FOLIO
The National Football League has figured out its policy on the national anthem.
Namely, it’s in favor of it.
By God, no one will encroach on the sacred space of the anthem. And by no one, of course I mean the players—those doomed warriors, just one play from being in Ryan Shazier territory, who risk their lives colliding into each other while folks mainline liquor in the stands.
The policy, laid out by Commissioner Roger Goodell last week, is simple enough.
“Stand and show respect” for the anthem, which is to say, no kneeling or other performative gestures. Definitely don’t do something untoward, like making airplane noises during the Blue Angels flyover. Not only would that be a cryptic mode of social critique, odds are good that a swift Baker Acting would leave the game day roster one body short.
If one cannot commit to standing for the anthem, well, there’s a solution. Stay in the locker room and come out after that last note fades.
NFL clubs, meanwhile, have committed to “advance social justice,” as far as an aggressively branded social monolith is committed, by any means necessary, to reducing everything from Salute to Service on down to perspective-free, corporate-sponsored, lowest-common-denominator bilge can be.
On a day when an NBA club had to issue a statement about one of its players being tased and beaten down by cops as endemic of an ongoing social brutality, the NFL reached this great compromise.
And Jaguars’ owner Shad Khan? Khan, who’s been outspoken on issues ranging from the HRO to the JEA, and supported his team last year as they navigated the London protest and its aftermath, decided to play the historical moment soft.
My favorite sentence? The brilliant non-sequitur: “We all want the same thing, respect for our nation and our flag.”
Khan goes on to mention a “pledge to advancing social justice that will be absolute and stand the test of time”—the very thing I think about when I think about Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones and the rest of the gang.
It is nigh on impossible to reconcile the paradoxical emptiness of Khan’s statement.
It’s as if he finally realized that, whatever nuance he may feel exists in a situation, it’s useless to say it in Duval. Because any critique of systemic inequities, other than absolute blandishments and meek distillations of reforms made elsewhere years or decades ago, just zips over people’s heads.
A fun game for media types is to read the comments on the stories.
Oh, how we gnash our teeth in despair when we see which readers are engaged enough to type their responses. Sometimes they’re pedantic. Sometimes ill-informed. Sometimes libelous. [The sweet spot, of course, is the hat trick: the morphine drip that allows us to sleep, sometimes, into the night, before the fever dreams of staff cuts and penury (or PR work) wake us.]
But enough about fever dreams of the unconscious mind.
When we read the comment threads, we know who’s reading us. It’s not the readers we imagine finding our work when we first start out; it’s a different group altogether.
They have their biases. They have their needs from culture. They want to be reassured, amid a world of moral chaos, economic timelapse collapse and spiritual decay, that their beliefs can at least be affirmed through the commodification in which they engage and, ultimately, subsume their spirits.
In that context, Khan’s ambivalence makes sense. Give the people what they want. They can’t name a tenth of the nations where American troops kill and sometimes die. But that’s not patriotism. Patriotism is the collective experience of sentimental escapism that unanimous participation in the anthem ritual offers.
The same mouthbreathers who went to the stadium to protest kneeling, you can be certain, would do it again this year had the Jaguars not put some wins together. This is, as we know, a frontrunner town.
But Khan’s statement wasn’t about the past; it’s about the future.
We know city money will go into development around the Sports Complex. Once the District incentives are locked in for Mr. Rummell, and elections are over, there will be more flexibility.
Our policymakers, even the smart ones, still publicly say the pension problem has been “solved,” even as the debt is out there and growing, ahead of the half-cent tax kicking in. The rhetorical case to make the Complex look something like artist’s renditions will be made. There’ll be no disagreement.
So Khan has finished discussing the anthem and the flag. Business is about to pick up, and taxpayers will be footing at least half the bill. So no need, none at all, to be controversial.
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