The Real Point of the Redskins Name Controversy

The completely contrived "conversation" over the supposedly offensive Washington Redskins name is yet another lesson for the American citizenry and the white males who, awkwardly, still for the moment make up a great proportion of the population. That the lesson is being misrepresented by a complicit media is no surprise yet deep down the average (read: white) male sports fan knows what is really going on. For he has experienced this lesson in countless ways since childhood.

Though 79 percent of Americans have no problem whatsoever with the Redskins name, President Obama has seen fit to wade into this "issue",  lapdog media "critics" who make a comfortable living playing their role in the corrupt Washington charade present their ridiculous "solutions" and assorted fringe characters chime in on either side.

All the while the white male sports viewer grits his teeth and tries to focus on what he really cares about - the game itself. And he is well aware that this is getting harder and harder to do with each passing year.

Whether sports media behemoth ESPN is endlessly championing fringe NBA players as homosexual heroes or professional sports leagues are constantly beating the drum of Hispanic Heritage Month, Black History Month and Disabled Chipmunk Month (I may have made that last one up; then again, the NHL may indeed have celebrated that -- it's all such a blur), the white male viewer knows that these are not authentic celebrations of any individual group. He knows that the real purpose of these exercises is aimed at him.

It's the old captive audience weapon that the cultural liberal bludgeons Americans with. Liberals know they cannot win people over to their side by the merits of their arguments, for their divisive, unnatural and illogical arguments are comprehensively without merit. Thus they seek to impose their will. And since we are a supposedly free society, they must find ways to force themselves on people who have no way to simply walk away from them, i.e., the captive audience.

No American has been as beat down by this ugly stick as the white male. From an early age, he was forced to attend his parents' church and was exposed to an endless prattle of effeminate pap that he could only sit and endure, knowing he would quickly drop it all once he was old enough to make his own decisions. He was forced to attend schools where he was exposed like a lab rat to all the fashionable feminist theories of his day and told that the history of people like himself was permeated with evil. He stuck it out in pursuit of the diploma and then the degree, knowing that one day he could walk away from what he was now trapped into enduring.

Of course I know all this because I experienced it personally. One example of many: I will never forget the resentment I felt at my college freshman World Geography class that I only took to fulfill a requirement for my major curriculum. I wouldn't have even taken the class if I had my druthers, and yet, though it was a geography class, I was taught as fact (on the final exam, give the answer they want or your grade suffers) loaded lunacies such as "abortion is the oldest form of birth control in world history" and "Malthusian population control is essential for world survival." The tired bias made not a dent on me. The feeling of total exasperation at being forced to put up with this hollow propaganda - at my own rather costly expense - when all I was trying to do was satisfy a small requirement on the way to my degree sticks with me to this day. Not as something unique but as yet another of those moments that was forced on me against my will. I guess I just didn't see it coming in an introductory geography class. I guess I should have.

And then we white males became adults and saw that there were new ways designed to always keep us stuck in the captive audience. At work, we are subjected to mindless Human Resources campaigns  on diversity, workplace sensitivity and the like. That it is all so unconvincing is not the point at all. The real lesson is loud and clear: You will not be able to break away. From cradle to grave, we are going to invade your personal space and impose our worldview upon you.

Which takes us to the one diversion many white males love most: sports. All we want to do is watch the games we have loved for as long as we can remember and enjoy them. It's true that nobody is making us watch, yet as men we're hardwired to do so.

And here as well those same feelings of having something forced on us against our will resurface again and again in countless ways. Liberals really don't understand the anger white male sports fans feel at having mediocre black quarterbacks forced down our throats by the media hype machine. We want sports to be a meritocracy. We see how our modern society champions incompetence in the name of diversity and we would like to be free of this boring tyranny on the playing field, if nowhere else. It should be cut and dry: Either you can play or you can't.

