Over the top politics at PBR

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

PBR = Professional Bull Riding. This was almost a Pit thread. My wife and I attended the PBR competition in Springfield MO this weekend. I’m a liberal/atheist from NJ who has lived in Arkansas for 40 years. I am totally inured to the proud to be an American jingoism featured in most sporting events down here, but I was outraged when the announcer said, “No one in this arena would ever take a knee for the national anthem!” Good guess, but I was really pissed. One of the best things about sports is that is (in theory) non-political. I have been to so many NFL and MLB games where I’m sure I was surrounded by people whose political beliefs I abhor. But can’t we just leave it outside?

Edit: I have blocked people on FB whose views I agree with because they’ve so pedantic. So it’t not just a left/right things.

2

I heard that exact statement at a highschool football game, last year, over the P.A.
Could not believe it.

3

Whew, I was beginning to think we’d have to ask for them to return that Blue Ribbon.

4

I heard that once. I took a knee.

5

Sports have never been apolitical. But often the politics have been hidden. Heroes like Kaepernick have made the hidden visible.

6

Rodeo, in particular, has always been a bastion of the right, god-fearing, America-loving, military-respecting, uh, common clay of the new west. Of course everybody feels that way, it’s the only way to feel, if you’re a real American. As soon as I saw PBR I knew–well okay, as soon as I translated it into bull riding–what this was going to be about. They are not subtle in the rodeo world.

7

And now I have Gene Wilder’s Waco Kid voice running thru my head.

8

More like, sports has always been mainstream politics, the stuff most people agreed with, the consensus. If you are somewhat insulated, you don’t notice that consensus because you think it’s universal, the old quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus trick the Catholic Church could pull in the era between the Arians and Luther: This is believed always, everywhere, and by everyone.

The 1980s began the process of pulling that down by creating a GOP without honor or humanity; a pure political force which only cares about lowering taxes for the rich and pulling down the basic social structures which kept the Liberal Consensus running. Some people, like gays, were essentially deemed life unworthy of life by Reagan’s lack of action on, and open mockery of, the AIDS crisis, and others were relegated to what the GOP would attempt to make permanent underclass by destruction of social services and the welfare state.

Now we have a GOP that’s purely tribal, a White Nationalist party in all but name, and you can’t pretend that it supports a consensus politics: Are you offended by people protesting police shooting unarmed Black men? Are you shouting for legal residents of this country to be deported? Yes or no? There’s no middle ground on those things. It isn’t Republicans versus Democrats, it’s Red Tribe versus the majority of America in what the Red Tribe sees as a fight for its very existence.