At the top of our society is a Brahmin caste of an elect in possession of prestigious degrees. Their high status is drawn from their educations, but the claim can only have legitimacy if their many years of formal instruction truly enlightened. The evidence for that is weakening by the day. Instead, these paragons were marinated in a hot house of radical ideology. It was political activism masquerading as scholarship. Still, off they go to fill positions of power and influence in our culture. They’re everywhere.
Prime example: professional sports, or Big Sports, Inc. An aristocracy of athletic talent earning six figures, sometimes seven, eight, or nine, is managed by a metropolitan administrative apparatus of people marked by paper credentials. It’s an insular social caste far removed from the fan base that is not so well-endowed with these modern markers of prestige. The interests, tastes, social norms, and biases of this caste in the clouds escapes serious cross-examination due to uniform social reinforcement. Nearly everybody around them thinks the same way. It’s the dumb lacking any self-awareness of their dumbness.
How else can the sloganeering of campus neo-Marxists seep onto the helmets of athletes with astronomical salaries, the normal expression of patriotic unity in opening ceremonies be debased by overt racial anthems, and the change of venue of a long-scheduled all-star game after the wailing of small-minded activists be realized? Radicalism becomes fashionable when there’s no competing voices.
Nothing escapes infection including the on-field attire. The NFL has an approved list of slogans for their helmets that includes “Stop Hate”, “End Racism”, and “Black Lives Matter”, all of them taken from people who previously chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon”. We know from where the adoption of extremist slogans come. It comes from people whose agenda exceeds the simple and generic meaning of the words. “Stop Hate”? What hate? Do they mean the garden variety of hate exhibited in domestic abuse, or the kind shown by a thief pistol-whipping a store clerk for resisting, or a jihadist taking synagogue worshippers hostage? I think not. The whole “Stop Hate” gambit became a cause because a viral video of an abusive cop was exploited as evidence of a systemic racial hatred. In point of fact, it was a singular incident of a bad cop, not proof of the KKK in blue.
It says more about our time’s hyper-communicability of bad behavior to every corner of the planet, whereas before it would be put in the context of a local incident to be handled locally.
“End Racism”? What racism? Widespread racial animus shows up in no respectable poll. In fact, whatever it is, it’s declining and widely condemned as shameful. So, where’s the “racism” that needs to be “ended”? Instead, a revolutionary agenda is at work. Cutting to the quick, our new fashionable revolutionary cadre want to end “acting white”, the Enlightenment, rationality, math, the scientific method, the constitutional order, anything that they assert stands in the way perfect categorical equality. This is the “racism” that they’re trying to “end”. Of course, none of this is achievable without a totalitarian state. That’s how you really kill the Enlightenment. Mao or Che would be proud.
As for “Black Lives Matter”, it came into vogue as if people needed to be reminded of the obvious: black lives do matter. Though, try saying “All lives matter”, the essence of the Gospels, and see how quickly the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department and Twitter mob pounce. All lives don’t matter to the chic radicals because they are consumed by the oppressor/oppressed shtick of Karl Marx and his later kindred spirits, of which there are many in the country’s thousands of faculty lounges. Things don’t turn out equal in racial enumerations, so the egregious non sequitur “use racism to combat racism” – in the immortal words of the high priest of Anti-Racism, Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers) – becomes the latest slogan to be turned into policy preference. Until the numbers come out equal, ALL lives don’t matter in this sewer of the mind.
Look to the knit caps worn by people on the sidelines. Prominently stitched is the word “Equity”. Just yesterday, “equity” was consonant with justice. Today, it’s consonant with racial vengeance. It’s back to Kendi’s bunk of “use racism to end racism”. That’s right, enact cash payouts for being black (reparations). Hiring, promotions, and admissions should place race as the topmost criteria. If one race shows up too prominently in the crime stats, redefine crime, end bail, and avoid prosecutions. If you haven’t enough miscreants of other racial categories in the prosecutor’s hopper, invent them in campaigns to ferret out “white supremacy” as the new “domestic terrorism”, but define it broadly so you can bag your political opponents.
Why is it that “equity” crusades all too often stray into the ugliest despotism?
We can’t even watch a football game without getting a steady diet of the politicized word salad. I can’t think of my San Francisco 49ers without Colin Kaepernick and the kneeling craze crossing my mind. Ditto for the San Francisco Giants. Taking it further, San Francisco is more aptly “San Fransicko” (Michael Schellenberger’s book of the same title). The city’s muddied reputation proceeds all. Ditto for California.
And corporate-boardroom NFL parades across our TV screens BLM/Antifa slogans. It’s just one big “Meh”. No enthusiasm and don’t care. I tried to watch 49ers/Cowboys and Rams/Cardinals but, once again, “Meh”. Time to switch to Netflix.
P.S.: The politicization of professional associations is next.
RogerG