Yet an endless number of "athletic" (read: black) pro quarterbacks have been foisted upon us. They have up to this point without exception been heralded as elite game changers. They have also up to this point without exception been nothing but mediocre. It's not like we're not going to notice these two things, you know. It's simply a fact of the position that pro quarterbacks who stay in the pocket and look off a DB before hitting a receiver or check off to their second or third receiving option are more successful than "athletic" (read: black) quarterbacks who run when their first receiving option is not open, even when a wide-open receiver is streaking towards the goal line. It is also more entertaining to watch a QB find the third receiver and thread a pass to him to move the team down the field than it is to watch an "athlete" take the snap, dart around end and run, run, run.

The notion that wanting to see the pro quarterback position played at its highest level is a sign of racism is beyond ludicrous. We are talking about the same fans here who accept and rabidly cheer on an NFL that is 70 percent black on the field and an NBA that is 80 percent black on the hardcourt. We don't want Vince Young quarterbacking a team for the same reason that we don't want Adam Morrison in an NBA starting lineup.

The disgruntlement with the nonstop media hype of black quarterbacks is really a sign of white male fans resenting the feeling that they are being played again, just as they have been played over and over again in all other aspects of their lives.

And that is what this fake Redskins name controversy is really all about. The fact that we are a captive audience is being driven home one more time. The liberal is imposing his perspective yet again. He's bought the games - he televises them, he owns the teams, he runs the leagues. If you want to watch, sit in your seat, absorb the propaganda and acquiesce as they take something else away from you.

Just like you once did in church. Just like you once did in school. Just like you do now at work.

The liberal is spelling it out: There is no private space for you, white American male. We will come into the things you love and turn them on you.

It comes with losing a cultural war.

Two Faces of Conditioning

They proved that this could be turned into that in the minds of millions of Americans in the blink of an eye merely to sell more of a product that kills its consumers. Doesn't matter. Content simply does not matter. Image is everything.

If they could so deftly shape masculine and feminine expression in the name of a duplicitous and deadly commerce why couldn't they also have the ability to reshape these things to suit a revolutionary aim to destroy a cohesive society?

If we could stop seeing these issues as liberal vs. conservative and red state vs. blue state and instead see the manipulation as the blatant and cheap marketing scam that it is, perhaps we can save this culture.

A century of oversized capitalism's fraudulent social programming has made a mass-cultivated populace so pliable that it passively accepts the Cultural Marxist assault on traditional human norms.

Predatory capitalism and Marxist collectivism: Two sides of the same tyrannical materialist coin.

Our demise as a free people has literally been sold to us like Coca-Cola.

Bob Crane and the Color Orange

I believe that at its heart "Auto Focus", the 2002 Paul Schrader film on the murder of "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane, is a very Catholic film. If you can separate the gratuitous nudity and strong sexual content from the overall story what you get is a devastatingly spot-on morality tale about the dangers of casually drifting into a life of error, or, as Catholics would call it, sin.

Crane, played remarkably well by Greg Kinnear, is above all a nice guy. Early in the film he winningly chirps, "Eddie Cantor once told me likeability is 90 percent of the battle. And we was right!"

Note he is not talking about being a good guy. He is talking about being a likeable guy. Big difference.

Crane's "likeability" opened the door to temptation as he slowly but surely threw himself into the near occasion of sin. "Auto Focus" unflinchingly documents this process and its consequences.

It's a fine film and I recommend it highly to those who can get past the sexual vulgarity. This description seems particularly spot-on:

This is a remarkable, delicate and disturbing film.
With its depictions of 60's and 70's lifestyles and
fashions and its brilliantly disquieting atmospheric
shift between the decades, the film is unquestionably
one of the most well thought-out period pieces to be
seen. But this is just the brilliant visuals of the
film. They underscore a far more interesting and
darkened theme. As an essay on man's descent into his
own personal hell of sexual addiction and societal
abnormality, "Auto Focus" perhaps stands alone. There
is a layer here, a seemingly nearly translucent one,
that is peeled back to expose something that lurks not
deep within us, but just beneath the polite exteriors
of our public personas. Given fame and money and a
partner in crime, Bob Crane wallows in his addiction
to sex, pornography and women.

