Just like the other 31 teams of the NFL, of course.
The reason I mention this is that a banner's been following me around the Web, as such things do, saying, "The Washington Redskins stand for strength, courage, and respect."
This is all about the word "Redskins" in the team name, of course. I might feel differently if I were a Native American, but as someone who isn't, this strikes me as the last war when the next one is already in our face.
According to the NFL's own actuaries, it can be expected that 28% of NFL players will experience brain damage as a result of all those collisions they endure on the playing field.
The NFL, the Redskins, the Cowboys, the Ravens, the Packers, da Bears, the Seahawks, and all the other NFL teams - they all stand for making a buck by mashing the brains of a substantial number of their players into pulp.
That is not an acceptable way to make a buck. Hell, I don't see how anyone can continue to be a football fan, knowing that this is true. Men's brains are being destroyed so that I can have something interesting to watch on TV on Sunday afternoons? I can't be a party to that. Forty-five years of being a football fan came to an end when I realized that this was what I was watching.
Josh Marshall has asked, "didn't we know this all along?" But his own illustrations show that we only knew that football destroyed the body. And the reality in America (and much of the world) is that many people work jobs out of necessity, just to put food on the table and pay the rent, that use up their body by the time they can collect Social Security, leaving them a retirement that they are unable to enjoy. Until that underlying reality is changed, it's hard to criticize football for paying people a lot more money for having their bodies prematurely messed up.
But maybe we ought to think about changing that reality. It's unreasonable, especially in a time where there's plenty of surplus labor, so to speak, that we have to use up the bodies of working men and women in the course of their work. We need to find a way to bring that to an end.
