, the real anthem at the ballpark is “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” which is easier to sing, everybody knows the words and the lyrics are happy.

The Star-Spangled Banner is a dubious anthem, cribbed by Francis Scott Key from a British drinking song in 1814. It’s only been the “national anthem” since 1931. For 155 gloriously haphazard years, the USA got by with neither an anthem nor an argument about how to genuflect when somebody starts playing it.

The flag goes back further but it’s not the point, either. The owners have mooted the phony issue of football patriotism by challenging a unionized workforce. They’ve offered the NFL Players Association a clear and vivid opportunity for its members to clarify their values, to take a united work action against the owners’ arrogance and arbitrariness. The owners have offered their players a gift — solidarity — that once defined the labor movement in America and lifted millions from wage slavery to middle-class prosperity. Moreover, the owners have proposed to the NFLPA the most dramatic option available to the working class since the days of the UMW of A and the IWW.

They can strike.

Not for a week or a season, or even a game. They can strike ever so briefly but unanimously and impressively — without a word of protest or grievance. They simply have to delay their arrival — as suggested by Jerry Jones, Dan Snyder, Robert Kraft and all the other NFL plutocrats — for the duration of a clunky and suddenly divisive battle hymn played torturously by a marching band. The players are welcome — say the owners — to stay warm indoors, standing, kneeling, sitting, fretting, praying, shmoozing, taking a leak, ’til the anthem’s over.

And then, kaboom! Like baseball players bursting from the dugout to the joy and pent-up cheers of their wisely apolitical fans, they can pour from the tunnel onto the field.

At which point, the most meaningful and patriotic words anyone can utter won’t be “Oh, say can you see” or “God bless America,” but simply:

“Play ball.”