The way the director contrasts the bright polyester leisure suit decor with the tired, dirty soul of America in the 1970s is nothing short of brilliant. The last half-hour is a visceral descent into personal darkness as revealed by the main character himself and the scenery that surrounds him.

As Crane is enveloped in this secular squalor, he seems to dwell on where he's ended up and how he got there. And he makes a rather cryptic statement about the meaning of the word orange.

This has always struck me as a comment of some importance.

As this interview with director Schrader reveals, the dialogue did in fact come from the real Bob Crane himself:

There’s a very interesting conversation that Crane has with his son towards the end about the word “orange.”

That came from Bob Jr., who overheard his father having that conversation with another man late into his life, when [he] didn’t quite understand what had happened. But Bob Jr. took it to mean that his father was at a point where he was trying to figure out some real basic sorts of things. That things had hidden meanings. So I used it there.

Here's the quote from the film:

The color orange. But what is it, really?

The color?

Yeah. But that's it. Just tell me, what is orange?

I don't know.

That's my point. You take it for granted. You don't think about stuff like that.

I believe I understand what Crane was getting at, and I'll tell you why.

Let's start by referring to one of my favorite scenes in literary fiction. It is from Walker Percy's 1977 novel "Lancelot". The book is set in corruption-plagued Louisiana and at one point Percy gives the best description of the very moment a childhood ends that I've ever read:

I can only compare it to the time I discovered my father was a crook. It was a long time ago. I was a child. My mother was going shopping and had sent me up to swipe some of his pocket money from his sock drawer. For a couple of years he had had a political appointment with the insurance commission with a "reform" administration. He had been accused of being in charge of parceling out the state's insurance business and taking kickbacks from local agencies. Of course we knew that could not be true. We were an honorable family. We had nothing to do with the Longs. We may have lost our money, Belle Isle was half in ruins, but we were an honorable family with an honorable name. Much talk of dirty politics. The honor of the family won out and even the opposition gave up. So I opened up the sock drawer and found not ten dollars but ten thousand dollars stuck carelessly under some argyle socks.

[. . .]

At the sight of the money, a new world opened up for me. The old world fell  to pieces - not necessarily a bad thing. Ah, then, things are not so nice, I said to myself. But you see, that was an important discovery. For if there is one thing harder to bear than dishonor, it is honor, being brought up in a family where everything is so nice, perfect in fact, except of course oneself.

OK, so his dad was a crook and most of us can't relate to that, but what a riveting way to describe that moment in a child's life when he leaves one world and enters another. I remember my Ah! moment myself and I can still feel today how total the change in my perception was. It was the first out-of-the-norm bad thing to happen in our family, something all children unavoidably experience one way or the other, be it through the death of a relative or whatever. I distinctly recall feeling before the traumatic event that the world was specifically created just for me. Grass was green just so I could run through the green grass. The branches of the trees in our backyard were shaped as they were just so I could climb them. And so on. And then this thing happened. And in an instant the feeling that the world was made just for me and my personal enjoyment was gone, never to return. I didn't lose anything real or tangible, rather I lost an illusion. A pleasant, innocent illusion to be sure, but one I had to lose eventually.

Now imagine losing your world as an adult. Not just an illusion, but your very world itself.

Which brings us back to Bob Crane. Locked into a personal prison of sexual excess and compulsion, I believe Crane had an adult Ah! moment and it is reflected in his thoughts on the word "orange." Just as small children have a strong sense of the proper order of things, so too does a man. And here is a man who found himself so trapped in error that he had seen everything in his life fall out of place. He wants his world to have the natural order we all take for granted with the word "orange". His loss is no illusion. It's tangible. It's real. And it is caused by his own actions.

