The silent majority won

 In the Missouri House congressional district in which I live, a man named Kenneth Abram was the Republican nominee. The sixty-two-year-old Boeing manager was a newcomer to politics and ran on a platform consisting largely of the platitudes around which his party has largely crafted itself in the modern era. He referred to himself as simultaneously pro-business and pro-labor without expressing a distinct opinion on, say, labor unions, for instance. When the Call Newspapers, a small news network covering issues pertaining to South St. Louis County, surveyed Abram, he gave quick and pointed answers which lacked any semblance of nuance. His opponent, Democrat Bridget Walsh Moore, gave thoughtful answers throughout; even on matters where the two fundamentally had the same stance (like a merger between St. Louis County and City), she explained that her opposition was steeped in a lack of cohesive plan that she had seen put forward rather than any sort of dogmatic opposition as a matter of principle.

If you drove through the 93^rd district at any point in the last couple months, you would be inundated with Kenneth Abram signs. There were occasional Bridget Walsh Moore signs, but Abram’s far outpaced Walsh Moore’s. And when the votes were tallied on Tuesday, the voices of Lemay and Affton were loud and clear—Moore won by 9.2%.

We are coming up on over half a century of it being considered a given that the Republican Party represents the so-called “silent majority”, the Richard Nixon-era belief that while liberals will protest in the streets or on college campuses, mainstream Americans go to work, go to church, and don’t necessarily obsess or derive their identities from their political views but when they do vote, they tend to do so conservatively. Perhaps there was a point in time when the silent majority was based on reality, but that point has long since vanished, and in 2022, the exact opposite has proven to be true.

I live in a blue district in a blue county in a blue metropolitan area—granted, it is one which resides in a red state, but in every presidential election in my lifetime, the county in which I live has voted for the Democratic Party. The platonic ideal of a St. Louis County presidential candidate may not be a Bernie Sanders nor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-style socialist, but it quite demonstrably is not a brash, Donald Trump-style Republican. And yet, there aren’t any houses in my neighborhood with pro-Joe Biden flags hanging, or anti-Joe Biden bumper stickers. But when it comes time to actually vote, the loudest voices are coming from those in the minority.

I have never put a political bumper sticker on my car nor put a political sign in my yard, and my reasons are simultaneously pragmatic and paranoid—I’m not trying to get attacked. Do I believe police officers (who lean to the right politically) are going to specifically target people with “I’m With Her” bumper stickers? With almost no exceptions, no, but subliminal biases do exist, and can I honestly say that, if I were a traffic cop, I wouldn’t take some extra level of glee in issuing a ticket to somebody with a 2020 election denying bumper sticker? Anyway, I’ve made the decision to avoid the potential conflict of interest altogether.

Despite Joe Biden being broadly unpopular across the country, it appears that the Democratic Party did shockingly well in a midterm election cycle that for years has been assumed to be a disaster for the party. While the United States Senate is still not yet determined, it looks increasingly likely that Democrats will maintain (potentially without the “with Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote” caveat) control of the Senate, and while Republicans remain favored to take control of the House of Representatives, it will hardly be the “red wave” that was repeatedly predicted. In Midwestern swing states which voted for Trump in one of his two presidential bids, things went quite well for the Democratic Party—lieutenant governor John Fetterman flipped a Pennsylvania Senate seat blue, Wisconsin reelected its Republican senator Ron Johnson but also reelected Democratic governor Tony Evers and avoided a worst-case scenario in which the state’s Democrats were gerrymandered into absolute irrelevance, and Michigan’s legislature flipped blue for the first time in decades. 

Ultimately, for as unpopular as Joe Biden is, the opposition party proved to be even less popular. This was the case in St. Louis County, when not-especially-popular County Executive Sam Page was re-elected over Republican challenger Mark Mantovani, whose yard signs overwhelmed the county. I don’t know that I saw a single pro-Sam Page yard sign in the months leading up to the election. But he had his voters, and that bore out on Election Day, even if the overwhelming majority of his voters did not actively campaign on his behalf.

The juxtaposition of the 2020 presidential candidates is perhaps the most instructive example, and certainly the most famous example, I can give of how Democrats became the true silent majority. Joe Biden received more votes than any other candidate in any other presidential election in history, and this was despite a distinct, somehow almost aggressive lack of personality cult surrounding him. Sure, there were cutesy Onion articles about him, but unlike Hillary Clinton or especially unlike Barack Obama, a self-stylized Joe Biden superfan wasn’t really a thing—he won the nomination largely by being broadly acceptable by the majority of the party’s voters, even if he barely cracked 50% of the votes despite the primaries being largely ceremonial for the second half of it. 

