OK, so it started with the Sunday Night Football Game where Al Michaels said that the New York Giants, who were 0-5, dealing with an avalanche of injuries (they lost all their Wide Receivers the game before) and playing at Denver against the Broncos (a game which, by the way, they won) said was "having a week worse than Harvey Weinstein," the powerful Hollywood mogul who has been buried under a, well, avalanche of rape and sexual harassment claims. He apologized after the commercial break, but I know it wasn't sincere. Michaels probably was told to say sorry by his producer, and knowing that he's an old-school redass, this might -- might -- push him into retirement. I mean, Mike Tirico is already taking over all the roles Bob Costas used to have. Saw a tweet from someone speculating that Michaels might join fellow ex-broadcast Brent Musburger at his Vegas Sports & Information Network on satellite radio. Didn't think he was that much of a gambler like Musburger, who I was told was forbidden by Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delaney from calling B1G football games because people know Musburger bets on games. But I digress.
Then on Friday there were reports that members of the Houston Texans walked out of practice and may have threatened to sit out their game Sunday because of what the team's owner, Bob McNair, said during an owners' meeting last week. In regards to players continuing to kneel/lock arms/stay in the locker rooms for the national anthem, McNair said, "We can't have the inmates running the prison." McNair, to his credit, is backpedaling like a Cornerback trying to cover Odell Beckham, Jr. over using that idiom.
It is a heightened climate. You may think this is crazy, but this climate is in reaction to Donald Trump being installed as President (with Republican chicanery -- gerrymandering, voter suppression, Russian influence). The vast majority of us who recoiled in horror that this prick somehow became The Most Powerful Man In The World is (and bear with me here) fighting back against the political incorrectness, the boorishness, the rudeness that is a part of his persona, which is also the tenor of the people and forces that swept him and his fellow asshole Republicans into power.
It is not Donald Trump per se, of course, but Harvey Weinstein is also a powerful white man who has been accused of using his power to objectify and molest women, and his pull in Hollywood has diminished to the point where the women he attacked and then silenced in shame finally ganged up on him. Meanwhile, the subject of police brutality (which is what Colin Kaepernick was raising attention for when he sat and knelt during the National Anthem, which is what this whole thing started off as) is an issue that needs to be addressed but hasn't, and smart people know it won't be under the Trump Administration because the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is a bigot who wants to use the rule of law to murder minorities, full stop. And, of course, the President has nothing better to do than to shittweet NFL players, and once he said that anyone who kneels during the anthem should be fired, nearly all the players got upset. This is the environment -- the resistance -- into which people are being forced to be contrite over what they said when, in a different climate, people would let things slide.
Now, as a general rule, I'm for all this hall monitoring, only because this is a way to fight against Trump, Republicanism, and the encroaching authoritarianism that people in power our slowly constructing to funnel said power in this country to them and only them in perpetuity. With that being said, everybody has a line between vigilance for civility and, well, political correctness. I know I often only talk about politics when I push back against liberalism and progressivism, which is my side. But I think the criticism Michaels faced and McNair is facing is overblown.
I feel deep in my heart that Michaels is a Republican. As an NFL owner, I am certain McNair is, too. They may have conservative, even revolting, personal views about sexual assault and player protests. But you cannot glean anything vicious in their beings by what they said. They are just a poor choice of words blurted out without malice towards women or football players. Michaels was just using hyperbole to emphasize how crappy a week the Giants were having. Similarly, McNair was trying to say that the owners pay the players and they should have control of the league and some say in what the players can and cannot do. (This may be a view that also offends some, but that would be an accurate assessment of the current relationship between NFL ownership and labor, regardless of the relationship some players thought McNair was implying when he said what he said.) That is all they said. And what they said should not make them as horrible as Donald Trump.
Look, I think words hurt. I still reserve the right to be offended and upset when someone says something to me that I don't like. But I also understand that I say things that unintentionally rub someone the wrong way, and I don't want to be castigated for it. Frankly, I don't know if I should even be criticized for it. For example, I want to keep my insults. I want to call a bitch a bitch, or a cocksucker a cocksucker. I have heard that someone people regard "bitch" (whose definition is a female dog) as a gender-based, even sexist, insult. And it has come to my attention that "cocksucker" is an epithet against gay men, according to some. While I can see that in that way, it is so far of a bridge to cross that the uproar over these comments is preposterous to me. At the risk of sounding privileged, I think I have a right to my insults, and I think "bitch" and "cocksucker" are not words I exclusively associate to all women and gays, therefore I want to use them to express my hatred towards someone. Please, I don't want anyone, or society, to take those insults away. I feel so good when I use them to insult someone.
Along that same vein, Michael invoking Weinstein isn't a big deal, and neither is McNair using a common (if ill-chosen) turn of phrase to describe a situation that goes out of control. Everyone has a line that other people cross. For some, those two crossed it. For me, those two did not. And I think I'm right. Come on, guys, there are bigger assholes to fry.
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