TAMPA, Fla.- The pending death of American culture and politics by a million politically correct cuts should inevitably lead to one overarching question: Can the woke go back to sleep? Please.
The ridiculousness of the perpetual culture war migrated from politics and academia to infect sports long ago, but it grows worse. The Super Bowl only provided another example.
You might think that the same largely manufactured liberal ire that led Daniel Snyder to rename his Washington Football Team might have been directed at the Kansas Chiefs, who, as we saw Sunday night, would probably have acquitted themselves better against mousy college professors, sniveling millennial malcontents and untalented hack journalists than they did against Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
You’d be wrong. On the eve of their big win, it was Bucs-bashing time.
Brady had already endured his own personal taste of asinine thinking. A few days before the game a USA Today columnist said Brady should not be excused for his support for former President Donald Trump.
This, by the way, was based on a TV crew getting a shot of a MAGA hat in Brady’s locker more than five years ago. Yes, five years ago. Even before Trump became president.
This columnist went on to mock Brady for his “moral cowardice.” How? He refuses to take woke journalists’ bait and talks sports while avoiding questions about the political controversy of the moment. “Even Brady’s aversion to talking about politics or current events is itself a form of privilege,” she wrote.
And not just any privilege. But white privilege.
Perhaps Brady simply watched his buddy, former New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, get devoured by the wokeness.
Before the season Brees, citing the heroism of his grandfathers defending their nation during World War II, said he’d never go along with anyone who disrespected the American flag.
Yet Brees quickly backtracked, threw his grandfathers under the bus, and didn’t just apologize, but is probably still apologizing somewhere.
But instead of Brady or his teammates, The Washington Post, which led the charge to shame Snyder into making his franchise, the Washington Generics, took a swipe at an entire city – Tampa.
On Friday, Jamie L.H. Goodall, an alleged historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, penned a piece headlined The Buccaneers embody Tampa’s love of pirates. Is that a problem?”
No, for Tampa residents, it’s not. Come to Gasparilla and you’ll find how cool it is, actually.
But Goodall was unconvinced.
“The Buccaneers’ name and logo are a true reflection of the city hosting the game, trumpeting its close association with pirate legends, like José Gaspar, the namesake of an annual Tampa Festival,” Goodall wrote.
“Yet, while this celebration of piracy seems like innocent fun and pride in a local culture, there is danger in romanticizing ruthless cutthroats who created a crisis in world trade when they captured and plundered thousands of ships on Atlantic trade routes between the Americas, Africa, and Great Britain.”
“Why?” she continues. “Because it takes these murderous thieves who did terrible things — like locking women and children in a burning church — and makes them a symbol of freedom and adventure, erasing their wicked deeds from historical memory. These were men (and women) who willingly participated in murder, torture, and the brutal enslavement of Africans and Indigenous peoples.”
Goodall then gives us a lengthy biography of Gaspar, as well as the origin of the famous street festival named in his honor and the etymology of the word “buccaneer.” Goodall even admits that the event “was a way to bring the multiethnic population of Tampa together in celebration.”
But then we get to the meat of this particular diatribe:
“Pirates were known murderers who pillaged, raped, and plundered their way through the Caribbean. And they were well-known enslavers who dehumanized Africans and Indigenous people, selling them for profit,” she wrote.
“Perhaps time has dulled us to the atrocities committed by these 17th and 18th-century outlaws. Or perhaps it’s the fact that if pirates of the Golden Age were bloodthirsty, so too were the nations who opposed them. They willingly and purposefully massacred millions of African and Indigenous peoples in the name of colonization.”
“Pirates, then, are seen as romantic heroes — the underdogs fighting the establishment — whom historian Marcus Rediker refers to as proto-democratic, egalitarian and multicultural,” she concluded. “Should we celebrate their complicated legacy? It’s a question Tampa Bay has to contend with as we collectively contemplate other major sports mascots with dubious legacies, like their Super Bowl rivals in Kansas City.”
After crushing the Chiefs on Sunday in its own stadium, it seems the city will have little problem celebrating the viciously apolitical Brady and the Bucs’ legacy, just like it has no problem with a big street party attended by thousands who likely neither know nor care about nor can name Gaspar and his supposed misdeeds.
The irony of our visiting historian’s lecture is that Snyder’s football team, just like the Kansas City variety and others you could once find in Atlanta, Cleveland, and Chicago, sought to honor those indigenous people who courageously and heroically fought the “colonizers.”
How long before the woke come for lions and tigers and bears? Oh my.