Oh, freedom!

The way it’s supposed to be

WHAT A mess the National Football League has got itself into. Along with the nation, considering the league’s great fan base. Last week, including last Monday night, a couple of hundred athletes sat out the national anthem, sinking to their knees, raising their fists, and generally showing their displeasure with the state of things, the president of the United States, their country’s racial history and/or life in general.

Before the prime-time game Monday, Arkansas’ own Jerry Jones—owner of the Dallas Cowboys—went one better. He took his team to the middle of the field before the anthem, locked arms and dropped to one knee to show support for the protesters, then all stood for the anthem. Which once again shows you that Jerry Jones is not only a master showman, but one of the smartest owners in the National Football League. He and his players somehow showed solidarity with the league, but showed respect for the country as well. Talk about having your cake and eating it, too.

As is his wont, the country’s tweeter-in-chief went where any other president would not have, and probably did more harm than good to his cause. Which is also his wont. President Trump had come out days before to urge football fans to boycott games and demanded the teams’ owners fire those professional athletes who participated in these demonstrations.

First, what a contrast with the way any well-ordered dictatorship would do business! This is still a free, not to say rambunctious, country. After you’ve read the paper this morning, Gentle Reader will probably be subjected to it all over again as the games start.

So relax and relish this spectacle—if you don’t mind the prospect of all these hefty, well-toned professional athletes risking concussions on the field that may leave them punch-drunk and permanently harmed later in life. So much for showbiz’s cardinal rule: Give ’em a happy ending every time. At least since democracy was born in ancient Athens, the Games have been an inherent, inseparable part of Western civilization, such as it is.

But these modern games are not so much a Greek but Roman spectacle, like the revolt of the gladiators that centered around the Colosseum, whose husk still stands as a tribute to man’s appetite for blood sports. This has “nothing to do with race,” The Hon. Donald Trump assured a restive population of sports fans. “This has to do with respect for our country,” a virtue he regularly confuses with respect for himself in his ever fitful imagination. Anybody with eyes to see and a mind to think for himself knows better, or certainly should.

But who’s to say our current president can’t unite the country despite the workings of his all-too-active ego? After all, someone who can unite the National Football League’s ever-feuding owners and its players should find it a cinch to unite the nation. But this time the current president has lost the support of the New England Patriots’ savvy Robert Kraft, who felt he had to join the critics of the president on this divisive issue.

And when you’ve lost Robert Kraft, you’ve lost someone who commands respect on the gridiron and off. That must have stung—if anything can still sting Donald Trump through all the layers of protective ego he wears like a suit of armor. “I like Bob very much,” said the president. “He’s my friend. He gave me a Super Bowl ring a month ago. So he’s a good friend of mine and I want him to do what he wants to do.” But at the same time the president was insisting on doing what he wanted to do, even to his own detriment. For if the president hadn’t said a word at his campaign-style rally about the protests before NFL games, if he somehow could have convinced himself only this once to pass by a hot-button issue without commenting, if he could have gone against everything in his constitution and somehow tiptoed quietly by this controversy, there wouldn’t be near this much attention paid to the matter, and probably only one or two football players actually kneeling. This president couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and now he has them kneeling in the aisles. Way to go, boss.

AGOOD team player himself, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin tried to downplay this whole brouhaha as just another labor dispute, demonstrating that the business of America remains business. Mr. Mnuchin said the players can “have the First Amendment off the field.” But— and you knew there would be a but— the NFL is no debating contest. “This is a job.” So much for the God-given right of any American to look his boss in the eye and tell him to go to hell when it suits him. And it clearly suited a lot of these players.

Arkansas’ Mike Huckabee, a preacher as well as a politician, had to put his oar in, too. The former governor and current commentator was heard from, judging the players and instructing them on how to pray: “I wish that some of these players who get on one knee would get on both knees and thank God they live in the United States.” How does he know they don’t? And what would be the point of their thanking God for their freedom if they couldn’t exercise it by demonstrating their convictions? The Rev. Mr. Huckabee would have done better not to judge lest he be judged.

Anybody trying to make sense of this mess needn’t try too hard. For it’s just the American people mixing politics and sports again, and winding up all over the field and even in the bleachers. Which is just how it’s supposed to be in this still free country.