That Biden, an old white guy, was not historic like Clinton or dynamic (and historic) like Obama, couldn’t conjure passion, however, did not materially impact his ability to swing voters. As much press as Barack Obama’s campaign rallies received, the overwhelming majority of his voters never attended one. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic had allowed for rallies, Biden’s certainly would have been quite underwhelming compared to what Obama produced. Meanwhile, Donald Trump became his own political identity, despite never received as high of a percentage of the popular vote as Mitt Romney or John Kerry. I have met many, many Joe Biden voters—I have never met, and God willing never will meet, a person who identifies themselves primarily through their support of him. If you drive through any Midwestern state (this is the case in Missouri, but it is also absolutely the case in Illinois, a state which twice denied Trump electoral votes, too), you will see barns on the sides of highways painted to represent support of Donald Trump.

The impact of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision which unpopularly overturned Roe v. Wade, has been repeatedly cited as a thing which helped Democrats to close the gap in 2022, but abortion is hardly the only issue on which Democrats are in the majority. Most Americans support gun reform. Most Americans support funding public education and increasing taxes on the wealthy. But they do so not through big, dumb, inevitably futile gestures like painting the side of a barn or turning the back of their cars into moving billboards, but by voting and by supporting those who share their beliefs. Unlike the midterms under Barack Obama, during which Democrats got absolutely smoked, the first (and perhaps only) midterm under Joe Biden went fairly well because the party, rather than running on the public face of a charismatic leader, ran as a party guided by popular policy. And it worked.

If they really believed this

Like the majority of Americans, I do not believe that abortions are analogous to murder. The simple fact that this is a majority opinion does not inherently make it the correct opinion. But I do know that if I believed that abortion was murder, and therefore tens of millions of murders had been conducted with the tacit blessing of a major American political party and many millions of its members and supporters, I would not be able to sleep at night. I would not be able to function in society. The amount of therapy I would need just to make sense of the world in which I live would keep me from being able to do anything else.

Maybe I am an extreme case of internalized guilt—I can’t bring myself to eat meat because of an outsized level of guilt regarding living things, and I feel legitimately upset any time I am forced to kill even a tiny insect. And I of course value human lives considerably more than (other) animal lives. But it sure seems like most people value human life enough that what could reasonably be termed a holocaust would paralyze a material number of the tens of millions of Americans who would deem abortion to be murder.

And yet that didn’t seem to happen, and when you consider the central thesis of the anti-abortion movement—that hundreds of millions of Americans are complicit in the murder of innocent babies—it is incredible that the self-stylized “pro-life” movement is not considerably more militant than it is. Why would a true believer in the cause ever seek the approval, or any level of companionship, with a so-called baby killer? If your pro-choice relatives won’t speak to you because you oppose murder, aren’t they just saving you having to sever ties yourself?

At the very least, why would an anti-abortion person not feel a strong, undying urge to sway the people they know and otherwise care about to believe in the immorality of abortion? Sure, the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade was not centered around changing hearts or minds and it was ultimately successful in subverting the will of the American people, but they still live in a country where, in their eyes, murder is popular. They live in a country where abortion is still going to be legal in large swaths of the country and where there is a widespread effort to fund abortions in states where they would remain legal.

Again, I don’t believe that abortion is murder. But those who do believe it is and respond with seething hatred are not the ones who confound me—it’s those who believe that abortion is murder and compartmentalize it, who regard the pro-choice as misguided in the same way they might view those with differing views on taxation—people with whom they agree to disagree. That is impossible for me to comprehend. And it’s why I don’t believe them.

If the anti-abortion were serious, how could they not feel invested in making the world acutely aware that what is happening is a moral abomination? How could they not participate in measures that, whether impacting its legality or not, would decrease demand for abortion, such as increasing availability of pre-fertilization birth control, promoting forms of sex education that demonstrably decrease unwanted pregnancies (i.e. “not abstinence-only”), and establishing a social safety net that would make having a child seem like something other than financially ruinous? Why would opposition to abortion have a strong inverse correlation to opposition to the death penalty, or to war, or to a welfare state robust enough to prevent homelessness or starvation, or to universal health care?

The scientific argument for the abortion of a non-viable pregnancy being murder is effectively non-existent—the aborted pregnancy is a wholly dependent extension of the mother. The religious argument that it is murder is not especially robust, either—the direct Biblical condemnation of abortion is, at most, open to an interpretation of passages that is largely about confirming prior instincts (the Biblical argument against eating shellfish or men not growing a beard is considerably more overt), and Judaism specifically requires abortion in certain cases, though for freedom of religion to apply exclusively to a very specific interpretation of Christianity is hardly new.

