This week I saw yet another screed from a severely liberal news outlet put out yet another piece that tells other people what they are thinking – specifically, that the mascot and logo of the Cleveland Indians is 100% racist.
I can hardly put into words how thoroughly sick and tired I am of this garbage. You don’t hear as much about it with the Indians because the louder screams are about the Washington Redskins. But there’s plenty out there now dealing with the Indians because they are playing at a historic level (24 wins in 25 games as of this writing). Jonah Keri, a baseball writer for the CBS Sports website, and someone I used to respect, wrote a piece designed to bring down the hopeful spirit of Tribe fans, and lift the spirit of Dodgers fans, by writing that there is no correlation between playing especially hot or cold at the end of the regular season and winning the World Series. Keri exposes his own laziness and ego by using his own work for the Five Thirty-Eight website in 2014 as one of his sources. Throughout the piece, he referred to the Indians as the Cleveland Lindors. It was not necessarily a praise of All-World shortstop Francisco Lindor, but more of a reference to the late 1800s and early 1900s when a team’s new ownership would change the team name to something about themselves or one of their great players. Keri explained at the end of the article that the Cleveland team nickname and mascot “have more than run their course, so I will refer to them as the Cleveland Lindors from here on out.” I was very happy to see him excoriated in the comments section for injecting his personal politics into a baseball article.
Of course, I feel harder hit by this because the Indians are my favorite team. But I have been every bit as vociferous in defense of the Redskins, because I think the entire controversy is contrived and pointless. I also hate how these 2 franchises have been singled out. Their mascots are CARTOON CHARACTERS. They are not intended to be political statements about any particular people. But where is the outrage at other cartoon character mascots? Isn’t the Boston Celtics mascot racist against Irish people? How about Notre Dame? Try to imagine the fury if some university tried to call their sports team the Fighting Jews. What about all the sports teams named after animals? I’m sure PETA and the ASPCA can readily provide accounts of severe abuse of every animal that can be found in this country.
If that last paragraph sounded stupid, it’s because it is – just like the faux outrage over the Redskins and Indians. But why is there so much fuss about sports teams’ nicknames? It’s part of 2 more things I can’t stand about liberalism – group think and victimhood. It’s all a part of the liberal drive to further separate the political class from the rest of the citizens, and the people that make themselves part of that political class to rule over the citizens and enslave them.
Let’s start with group think. This is crucial to liberalism. The group is to be emphasized over the individual. In fact, the late Senator Ted Kennedy once said on the floor of the Senate that we need to be part of a “war against the individual.” To liberals, I am not James Edgar, I am a white male. My wife is not AnJanette Edgar, she is a black female. When you strip the individual out of the discussion, it is far easier to impose your will onto other people. You can claim, as Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson did, that “ALL white people have benefited from white privilege, and every white person needs to compensate minorities for the oppression and suppression minorities have been forced to live under for as long as we have been a nation.” Those who hold this mentality do not want to see a documentary of the West Virginia coal miners who have lived in abject poverty for many generations, who have never owned a home with indoor plumbing, who have never seen a doctor because they don’t even have $10 for an office co-pay, and who are either morbidly obese or on the brink of starvation from only being able to buy the very cheapest foods (often at convenience stores because there is no grocery store of any kind, let alone one that specializes in healthy foods), which are the worst for your health. My wife recently watched such a documentary and asked me questions about it, since my paternal grandmother’s family were West Virginians. You see that once you herd people into a group, you de-humanize them and can form your opinion of them based on a larger set of people and place your preferred demands on them. With regard to the sports team names, you can find a handful of Native Americans who do find the mascots offensive and declare that all Native Americans feel this way.
This goes hand-in-hand with victimhood. There are people out there making piles of money convincing people that they are victims and somebody owes them money. These people claim to be champions for the victims and will stop at nothing to get them what they deserve – for a considerable fee, of course. Do you know who goes out and forces other people to do things and keep most of the money in his own pocket? A pimp. That’s what people like Jesse Jackson, the aforementioned Dyson, and Al Sharpton really are. They go out into the world every day looking for victims, and if they don’t find any, they invent situations for people to be victims. They stir people up to fight one another, and bring the spotlight onto themselves as the ones fighting for the victims. And America has bought into it. These 3 that I mentioned, plus many others, have achieved for themselves prestigious positions that pay very big salaries, and have done virtually nothing for those they claim to champion. Sometimes they literally make stuff up out of thin air. After the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson MO, Sharpton went around making speeches about the Ferguson police, insinuating there was a full but unwritten campaign to kill as many black men as possible. This caught on and spread to the entire country. Please note this is not my attempt to dismiss police brutality or the idea that minorities have been getting killed based on pre-conceived prejudices rather than hard evidence that the officers’ lives were truly in danger. There is no doubt that such killings are occurring, and it needs to stop. But the notion that a police department in a civilized society is deliberately working to eliminate a group of people from existence is quite far-fetched. (I imagine there are some small towns in the deep South that do have such campaigns, and those towns are not civilized and the leaders of such campaigns should be executed, very slowly and painfully.) He took a tragic situation and exaggerated it into a nationwide attack on a group of people. This marginalizes the existence of true victims, and made him more famous, and got his show more viewers and his network’s website more mouse clicks. But it didn’t do a damn thing to help Michael Brown’s loved ones.
Another side effect of this group think and victimhood is the massive egos it creates in those that ascribe to them. Once you de-humanize people to force your beliefs onto them, and put yourself on a pedestal as a champion of the downtrodden, you can develop a god complex. By forcing knuckle-dragging Neanderthals to adopt your “enlightened” views and extorting money from certain interests, you start to believe you are a higher life form. Some knucklehead in Washington DC spearheading a protest movement against the Redskins nickname was challenged that not all Native Americans felt the same way – that in fact, there is a high school on a reservation in New Mexico that calls its sports teams Redskins. The knucklehead responded, “we just need to educate them.” You see what she did there? The Redskins nickname is racist, and the people on this reservation are too stupid to know it, and they will change their mind once they are “educated.”
I will never be on board with philosophies like these. People that are of
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