the Change I Wish to See

GW football doesn't exist (despite what the t-shirts at the bookstore say). There are many rumors as to why. Some say it was contractual, to guarantee the building of the Smith Center. Others say it's because Georgetown was upset that we'd finally have a chance at being better than it at something, and so we caved in to protect the "natural order of things," -- Georgetown's actual words -- when it threatened to put us on its basketball schedule.



Yet others say football teams add school spirit, and building classes of kids who care, about anything, certainly their school, would hurt GW's image and hence its recruiting with the "I'm too sexy for my Uggs - juicy-assed - collar-poppin'" Lawn Guyland apathetics crowd.



But after a night like tonight, where we sat right behind the end zone, knee-deep in student pride for a slow, dull-witted creature, it hit me: I can't feel my toes.



It was really, really cold. And I was soaking wet because some genius had spilled his entire Pepsi on my back and legs. The whole thing. It was like the dude behind the counter had put me directly under the soda fountain rather than a cup. He might as well have thrown ice in my eye. I looked like I had been in the trenches, with shin-deep soda stains on my jeans from wading through a caffeine river. He tried to help dry me off, but at that moment, it was the kind of help that doesn't stop you from wanting to punch him in the face. And through it all, there was this sopping bag o' douche a few rows ahead, who just could not let it go. Whether it was 2nd and 4, or 3rd and 19, he was screaming, "Gimme five [yards]." He yelled during timeouts. He yelled at halftime. He embarrassed his wife. He made me sad for his kids. He smelled like hobbit feet.



And it's that kind of "god, this sucks," "I should be anywhere but here" mentality that we are sorely missing. Because we would lose. We would lose hard. And we would lose interest if GW didn't put the game out of reach in 15 minutes or less. But we could be one in our failure. We could be nothing, together.



GW, the ball's in your hands.



Give us something new to complain about.





Sent via iPhone.

I use to think that if this country was just us
that we could build an overdue conception of justice,
but just us could never really combat injustice
'cause when power's in just us, it's just nuts.



For instance, Gary Sheffield sounds like a bigot:

"...You're going to see more black faces, but there ain't no English going to be coming out. … [It's about] being able to tell [Latin players] what to do -- being able to control them.

"Where I'm from, you can't control us. You might get a guy to do it that way for a while because he wants to benefit, but in the end, he is going to go back to being who he is. And that's a person that you're going to talk to with respect, you're going to talk to like a man."

Can I pull something reasonable out of that? Sure. I could tell you that what he really meant to say, is that profit-hungry MLB owners and officials capitalize on the struggles of Latino youth; that they dehumanize them, seeing Latinos as potentially cheaper labor to further a product rather than young men hungry for a chance. I could tell you that baseball's athlete-sourcing has taken a huge hit stateside due to the skyrocketing popularity of football and basketball. I might tell you it's been obvious for years that baseball has little interest in scouting young black men domestically. I could tell you that young black American men are more often misled by marketing featuring Carmelo Anthony, Michael Vick and Clinton Portis than they are influenced by ads featuring Ryan Howard and -- and actually it's hard to think of a commercial featuring a black American baseball player. I could tell you that these facts are all part of a larger, ongoing social wave towards more instantaneous gratification and away from the national "pastime."

I could, but I'm not going to do Sheffield's work for him. Gary Sheffield is a grown damn man. At what point do we stop being apologists and calling these people inarticulate? Our civic duty includes not just exercising our right to speak, but managing said exercise. Why isn't Sheffield expected to be able to deliver his message, if it indeed has been publicly misconstrued, accurately? Is it because he's an athlete? Is it because he's black? If he means something different than what he says, why are the listeners burdened with decoding? He said two things very clearly: Latino men are relatively easy to control and black American men are relatively rambunctious. Neither is flattering. More importantly, neither is even true.

The larger point here is that there is more than enough intrinsically devisive about our social fabric. The last thing we need is to turn black-brown relations on themselves by excusing a man who tries to hide behind the conditioning of his skin color to be as racist as those he claims to actually be critiquing.