Even if I do not agree with it, I understand, if you consider abortion to be murder, how one cannot accept a simple difference of opinion. The same cannot be said of opposition to same-sex marriage, which impacts nobody outside of the marriage itself, or opposition to contraception, a thing which has stopped millions of abortions from happening, both of which Clarence Thomas has openly stated could be reconsidered in the wake of the Roe v. Wade overturning (Thomas famously did not reference the court’s Loving v. Virginia ruling that legalized interracial marriage, another harmlessly legal thing which Thomas, an active participant in an interracial marriage, apparently would not reconsider). The Roe v. Wade precedent is not being used in a legal fight against capital punishment; it is being used in a legal fight against pet cultural grievances of social conservatives to enforce that their concept of monoculture is preserved as a legally binding requirement.

The prospect of a country, and more broadly a world, where murder is shrugged off as either a secondary concern or an outright net positive, would terrify me, if this was what I believed was happening. I would devote every waking moment to comprehending the callousness and trying to change minds about it. I can’t even imagine the pain that this would cause me internally, or how I would be able to live in such an evil world. It is so inconceivable to me that I deem it truly and literally unbelievable.

What is possibly the end game of all of this?

During the first round of the 2021 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Colorado Avalanche forward Nazem Kadri was suspended for the sixth time in his career for an illegal hit, this time to the head of St. Louis Blues defenseman Justin Faulk during Game 2 of their first-round series, a hit which ended Justin Faulk’s season (and, given Colorado’s eventual disposal by the Vegas Golden Knights, Kadri’s season) prematurely. It would be willfully ignorant to believe that the reaction of Blues fans at Enterprise Center to Kadri barreling into red-hot goaltender Jordan Binnington during Game 3 of their second-round series, causing an injury which will cost Binnington at least the remainder of their set, was unrelated to previous events.

Kadri was not penalized for what appeared to be a reckless if not patently illegal instigation, a decision which was probably not any more or less egregious than the referees’ ignoring of an earlier hit by Blues forward Ivan Barbashev on Avalanche defenseman Samuel Girard, which will likewise cause a player to miss the remainder of the series. Kadri was not sanctioned further with any sort of suspension, an outcome that never would have even been suggested had literally any other player on either team committed such a penalty—this was clearly a response to Kadri’s history, and not an unfair one given that repeat offender status is a major factor in how the NHL legislates dirty play. Likewise, the NHL chose not to suspend Jordan Binnington for throwing a water bottle at Kadri during a post-game interview, a thing that, since the water bottle was not frozen nor filled with explosives, was the only reasonable course of action.

There is a 100% chance that St. Louis Blues fans will boo Nazem Kadri profusely tonight, as they did for the remainder of Game 3 on Saturday night. Is this a rational response to a player, even if the player is deemed worthy of such scorn? Not really—it’s not like Kadri, who is if nothing else a very productive NHL veteran with a long history of being booed by opposing fans, is going to fold like a card table upon moderate heat. But the repeated “Ref you suck!” chants levied at Denver’s Ball Arena during Game 2 were productive, either. Sports fans like chanting and they like booing and doing so is a perfectly harmless pastime.

What is not perfectly harmless is what some number of dumbasses did on Saturday night into Sunday by hurling racial slurs at Kadri, the NHL’s highest-profile Muslim player, with some sending threats of violence against him. Players from both teams, rightfully, condemned the attacks, and local police have appropriately investigated the threats—even if the supermajority of them came from crackpot keyboard warriors on Twitter who would have never acted upon their words in real life, it is their responsibility to treat any threats as serious until proven otherwise.

It seems pointless to explain that, in a metro area of 2.8 million people with many more St. Louis Blues fans outside of it, the percentage of Blues fans who sent racial slurs or threats to Nazem Kadri was a minority. The percentage even represents a slim minority of those who took to the internet to criticize Kadri for his role in the play that left Binnington hobbled (a group to which I belong). And those who were contacted by authorities for levying such threats will assuredly not be among the chorus booing Kadri tonight. Those people will, um, be busy.

But for as much negative energy as there has been towards Nazem Kadri by countless NHL fan bases over the years, a force more powerful than hatred of Kadri has taken control—hatred of St. Louis. And for the life of me, I cannot figure out what the end game of this is.

