Not your father's afternoon at the stadium

Two recent news items from the sports world make for telling glimpses into the impact larger cultural changes have had on that realm.

On ESPN's Around the Horn show, commentator Kevin Blackistone  said that singing of the national anthem prior to football games should be given the 86:

Whether it’s the singing of a war anthem to open every game. Whether it’s going to get a hotdog and being able to sign up for the Army at the same time. Whether it’s the NFL's embrace of the mythology of the Pat Tillman story. It has been going on in sports since the first national anthem was played in the World Series back in 1917. And it’s time for people to back away.

Then there's this bullying / harassment situation between Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin of the Miami Dolphins.  Leon H. Wolf at Red State examines the implications:

I am not here to talk about “football culture,” either to attack or defend it. I’ve never played organized football, at any level, so I can’t comment on that. Nor am I here to defend what Incognito said or say it makes sense within the context of some sort of “tough love” program to mold Martin. Having read the transcripts of the voicemail and texts, I’d have never said those things even in jest. Nor am I here to defend some sort of macho ideal of what a football player should be.

The issue, which Phillips and so many media yakking heads continually gloss over, is whether Martin’s reaction, however genuine, was appropriate to the stimulus that prompted it, given what we as a society expect from adults of Martin’s age. Phillips and others cannot see to this point – to this class of person (which tends to be liberal), there is no such thing as how a person ought to feel, there is only how they do feel. And if how they feel is genuine, however irrational, then it needs to be “honored” and coddled.

A society cannot long survive in the complete absence of expectations about behavior in response to stimuli. If no one can ever say, “Hey man, you need to throttle it back, as a grown adult you should be able to handle this,” without themselves being the bad guy in the situation, we may as well all pack it up and go home. We had a nice run, America, time to let someone else have a try.

And it’s perfectly appropriate to say, as New York Giants offensive lineman Antrel Rolle did, that Incognito’s actions were deplorable, while at the same time recognizing that as an adult, people are always going to try to push your boundaries, and your reaction to that can’t always be to capitulate and surrender. And in fact, when we see someone’s reaction that seems so out of bounds in terms of proportion to the stimuli that caused it, it’s definitely probative as to whether we believe the genuineness of the reaction, especially when contradictory evidence continues to surface indicating that Martin may not have been as upset about the text messages as he is now claiming at the time he received him, and given that Martin’s play on the field was roundly criticized before this incident ever occurred.

And yes, we should all be glad that if Martin was in the middle of a breakdown, he went to the hospital rather than getting a gun and shooting up the Dolphins’ locker room, as some have suggested. But does that mean that we can under no circumstances say, “Great, Jonathan, but maybe next time let’s work on some coping skills so you don’t have to go to the hospital next time you get a mean text message?” While we are busy burying the Dolphins’ organization for failure of oversight (over what two fully grown adults were doing over the privacy of a cell phone connection), can we at least ask whether Martin’s family, college, and high school coaches ought to have better prepared him to handle himself when someone upset him?

Then there's the NBA's "Green Initiative."   It's clear that the sports, a realm of human activity the focus of which is supposed to be refinement of certain abilities that enable one to win a particular game at ever-higher levels of competitiveness, has become, like music, like even much science education, fetile ground for the encroachment of the FHer agenda.  The personal is definitely now political.  Nothing is off limits in the realization of the overlords' vision of a completely leveled - and docile - society.