The message, if so intended, that MLB's power structure is an illustration of a deeply-seeded socio-eco-political dilemma that operates to divide us, is critically engaging. It is a message that is too important to get lost between the lines. It has to be said, but it has to be said well.

Gary Sheffield sounds like a bigot. The fact that he's black makes it worse, not better.

First of all, it can't go without mention that I did indeed struggle over the title. I was so close to "A Man Without a Monkey." So close. And yes: I know what I just said, Ryan.


There have been two great things about Super Bowl commercials over the last two years.

One:

The realization that any average citizen can vanquish obnoxious, insistent-on-outshining-your-light tennis club members with the aid of the crime deterrent feature on your Sprint cell phone.  And, thank goodness, recent tests done by me on the foreheads of overzealous law students prove that 4 out of 5 jackasses feel pain and respond accordingly when pegged point-blank with a phone, regardless of who your carrier is (so cheer up Cingular, Verizon and T-Mobile owners).

Two:

The careerbuilder.com monkeys made me want to search for all sorts of jobs -- even for jobs I knew I was less qualified for than Bush is for a Nobel Peace Prize, even for jobs that if landed would somehow end up costing me more in relocation and stress than anything I could ever hope to see in return, even for jobs that would tarnish my family's good name...  It didn't matter.  Those ads were the best spots since that House Was Built Too Small.  There's just something so fulfilling about seeing past and present co-workers shrunken to fit into monkey suits and reenacting all the brainless, court-jester audition routines they subjected you to for way too long.

What did we get this year?  The Richard Roundtree Special: we got the shaft ladies and gentleman, the shaft.

I don't know when I was first disappointed last night, but I certainly was jarred into consciousness when careerbuilder.com blessed us with a grown man with a paper clamp affixed to his nipple. Then GM dropped an ad where a yellow, human-replacing, car-manufacturing robot leaves the factory and commits suicide, after a 2006 when at least 30,000 people were left reeling from GM layoffs and in a 2007 when more layoffs have been promised. (Oh wait: so the point of that commercial was the irony? Nope, still don't get it.)

I guess the Federline ad was ok.  But there were at least three problems.  First, it was actually Kevin Federline.  Second, if you've read my blog from the beginning, you'll understand why I'm horribly afraid his daydreamed "lyrics" will end up on a commercially successful album in the near future. And third, maybe it's just me, but I'm beginning to worry that all this "K-Fed anti-hype" is spiraling into control.

We've done this to Paris Hilton.  She started out as just a skinny rich girl. Then we unwittingly convinced her she was hot.  Then she was on magazine covers and catwalks.  Then she was in sex tapes.  Then she had her own TV show.  Then she released an album that 75,000 people bought in its first week (which I call the "Joe Dirt" theory: if you drop a pile of sh*t -- "a big ole hunk of butt release," that is -- from the sky, somebody will pick it up).  Then she was in sex tapes, again.  Then she became the joke people told on the way to her parties.  The point is that fame isn't a straight line; it's more like a sphere. And I don't know how we've done it, but we've somehow traveled by way of some twisted circle and made Federline famous for the very thing for which he had originally been infamous.

But right, the point.

I forgot to put a disclaimer at the beginning: I generally detest commercials.  They're usually about stuff I wouldn't buy even if I had the money Paris got for "not knowing" a sex tape had escaped her bedroom.  Or that money GM will save when the robots' union accepts pay cuts and doesn't fight for healthcare...  But it doesn't mean I wouldn't like to be surprised.  Geico does it almost every time.  And careerbuilder.com, with its glorious, glorious, laser-pointer-armed monkeys, had done it for an entire year.  If I don't see any monkeys next February, I'm... I'm... writing another entry ad execs will never see...

But it'll be so fierce. So. Fierce.

The guy who won this thing got 50k. That's 50. Thousand. Dollars. And if you saw my earlier post, you'll notice the extra heaping of irony for me. Apparently, the dude used a strategy, taboo inside the world of RPS, of tossing two papers in a row. His opponent opened with a rock and lost, and said there was no way he thought the guy would risk throwing paper back-to-back.

The 2000 election has nothing on this fraud. I want a rethrow. Yeah, I said it.

(Do I really have to include the "sports" tag?)