Those who rationalize the Best Fans St. Louis-ification of the Internet, a collective of well-paid writers and sporting rivals who mobilize at the notion that St. Louis is a giant, regressive shithole that is a half-century behind the times, do so under the guise of civil service—that those who say racist or homophobic or otherwise problematic things (or, in the case of the Best Fans St. Louis Twitter account specifically, commit the unholy sin of referring to the local baseball venue as “Bush Stadium” or not paying one’s hard-earned money to attend a given baseball game in lieu of doing literally anything else with one’s leisure time) deserve to be called out for it. It’s not an unfair point, but in the case of those who threatened Nazem Kadri, who absolutely deserved to be called out for doing so, the feds don’t need you to research the matter yourself. Which is more likely to shut down an asshole cold in his (or her, or their, but let’s be honest—usually his) tracks: giving him a platform of thousands of Twitter followers to read his mini-manifestos, or the damn police calling him?

In America, liberals tend to view the country through a prism of red states and blue states while conservatives tend to view the country through a prism of rural and urban, which makes St. Louis arguably as universally maligned as any semi-large city in the country. St. Louis is a majority-minority city where over 80% of the votes in the 2020 Presidential Election went to Joe Biden; a city whose congressperson, Representative Cori Bush, came to prominence as a Black Lives Matter activist and is among the most far-left members of the U.S. House. About two-thirds of St. Louis city and its surrounding county voted Democratic in 2020, while about two-thirds of the remainder of Missouri voted Republican—this puts St. Louis in the unusual spot of being in two completely separate culture clashes with both the progressive national remainder and with the broader remainder of Missouri.

None of this is to say that St. Louis is perfect—like pretty much any other hockey market, the St. Louis Blues fan base is disproportionately white (the same could be said of the Colorado Avalanche fan base, existing primarily in Denver, a city which is already less than 10% Black) and there are a ton of reprehensible elements to the group. But when any and all criticism of Kadri, a thing that 48 hours ago was considered a universal truth of hockey fandom outside of Colorado, is reduced to the same omnipresent image of Get A Brain Morans Guy (you never really hear about the mostly Missouri residents protesting the Iraq War that he was counter-protesting, do you?), you are essentially telling those who by and large agree with you on most actual issues, issues far more important than whether or not they like the same hockey guy you like, to get fucked.

While major cities in the United States (including both St. Louis and Denver) are growing bluer over time, it is dwarfed in comparison to how those in red areas are growing more conservative. There are 115 counties/independent cities in Missouri, and only eight of them had Joe Biden within twenty percent of Donald Trump. But when it comes to statewide referendums, when voters are voting on specific issues rather than reflexively choosing between a D and an R on the ballot, voting is much further left than one might assume based on election results. Earlier in 2020, Missouri voted in favor of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and in 2018, Missouri voted to legalize medical marijuana and increase the minimum wage to $12. These may not be “defund the police” levels of leftism, but they do reflect a state that is fundamentally willing to vote for liberal Democrats (it was barely five years ago that Missouri had a Democratic governor, Jay Nixon, and a Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill, who were at the very least healthily to the left of a Joe Manchin type). Urban liberals from blue states smugly want to believe it is entirely a reflection of having a Black president, but this shift was already well underway pre-Obama—rural Democrats wanted you to treat them with some respect. I don’t condone those who felt so marginalized by those in urban areas whom they believed to be on the same team as them that they started voting for goddamned Donald Trump, but I get it. No matter how far left my politics, and they aren’t exactly getting more moderate as I age, any time I see myself being framed as some sort of racist insurrectionist hillbilly, I do ask myself why I am fucking bothering to care when it is seemingly never going to result in me feeling like I belong anywhere.

It's time for me to discuss the ugliness during last night's Academy Awards

I have needed almost a full day to gather my thoughts on what I saw unfold during the third hour of the broadcast of the 94^th Academy Awards, but it is time to ask questions about the unsettling sights I saw. What the absolute Hell was that Godfather tribute?

I was a bit weary when I first heard that the Oscars were going to do a tribute to The Godfather—last night was only the 49^th anniversary of the film’s Academy coronation (the film was released in 1972 and was celebrated in 1973), it’s not even close to among the most celebrated films in the history of the awards (it won three trophies, which doesn’t even put it among the 100 most celebrated films in Oscar history), and anything interesting that happens at the Oscars inevitably happens by accident. My expectations were low and somehow things went way worse than I expected.