This is what sin does to us. When we sin things fall out of place. If we seek repentance and vow to amend our ways, we can restore our world and its natural sense of order once again.

But the incorrigble sinner will discover to his horror that after a while his whole world will spiral away from him. I recall times when my friends and I would hear about the perpetrator of some particularly heinous crime - a child molester, rapist, murderer, etc. - and wonder how he could do it. Not the crime itself, as we all know that human beings are capable of the most depraved behavior imaginable. No, what we wondered was how he could wake up the next day and tie his shoes, comb his hair, brush his teeth. You know... how could he do all those normal little things that regular folks do every day?

Well, Bob Crane answered that question. He can't. Not like he did before. The same applies to any kind of persistent grave sinner. The man who becomes consumed by his sins finds his world so knocked off its axis that he loses the simple certainty in life that can be found in the word "orange." You can't just take such things in life for granted. They don't just fall into place. That's all gone.

This is how completely destructive unrepentant serious sin is to a human life. This is how fully it warps the sinner's very existence. This is how utterly lost the man steeped in sin is.

Orange.

It's really a very profound and quite shattering observation.

A Modern American Love Story

A memorable episode of the CBS crime documentary "48 Hours" from 2008.

[Note: SPOILER ALERT. Watch the episode first if you don't want it all given away.]

It starts with this typical-looking modern American woman talking about how her New York stock trader husband was her perfect guy, how when they started dating he would surprise her by giving her a whole outfit of expensive designer clothes - dress, shoes, purse - and saying, "Get dressed, we're going to [some ridiculously expensive Manhattan spot]."

He really was the sweetest guy, her "knight in shining armor."

They got married and moved into a "really nice" exclusive Manhattan suburb. She never called it rich or tony, just "really nice."

And he was just the greatest husband. She stayed at home with the kids while he would go and work the floor of the Exchange all day. And as soon as he got home he would not hesitate to change the baby's diapers.

He always gave her fistfuls of cash so she'd have some spending money and they just lived the perfect dream existence.

Then one day the dream exploded.

The beat-down, balding puddle of masculinity lost his job on the Exchange, but couldn't bear to face his wife and tell her because he was always "the great provider" who gave her all these things.

So he pretended to go to work each day as normal, and started scouting out banks to rob.

The first bank he robs he was "scared out of his mind." But he wanted to be the good provider, so he did it.

Got $16,000 or something like that.

Used it to pay:

a. the mortgage on the fancy house in the "really nice" suburb.

b. the bills on the fancy house.

c. the spending money for the wife.

He said it just like that. Where did all that money go so fast? Those three things. Like it was the most normal way in the world to spend sixteen grand.

He robbed like 9 more banks or something before getting caught. And the wife was saying to the camera, "I have no idea why this happened. I never saw this coming in a million years."

He goes to jail and she divorces her "knight in shining armor" because "I need to move forward with my life."

End of a Modern American Love Story.

.... BUT....

On to Part Two: Cashing in on his ridiculous, irresponsible and destructive behavior:

Crimes and Secrets of a Desperate Dad, Why a Wall Street Trader Became the Long Island Bank Robber is available at:

http://www.scribbcrib.com 

It’s available on Pdf and Mobi format formats and will be on Amazon in April.

It tells the true story of why and how a good guy made a bad mistake.

Steve

It's bad enough that this man's moral compass was so warped that he valued material possessions and the pursuit of money more than his own freedom and well-being. But now, after serving time in prison and having his life turned completely upside-down, he responds by.... chasing after the money once again. 

Which just goes to show you that some people never even attempt to gain a true understanding of themselves and the behavior that holds them back in life. You can't put a dollar amount on integrity, Steve. And if you had some of that, you might just find yourself a woman who won't see you as nothing but a cash cow to be milked 'til your very manhood is dry.

