ll those NFL players kneeling and making fist gestures during the National Anthem
might think they're protesting something. The fans forced to watch their gesture
might think they're just unpatriotic. But in fact the kneeling is a symptom
of the imminent death of pro football.
Science has shown that pro football and other sports in which the players get struck on the head lead inexorably to permanent brain injury. The players know this means the decline of football as a major sport. This knowledge gets internalized, and the mind devises a coping strategy: make football uninteresting, make it political, and turn the fans against it. If they succeed, then maybe the loss of football won't be such a bad thing.
This is why football players, but not basketball players or baseball players or long-distance runners, are displaying their hatred for America and its National Anthem on the field. (Of course, some of them do, but few people notice.)
Perhaps it also explains why our cities have instituted pro-crime and anti-police policies in the past few years. Who would live in a city where you can be murdered and the criminal justice system, steeped in unsupported mythology about the causes of crime, does nothing about it? Who would open a business there? The real goal is to drive the middle class out of the cities.
Political activists use this strategy all the time: those pink hats and vagina costumes were specifically designed to be embarrassing, as were the bizarre antics of gays in their parades.
As one commenter said, if those gays had walked down the street wearing ties and three-piece suits, conservatives would have accepted and embraced them. But acceptance was not the goal. The goal was to promote a stereotype, and create a division in society, so they could play the role of victim and thereby gain media coverage and special privileges.
While the pro football players try this strategy, the managers seem to be somewhat concerned about the loss of profits and make perfunctory efforts to discourage it.
There's a scene in the old TV show Hogan's Heroes where Colonel Hogan tells his men to riot and create a diversion, then says ineffectually “Boys, please keep it down” when the camp Kommandant demands that he control his men. This is basically what the pro football managers are doing.
Before neurologists found ways of measuring brain injury, it was commonly recognized that football players tended, on average, to be more active physically than intellectually. Until recently all we had were anecdotal stories: I personally remember being surprised at how the intelligence of my high school friends seemed to plummet after they joined the football team. I wrote it off as a psychological phenomenon.
Now we have compelling evidence that the cause is not psychological, but physical brain injury. It isn't fringe science or anecdotal stories any longer, nor is it junk science. Autopsies of former players and brain imaging studies have shown strong evidence that brain concussions are producing chronic traumatic encephalopathy in pro football players. No one can seriously doubt that the same is happening to high school kids. An article in last month's Journal of Neurosurgery showed that high acceleration head impacts alone are sufficient to cause a 492% increase in tau, a marker of axonal injury that results in neuronal death. Concussion and other overt diagnosable symptoms need not occur.
For soccer, there's a simple solution: ban people from striking the ball with their head. Finding a solution for American football won't be so easy, and many Americans strongly identify with and love the sport as it is. Football strikes a deep chord in the American psyche that baseball and basketball just can't reach.
Nevertheless, the idea that brain injury is acceptable as the price one pays for playing a game and entertaining others just won't fly. The players know this. That may be why they don't care if they run it into the ground.
aug 11 2018, 6:37 am