The Godfather might be the single easiest film on the planet for which to find somebody to give a good Academy Awards tribute. It’s modern enough that it doesn’t seem like a history project to watch it and it is widely esteemed enough that the volunteers should be plentiful. Martin Scorsese, the director emeritus of the Academy Awards, surely would have shown up to pay tribute to his good friend Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus. Steven Spielberg, also a friend and contemporary of Coppola and probably 1A to Scorsese among the Academy, was already in the theater as a Best Director nominee, and surely Paul Thomas Anderson, also in-house as a director, would suffice. But instead, the Academy went off the board and brought out Sofia Coppola, Francis’s daughter and a respected director in her own right, to introduce a tribute to a film that she, as a baby, appeared in, well before her much-maligned appearance in the third chapter of the series.

Just kidding, they went with P. Diddy.

With all due respect to Monster’s Ball or Get Him to the Greek, this was certainly not the cinematic figure I would have expected. But I can also see some argument for a bit of an outsider. Like, think of the most completely random, non-film celebrity you can think of. How about Tom Brady? It would be extremely weird if Tom Brady introduced the Oscars’ Godfather tribute, but it would speak to the film’s wide appeal. But the big problem wasn’t that Diddy approached the tribute as an outsider—it is that his influence took over the tribute.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, rather than showing the countless classic lines of dialogue or the film’s breathtaking cinematography, the montage portrayed The Godfather as though it was Scarface, a film which is perfectly fun and watchable but is nobody’s idea of truly significant. It turned out not to be a tribute to a film celebrating its 50^th anniversary but rather a tribute to the trilogy as a whole, giving nearly equal weight to all three parts, baffling even for those of us who think The Godfather Part III is far better than its reputation. In theory, the montage’s soundtrack should have been simple—the film’s iconic score—but instead it was scored mostly by music from Kanye West and, of course, Diddy himself.

My wife, who has never seen The Godfather, turned to me during the tribute and remarked, “This movie doesn’t look very good.” And I can’t disagree with her on the merits of the tribute! You got a car explosion and some violence and some brooding shots of Vito and Michael Corleone, things which are certainly part of The Godfather but in no meaningful way convey what makes it great. How is there not even a glimpse of Vito and Michael speaking to each other? How are there more clips of Joe Mantegna speaking than Robert Duvall? Diddy prefaced the tribute by stating how much he loves The Godfather, but based on this montage (and yes, I am firmly aware that he probably had minimal input on the montage’s creation), I have no idea why he would.

Next, Diddy brought out Francis Ford Coppola, the director of all three films, Al Pacino, the star of two films and a prominent supporting actor in the other (and, really, the gravitational center of that film too), and Robert De Niro, who was the fourth credited actor in one of the films, and not even the one being theoretically commemorated. That De Niro was even in The Godfather Part II is basically a footnote to his career. It helps of course that De Niro is the most relevant of these three to modern movies and looks by far the most vibrant of the trio today, but this would be like doing a tribute to Back to the Future and bringing out Robert Zemeckis, Christopher Lloyd, and Elisabeth Shue.

The audience gave an extended standing ovation because, again, what person involved in making movies does not cherish The Godfather? Only Coppola spoke—given that he is an 82 year-old man who was never a performer even in his prime, it went about as well from a dynamism perspective as could be reasonably expected. But he had virtually nothing to say—he thanked Mario Puzo, the author of the novel The Godfather and co-writer of the film screenplays, and producer Robert Evans. The only time either Pacino (who, and I cannot stress this enough if you have not seen the films, far and away the most significant on-screen presence throughout the trilogy) or De Niro spoke was at the tail end, when De Niro repeated Coppola’s well-meaning but lethargic “Viva Ukraine” used to close out his speech.

The Godfather is both one of the greatest films ever made and a film that has been continuously embraced by dumb guys. It seems like every Trump administration lackey would cite The Godfather as his (always his, in this case) guiding template in life, despite the lessons of the films very much not being that you should like your life like Michael Corleone does. After this tribute, I understand why people who haven’t seen the movies think The Godfather is some meathead action movie rather than a beautifully made, poignant epic of mortality, guilt, and how the American dream and the American nightmare are so frequently one and the same.

The Godfather came out before I was born but it didn’t come out that long before I was born. I knew when I first watched it that it wasn’t a new movie but I also didn’t think of it as musty or stale. But some day, the film will exist entirely in the past—it’s pretty remarkable that so many prominent Godfather people such as Pacino, De Niro, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, and James Caan are still with us, but this won’t always be the case. And it would be a shame of the legacy of one of the great American artworks was as the dumb gangster movie it never was.

The one where John tries to rationalize a Los Angeles Rams Super Bowl win

On February 13, if the often-though-not-always correct bookmakers in Las Vegas are correct, the Los Angeles Rams are going to win the Super Bowl and cause me to be in a terrible mood for days. I want to try to mitigate this as much as I possibly can.

