Their Sons Grow Suicidally Beautiful at the Beginning of October, and Gallop Terribly Against Each Other's Bodies

I'm amused and fascinated by the firestorm in the NFL over players, who are taught from pee-wee to high school to college to the pros that spectacular hits are the road to getting paid, suddenly being told they can't do what they've been trained and coached and paid to do (there's profit in those spectator hits) and worse, having their characters impugned by the very owners who pay them for (and profit by) the spectacular hits. It’s as if the viciousness the league has inculcated and marketed for decades is suddenly endangered by its own reckless success; it’s not surprising the owners seek to punish the players for the players' moral failure of carrying out the immoral orders of the owners.

The NFL owners and its players union after this season will almost certainly have a labor stoppage, probably an owners' lockout, and I've heard predictions that the owners' insistence that the players give back every single penny of debt the owners racked up themselves on stupid contracts and debt service will result in the cancellation of the entire season. The owners who today cry about helmet-to-helmet hits will in the next sentence extol the benefit of an 18 game schedule on 16 game pay as a bargaining chip. Concern with labor's physical well-being runs that deep.

Fine metaphors abound! DC afternoon rush, local sports radio, the conservative of the two hosts, on issue after issue between the players and the owners, agrees with motherfucking me! If it was the teachers union, if it was coal-miners, if it was the union that cleans his hotel room while he's on location at the Super Bowl, guess which side he's on. Janitors don't entertain him.

Watching the NFL owners fuck up one of the few money-making cash cows left in Bubbleville will be as educational as enjoyable. Watch, listen: an empire imploding, America in a terrarium.

Saturday is Jaime's night, you're going to see this image through this coming Sunday. What are the odds that United is awarded a PK if Jaime hasn't scored by the 60th, especially in a game as meaningless as this one? 1-3?

• Overheard in Nevada.
• The elite paying for the anti-elite sentiment of the Tea-Partiers. Having said that, reading Dana Milbank rail against Tea-Partiers is a perverse joy.
• More tea-party hilarity.
• Jokes are funny.
• I the people.
• They've stopped pretending.
• Virginia Thomas' smackability quotient is off the charts.
• Zizek on China.
• UPDATE! Jack! What's up? Your place is down.
• Maryland casinos.
• For you with a crush on Hans Riemer.
• Oh noes! Ehrlich hates MOCO. Moral quandary!
• Abandoned bowling alleys.
• Rod Smith.
• Worse poet of the 20th century? Damn, I can't win anything.
• C, part five.
• Pärt.
• UPDATE! Live right now (12:20PM EDT 10/20/10) Dean and Britta are on KEXP playing Galaxie 500 songs, including a kick ass *Tugboat.* This will be available at KEXP's archives by tomorrow.
• UPDATE! Ear-candy.
• Yes, I know I've posted the Wright poem within the past six months, but it's apt for this post.

  

AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTINS FERRY, OHIO

James Wright

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.