Your NFL Sunday: "As Iceberg Slim might put it, the players and public alike have been sold a series of air castles."

It's gaslighting all over again in this essay, which connects the autobiography of a pimp (spoiler: not a pretty story at all) to big-time football, health problems and brain damage suffered by players, thoroughbred horse racing, and the plantation-president.

As usual for a longer essay, I've included only one excerpt, and highlighted a single passage from it. You're encouraged to read all of the essay.

American Pimps, by Shawn Hamilton (The Baffler)

The NFL, Donald Trump, and Iceberg Slim

Retirement by Gaslight

The thoroughbred horse has reached what Richard C. Francis, author of Domesticated, calls an “evolutionary dead end.” Breeders have not produced a faster thoroughbred for decades.

Thoroughbreds have evolved “inordinately large hearts and lungs” to increase their aerobic capacity. They have evolved a huge chest cavity to make room for those larger organs, which then crowd the stomach and intestines, causing them to “shift around in hazardous ways.” The bodies of the thoroughbreds are “too large” relative to the legs and feet, making the animal “extremely top heavy.” And this, Francis writes, “goes a long way toward explaining the high frequency of leg injuries, often catastrophic.”

This is not the face of racing that the public sees. The early years of a racing horse’s career are glorious. As the horses get older, drugs are often used to keep them going. And when the thoroughbred comes to its end, quietly—away from the cameras, seersucker suits and sun hats —it is put down and perhaps later immortalized in statues, photos, or crappy movies.

The NFL player who sees a connection between himself and a poor kid in the ghetto appears nuts to many fans. But the working-class fan who thinks his interests align with those of billionaire owners is perfectly sane in their view.

In Pimp, Glass Top recommended retiring his obsolete thoroughbreds to mental asylums. He used a combination of ruses and drugs to convince them that they had gone insane. “I got a thousand ways to drive ’em goofy,” said Glass Top, “That last broad I flipped, I hung her out a fifth floor window. I had given her a jolt of pure cocaine so she’d wake up outside that window. I was holding her by both wrists. Her feet were dangling in the air. She opened her eyes. When she looked down she screamed like a scared baby.”

“She was screaming when they came to get her.”

Some have attributed NFL protests to a similar kind of insanity, stoked by the fervid imaginings of the players themselves. They are rebranded as “spoiled,” “entitled,” or just not that bright. The fan, meanwhile, is the paragon of reason and logical consistency.

This is the same fan who believes that paid patriotism is okay, but peaceful protest is not. This is the same fan who is eager to subsidize billionaire team owners, while labeling a dissenting player “spoiled” or “privileged.” And this is the same fan who is willing to watch the game despite scandals ranging from domestic violence, to prescription drug abuse, to the conspiracy of official silence surrounding the head-injury scandal. This fan is willing to accept all these contradictions and lies as just part of the game or as an unspecified price of doing business. And when the owner refuses to really “own” his players and put them in check, this fan is ready to boycott.

The NFL player who sees a connection between himself and a poor kid in the ghetto appears nuts to many fans. But the working-class fan who thinks his interests align with those of billionaire owners is perfectly sane in their view.

However, none of this wishful thinking will alter the fundamental shifts in the rules of engagement: the players can no longer “just play the game” the way the fans want them to. They know too much. The stadiums remain, but the air castles are gone. And this is probably just the beginning.

Learning how to kneel: "Over the past century, 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and baseball have become inextricably wed."

It wasn't necessary for Colin Kaepernick to take a knee to dissuade me from watching football. Whatever waning interest remained was jettisoned some years back when the appalling extent of brain injuries and crippling physical impairments finally started being reported.

The NFL's lies and cover-ups since then sealed the deal. By all rights, we should be protesting the nature of the sport itself, but as for those other protests currently compelling white America to boycott modern gladiators:

(Psst -- it's not about the flag or the military, and it never has been.)

If you're saying to yourself, well, I never protest, and when I do it is done tastefully, so as to be inoffensive to others ... you just might be revealing yourself as a privileged societal cog unable to fathom injustice.

Would you have participated in the American Revolution?

If so, on which side?

So much for football. I've always been a baseball fan, anyway, and I was proud as proverbial punch when Bruce Maxwell, a catcher for my beloved Oakland A's, became the first major leaguer to take a knee. He comes from a military family, and his military family gets it.

The bigger question for me is this: How did the tradition begin of the national anthem being played before sporting events?

It goes back a century, to 1918 and the Great War, which did more than another single event to inaugurate and define the parameters of American "patriotism" as we now (usually unthinkingly) accept it -- and also gave us Prohibition, among other intrusions.