Being a former St. Louis Rams fan is just an absolutely insane bummer, and it does not help that every team I want to be bad is now good. Hell, we were one first-half touchdown by Tyreek Hill, the guy who strangled his pregnant girlfriend and then broke the arm of his now-born child when he was three (I usually add “accused of” type caveats, but he straight up says it on audiotape), from the super racist team that has spent the last half-decade scavenging the wreckage of St. Louis football fandom (and largely succeeding) for new adherents that they themselves had a role in creating in making the Super Bowl. A Chiefs/Rams Super Bowl—Jesus absolute Christ.

The Rams have, instead, an extremely likable opponent in the Cincinnati Bengals. There are undeniably faults—Joe Mixon is indefensible, and while I give owner Mike Brown credit for voting against the Rams’ relocation, this doesn’t exactly make the notorious cheapskate who himself extorted Cincinnati into building him a stadium he named after his daddy a sympathetic figure more broadly. But there’s Joe Burrow, the quarterback who looks like a bully in an 80s teen comedy but instead is the protagonist of a beautiful story—the Ohio native who was squeezed out of fulfilling his childhood dream of playing at The Ohio State University and instead became a folk hero at LSU alongside Ja’Marr Chase, who is now his top receiver with the Bengals. With all of the attention in the world on Burrow, his social media presence has been aggressively combed and all anyone seems to have come up with is a bunch of innocuous tweets about the mid-2010s Cleveland Cavaliers and some shockingly progressive tweets about social and economic justice.

In a perverse way, that Joe Burrow has become maybe the most broadly beloved player in the NFL mostly over the course of a few weeks makes me less confident that the Bengals can pull this off. When the Rams played the still-Tom Brady-led New England Patriots in the Super Bowl in 2019, the fact that it was Brady and Bill Belichick, arguably the two greatest to ever do what they do, did give me a sense of relief, even if rooting for the Patriots was never exactly my favorite thing to do. But now I’m rooting for a second-year quarterback who is certainly good but I am absolutely not convinced is great to maintain St. Louis’s 1-0 lead in Super Bowls won vs. Super Bowls won by teams that abandoned it.

What to do if the Cincinnati Bengals win the Super Bowl is very simple—pound a few celebratory shots and/or beers, run around screaming along to “Song 2”, and sending derogatory taunting text messages to every single Green Bay Packers fan I know. That’s the fun part. But what if the Los Angeles Rams win the Super Bowl? How do I cope with that? Here are the things I will tell myself:

1.     This wasn’t going to happen in St. Louis: I’m old enough that I remember when the Arizona Cardinals won the first playoff game in franchise history—a 20-7 victory over the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC Wild Card Round in the 1998-99 season. I remember a local sense of melancholy, that this was something that should have happened in St. Louis but didn’t (this sense evaporated eight months later when the 1999 Rams took charge). That is probably true—there wasn’t really a material change in the operations of the St. Louis, Phoenix, or Arizona Cardinals. But had the hundreds of thousands of NFL franchise owners banded together and stopped the relocation of the St. Louis Rams, what is currently unfolding in Los Angeles never would have happened. Stan Kroenke bought the Rams with the express intent of relocating them—the Rams spent the first six years of his majority ownership treading water, openly cavorting with Los Angeles while employing Jeff Fisher to oversee the most aesthetically unpleasing football team possible. If Kroenke were unable to move the Rams, he probably would have sold them, and as awful of an owner as Stan Kroenke is from the perspective of St. Louis, every move he is making is built around bringing Los Angeles a championship right now. It’s not exactly a mystery as to why—he’s 74 years old and despite giving his son, former awful Mizzou basketball player Josh Kroenke, control of the Denver Nuggets in order to subvert the NFL’s ownership rules, he only cares about himself and doesn’t care what happens to the Rams franchise once he’s dead.

2.     Good for Aaron Donald: Aaron Donald was more of a regional curiosity when he played in St. Louis for two seasons—it was against league broadcast rules (citation needed) for ESPN to discuss the St. Louis Rams (even the relocations of literal NFL franchises are covered with all the fervor of a pretty bad Russell Westbrook shooting night). And now everybody accepts that Donald is awesome, which he was in 2014 and 2015 as well. I have no grudge against Aaron Donald. What am I supposed to do, ask a guy not to get paid to play in LA and instead stay loyal to a city he isn’t from which doesn’t have a team? Aaron Donald should get to body-slam Stan Kroenke off the stage if the Rams are handed the Lombardi Trophy. Maybe take a shot at Goodell while you’re up there too. Note: There are two other former St. Louis Rams still on the team—Rob Havenstein, who was only with the St. Louis team for one year and for whom I have no emotional attachment either way, and Johnny Hekker, the punter who seems like a cool guy but is a living reminder that for the last four years they were in St. Louis, the most marketed players on the Rams were the kicker and the punter.