He Gave His Life For You

A touching paen to a remarkable man from his devoted son:

Nearly 50 years after leaving the University of Pennsylvania for Vietnam, Lt. Col. Mortimer Lenane O'Connor will receive a posthumous Ph.D. today in a ceremony honoring academic achievement and sacrifice on the field of battle.

My father, who set aside his dissertation to lead soldiers in war, will be included in the Class of 1968, the year he would most likely have completed his doctorate had fate not intervened.

Indeed, Lt. Col. O'Connor seemed the epitome of the warrior as the complete man:

In 1958, my dad was sent to Penn to study English in preparation for teaching at West Point. In his year at Penn, the young officer set aside the Cold War for Chaucer and refined his taste for poetry and prose.

After that teaching assignment and a year in Korea, my dad returned to Penn - living in Willingboro with Betsy and the six kids, teaching at Temple, and plodding through Ph.D. course work and research.

He studied German vocabulary flash cards late into the night, long after reading Dickens to us on the living room couch. My mother typed up his papers on a battered Smith-Corona.

He took some of the boys on summer bivouac with ROTC troops to Indiantown Gap. Quoting T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men," he would intone, "This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends," as we hand-loaded rounds into mortar tubes and watched them arc into the summer sky.

An earnest regard for the arts and a grounded sense of history marked this man:

By the time ground troops were committed to Vietnam, my father's dissertation on "The Siege of Constantinople," a Henry Nevil Payne allegory of intrigue in the quasi-Catholic court of Charles II, was near completion. At its heart, the heroic tragedy was about doomed royal brothers fending off political and religious enemies. The parallel between 15th-century Byzantium and 17th-century England also eerily mirrored developments in Vietnam, where, as my father began his thesis, a Catholic regime run by brothers faced a Buddhist insurgency and treachery in the ranks.

He fell in battle, but his keen intellect would not be forgotten:

The dissertation sat unread in a battered briefcase for more than 40 years, set aside like so much of the past. Disinterred at last, it was sent to Penn, where the graduate English faculty recommended that the warrior be crowned a scholar.

No degree can change the lost years of a father's absence. But in literature, as in life, it can bring an unfinished story to a graceful conclusion. Ask Dr. O'Connor as he passes by in the Penn procession - the ghost with a sheepskin scroll and an M-16.

This man had a large and thriving family, a fertile mind valued by an Ivy League university and an endlessly bright future and he sacrificed it all for his country. We must always remember men like Dr. O'Connor as we face this generation's battle to preserve our freedom, which is threatened from forces within our very gates.

A heartfelt thank you to son O'Connor for reminding us of the Price of Liberty.

Long-dead Celebrities Make Great Pro-Homosexual Advocates

ESPN.com is running a typically long-winded "news article" filled with nothing but pure speculation and total conjecture in an effort to make devout Catholic and NFL coaching legend Vince Lombardi a patron saint of the homosexual movement:

Actually, Vincent Thomas Lombardi treated his Green Bay Packers and Washington Redskins as anything but [dogs]. No, winning wasn't everything, or the only thing. In Lombardi's playbook, winning placed a distant second to simple human decency.

In 1969, the year before his death, the only year he coached the Redskins, Lombardi worked with at least five gay men -- three players and two front-office executives, including David Slattery, who would come out in 1993. In his defining biography, "When Pride Still Mattered," author David Maraniss described the scene of Lombardi charging an assistant to work with one of the gay players, a struggling back named Ray McDonald. "And if I hear one of you people make reference to his manhood," Lombardi is quoted as saying, "you'll be out of here before your ass hits the ground."

Of course the homosexuals have a rich history of "outing" long-dead celebrities and historical figures, including Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln and James Dean. So this is standard operating procedure. It's much easier to assert the "fact" that somebody is just like you or unequivocally agrees with your personal views when that person is no long around to correct you on the matter.

I suppose the fact that Lombardi famously emphasized a man's sense of responsibility to his God, his family and his football team, in that order, does nothing to dissuade these molders of our new cultural reality.