America's forgotten past: "It is worth reviewing how World War I turned out so much worse than the experts and politicians promised."

 ... Wilson acted as if the congressional declaration of war against Germany was also a declaration of war against the Constitution. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt commented in 1924, “Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power.” Wilson even urged Congress to set up detention camps to quarantine “alien enemies.”

This entertaining 2011 account tells the rest of the story.

The song remains the same: Over the past century, "The Star-Spangled Banner" and baseball have become inextricably wed, by Luke Cyphers and Ethan Trex (ESPN The Magazine)

THE FIRST THING to remember is that it's a battle song.

The most memorable lines involve rockets and bombs, and the lesser-known verses conjure "the havoc of war" and "the gloom of the grave."

The second thing to remember? It's a taunt, a lyrical grenade chucked at a defeated opponent. "See that flag still flying, the one you tried to capture?" it famously asks the British. Then it answers: "Scoreboard."

That's why, in a country that loudly lauds actions on the battlefield and the playing field, "The Star-Spangled Banner" and American athletics have a nearly indissoluble marriage. Hatched during one war, institutionalized during another, this song has become so entrenched in our sports identity that it's almost impossible to think of one without the other.

Our nation honors war. Our nation loves sports. Our nation glorifies winning. Our national anthem strikes all three chords at the same time.

Taking a knee with Nick Wright and Bill Hanson.

Wright rests the case.

Hanson?

It's back to the same old symbols, not social justice.

You know it's bad when you wish Chris Morris had written it instead.

I understand why a newspaper like the News and Tribune feels it is compelled to write at an elementary school level.

What I'll never understand is why it must think at the same level.

Watch Wright's video, Bill.

HANSON: Symbolism and Sensibility — our national angst, by Bill Hanson (Southern Indiana Christianity Today)

 ... Players and coaches have every right, I guess, to take a knee, lock arms, hang out in the tunnel or turn cartwheels during the playing of the National Anthem. OK, not cartwheels. That would be disrespectful and just plain silly. But they do have a right to protest oppression and racism. And, I’ll admit that Sunday’s protest garnered plenty of attention. But to what end? Social media exploded with just what you might expect. Videos and memes from each side supporting or tearing down the other. Not a lot of meaningful dialog about the best ways to stamp out oppression or racism has come to light so far.

(Psst -- it's not about the flag or the military, and it never has been.)

I'm often reminded of Thomas Jefferson's words:

"Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

To avoid misinformed confusion, readers old enough to remember the Vietnam War era will recall Tricky Dicky Nixon's law-and-order platform, as a blunt missile aimed squarely against "anti-American" war protesters (attacking the flag and our soldiers overseas) and African-Americans (being all uppity about rights and freedoms).

A space alien (or Mr. Spock) might ask: But was the overseas war just, and did the civil rights protesters have a point?

If you're saying to yourself, well, I never protest, and when I do it is done tastefully, so as to be inoffensive to others ... you just might be revealing yourself as a privileged societal cog unable to fathom injustice.

Would you have participated in the American Revolution?

If so, on which side?

You see, etiquette typically goes out the window when TJ's tipping point occurs, as it did in America in 1776, or in Russia in 1917.

Of course, the plain fact is that NFL protests have been breathtakingly sober and polite. If you're upset about free speech and conscience, but not troubled by the mangled brains of players who perform so you can remain safely inside your bubble, there isn't much more anyone can say except "dude, I'm so very sorry for you."

It’s Not About the Flag or the Military. It Never Has Been.

When athletes protest during the national anthem, they are acting on behalf of people who can’t speak as loudly.

By Andrew Cohen (Brennan Center for Justice)

President Trump’s weekend attack on athletes exercising their constitutional right to protest followed the longtime model used by police unions. Instead of acknowledging the legitimacy of the complaint that there is discrimination and misconduct in policing — Trump, like the unions, changed the subject, lashing out at the athletes as unpatriotic, even anti-American. The protests were mischaracterized as attacks on the flag, the anthem, the military, or the nation itself. As if it were ordained somewhere that one must stand, as opposed to kneel, for the anthem.

This is nonsense, of course. There is nothing more American than protesting injustice when it is manifest, nothing more patriotic than speaking for those who do not have a voice or whose voices are rarely heard. When people protest police misconduct, and racial disparities in our criminal justice systems, they are acting to improve the conditions of their fellow Americans, acting to force necessary reform on people (like Trump) and institutions (like police unions) that resist this change. This is “anti-American” or unpatriotic only if you believe the protections of the First Amendment are overrated or unnecessary. And only if you believe it’s unpatriotic to want to make America more just ...