3.     Matthew Stafford is cool, too: How is Joe Burrow in a Super Bowl and he’s arguably not even the guy whose bro/bully appearance is most incongruous with everything we actually know about him as a person? The Los Angeles Rams have a ton of irritating offensive players—Cam Akers was openly wishing concussions on opponents less than a month ago, Tyler Higbee straight up did hate crimes, and Cooper Kupp forced every NFL announcer at gunpoint to say both his first and last name any time he catches a ball. But Matthew Stafford spent a long time being jerked around by an incompetent Detroit Lions franchise (I mean, I don’t want to deny his complicity—nobody was forcing him to take the money) and now he gets to play for a team that cares. If this were a different team, I’d love it. Also, his wife called out fan apathy and that is insanely funny to me.

4.     The twelve Los Angeles Rams fans deserve happiness: When it comes down to it, if I am going to critique the relocation of the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles, I have to acknowledge those who were hurt by the original sin of the St. Louis Rams—their relocation from Los Angeles. The face of the relocation to St. Louis, Georgia Frontiere, inherited the team from her husband, who himself only acquired the team after a 1972 franchise trade with the then-Baltimore Colts, a thing that I still can’t wrap my head around. I can note that Rams attendance was rarely very good in Los Angeles and that Frontiere gave Los Angeles a more sincere chance to keep its team than Stan Kroenke gave St. Louis, and that’s all true, but I wouldn’t expect that to be much solace for Angelenos who lost their favorite team. There may not have been as many die-hard Los Angeles Rams fans as there were die-hards of some other teams, but that doesn’t mean there were zero. And while most of my experience with die-hard Los Angeles Rams fans came from those who spent decades trolling St. Louis Post-Dispatch comments sections and therefore my perception of them is a bunch of antisocial lunatics who celebrated the relocation of my favorite childhood sports team with fervor they would not experience again until November 8 of that same year, I know that this is a self-selecting group. In a perfect world, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and San Diego would all have NFL teams. And just as I compartmentalized Los Angeles’s absence from the NFL team list when the Rams were in St. Louis, I can’t really get mad at LA fans who do the same with St. Louis, so long as they aren’t aggressive jerks about it.

All right, there we go. And now I can take a deep breath and root for the Los Angeles Rams! Just kidding, I still hope they lose by triple digits and that Kroenke falls out of his luxury box.

We are all pawns in the NFL's game

In one of the most memorable scenes in the first season of The Wire, D’Angelo Barksdale, a lieutenant in his uncle’s drug-dealing operation, encounters two low-level gang youngsters, Wallace and Bodie, playing a game of checkers with chess pieces. Realizing that the two don’t know the rules of chess, D’Angelo explains the movements of kings, queens, and rooks, each serving as a metaphor for someone in their real-life organization. But the most essential lesson comes towards the end with an explanation of the pawn. While D’Angelo is acutely aware of the relative uselessness of the pawn, a high-population piece with a very limited set of potential movements, Bodie sees the pawns for what they can be, potential queens capable of any movements they so desire.

Within the series, each of these characters is, at some point or another, revealed to be the equivalent of a pawn within the Barksdale organization. No character makes it out alive—some make it a little further down the board than others, but none truly gains the power to which Bodie aspires. This is the way chess works—I have played thousands of games of chess in my life (I logged into my Chess.com stats page to confirm that this was the case and not an outlandish estimation) and in a game that starts with sixteen pawns, most of them don’t get out alive. In most games, none make it to the queen rank to which Bodie aspires, and even in a game with an unusually high level of promotion, it’s never more than two or three. Even those that do reach queen status are hardly immune from potential capture, and even those who survive still exist solely at the behest of the king. The mastermind behind the pieces wants to keep the queen alive only so long as it fulfills their ultimate purpose, which has nothing to do with the queen’s continued life.

The billionaires in charge of major American professional sports teams don’t wish you harm—this would require them to consider your state of being at all. Your ultimate purpose to them is as a vessel through which they can ultimately enrich themselves. In a game of chess, a player would gladly sacrifice their pawn to capture a non-pawn piece. There is an inexact but largely agreed-upon formula for approximating piece value—a pawn is worth one point, a bishop or knight is worth three points, a rook is worth five points, and a queen is worth nine points. If you are playing chess, you don’t want to lose a pawn, but it isn’t going to materially impact your chances of victory, even if you were to gain nothing in return.