I recall reading a book about Lombardi's Packers and the notoriously tough coach is running a practice or a training camp exercise or something and he walks up to a glassy-eyed Marv Fleming, the starting tight end, gets right in his face and accusingly asks, "Have you been masturbating mister?"

It's a comical anecdote that highlights Lombardi's ultra-serious approach to football. I took it to mean he thought something was off about poor Marv. Turns out ole Vince was extremely supportive of his lifestyle choice and wanted to give him a hug. Who knew?

If You Think the Name of This Blog is Ridiculous...

... You obviously haven't read this inflammatory piece at Salon.com titled "Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American":

“White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation,” writes author Tim Wise. “White privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Dublin. And if he’s an Italian-American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.”

Because of these undeniable and pervasive double standards, the specific identity of the Boston Marathon bomber (or bombers) is not some minor detail — it will almost certainly dictate what kind of governmental, political and societal response we see in the coming weeks. That means regardless of your particular party affiliation, if you care about everything from stopping war to reducing the defense budget to protecting civil liberties to passing immigration reform, you should hope the bomber was a white domestic terrorist. Why? Because only in that case will privilege work to prevent the Boston attack from potentially undermining progress on those other issues.

Let us count the ways in which this shows, yet again, that you can say things about white males in the Amerika of today that you simply cannot say about any other identifiable group of people:

1. Imagine a headline to a local crime story, "Let's hope the rapist was a black man"

2. Or how about this on the latest Wall Street scandal, "Let's hope the embezzler was a Jew"?

3. Or how about, "Let's hope the man who murdered his daughter was a Muslim committing an honor killing"?

To deliberately seek out a group of individuals after a hideous crime is committed and dearly wish that they be the perpetrators just because it would endorse your personal beliefs/biases used to be the very essence of bigotry in this nation. Today it is clever liberal nuance used to spotlight the higher intellectual point: White males are the cause of all problems in the world.

Have no illusions, my fellow white male Americans: You ARE a target.

Get used to it, because things are only going to get worse.

Movies For Men - On the Passing of Roger Ebert

A time and a "career" encapsulated in one moment:

I had been feeling a tad guilty for loathing Ebert in lieu of his recent death.

This is just the tonic I needed.

You want to be nice because the dude just died but then you realize he had real influence and used it to promote excrement.

The guy did damage. Cheerleading for all the crap that has led to the emasculated "films" we are inundated with today.

Perfectly captured here:

- Boring, full of itself beyond all hell psychobabble Platoon is an unquestioned masterpiece. That goes without saying.

- Full Metal Jacket, the movie that has really lasted the test of time, is an insipid cliche.

Of course, it is laughable today to think that Oliver Stone even belongs in the same conversation as Stanley Kubrick but you could have a field day going back and reading and watching critics like this go on and on about similar movies in the '70s and '80s.

They were legion.

Platoon quote:

"I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. And the enemy... was in us."

BRILLIANT! AMAZING! OSCAR! OSCAR!

Full Metal Jacket quote:

"The Marine Corps does not want robots. The Marine Corps wants killers."

JOHN WAYNE CRAP! B-MOVIE BRAVADO!

One has to only recall the tyranny of all that Alan Alda, wimpy, "thoughtful" BS that came out back then to understand my lack of compassion for Ebert. It was suffocating and it led directly to the estrogen-soaked movies of 2013 America.

Despite the universal praise it received when it came out, I didn't see Platoon until years later yet all along I instinctively knew that it was not worth my time.

And when I finally got around to watching it the only thing that surprised me was that it was even worse than I thought it would be.

This really strikes a nerve.

The very ones who were presented to us in the pre-Internet age as "sensitive minds" pushing their "intelligent" films were the dumbest SOBs by far.

And the dumber they were, the more "enlightened" they became in the mainstream media machine of the day.

Poseurs, frauds and femmes.

They made a major contribution to the destruction of masculine film.

They will not be missed.