When the St. Louis Rams relocated to Los Angeles, there were thousands upon thousands of NFL fans in a country known for, to quote John Steinbeck, its poor seeing themselves not as exploited but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires willing to justify the move. Regarding a team’s move as reasonable not only allows fans to justify their support of an organization which would rubber-stamp such a transaction, but to feel empowered that it was not their team that moved, a minor reward for their loyalty, a thing which is understood to be an undisputed social good. This process has played out in the years since in different cases—the NFL abandoned their fans in San Diego and Oakland for the glitzier, more affluent Los Angeles and Las Vegas markets. Fans in Major League Baseball have fantasized about relocating the Tampa Bay Rays or Oakland Athletics to their preferred tourist destinations while National Hockey League aficionados have wished the Arizona Coyotes to Houston or Québec, depending on their national loyalty.

Since relocating to Los Angeles, the Rams have been among the most successful teams in the National Football League. Since a 4-12 debut in 2016 under St. Louis Rams carryover head coach Jeff Fisher, hired in 2012 having already been informed that the team was planning to move to Los Angeles and presumably valued for his ability to drive fans away with the most aesthetically unappealing ultra-conservative style of play imaginable and his track record of shepherding teams to new cities, the Rams have averaged 11 wins over each of the last five seasons, more than all but two NFL teams (Kansas City Chiefs, New Orleans Saints). In stark contrast to their timid personnel decision-making in the six years of Stan Kroenke’s ownership of the team in St. Louis, most if not all of which were later confirmed to be spent biding his time before he could bolt to Los Angeles, the Rams have aggressively pursued splashy player acquisitions—three months after the move to Los Angeles, the Rams traded up to the #1 overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft in order to select quarterback Jared Goff, whom they later packaged for another quarterback upgrade in Matthew Stafford, whom they have since surrounded with established stars such as Odell Beckham Jr. on the offensive side of the ball and Von Miller and Jalen Ramsey on defense.

And yet, by and large, Los Angeles doesn’t seem to care about the Rams. In a meaningful Week 18 game this season against the San Francisco 49ers, one with a division title and a home playoff game potentially hanging in the balance, SoFi Stadium, Stan Kroenke’s six-billion-dollar palace in the inner-ring suburb of Inglewood, was so loud that a quarterback was forced to resort to silent counts—that quarterback was Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford, overwhelmed by the heavy and vocal concentration of fans in 49ers red. The home-field disadvantage was so pronounced that Stafford’s wife Kelly openly pleaded with fans not to sell their tickets for the next week’s playoff game against the Arizona Cardinals. For the Rams’ upcoming rematch at home against the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game, the team implemented a controversial restriction on sales from outside the Los Angeles region (which has since been rescinded), with Melissa Whitworth, wife of Rams offensive lineman Andrew Whitworth, offering to buy the tickets of any Rams fan who would otherwise sell them to 49ers fans.

It feels like overkill to express that this never would have happened in St. Louis. While many have claimed that Los Angeles is simply still trying to get its feet wet as a football market in just its sixth season with the NFL following a twenty-one-year absence of the sport’s premier league, St. Louis hosted two playoff games before raucous, partisan crowds in its fifth season as the home of the Rams, and in the four seasons prior to the team’s 1999-00 Super Bowl run, the Rams averaged just 5.5 wins per season. The St. Louis Rams sold out every home game they played from 1995, their first season, until Christmas Eve 2006, when the Rams, at 6-8, failed to sell out a game played on a de facto holiday (and still sold 62,324 tickets). While attendance dipped following the team’s acquisition by Kroenke, assumed immediately and prophetically by most fans, despite his Missouri roots, to be a ruthless capitalist with ulterior motives, and the team’s descent into the literal worst five-year stretch in NFL history, the franchise, as all NFL franchises are, remained wildly profitable. But ultimately, the question was not whether Los Angeles fans were going to be more rabid fans than St. Louis fans. The answer to that question was irrelevant.

Forbes estimated Stan Kroenke’s net worth in 2015 at $7.6 billion. It now estimates his net worth at $10.7 billion. It is not a mystery as to why his net value has skyrocketed even beyond the typical increases that occur with a large enough stockpile of assets—he is now the owner of one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the world. The stadium, which will host this year’s Super Bowl, next year’s College Football Playoff National Championship, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2028 Summer Olympics, was the prize for Kroenke. He never needed the Los Angeles market in order to avoid taking a loss on the Rams—each team’s split of the league’s $9.8 billion in revenues is over $100 million higher than the league’s salary cap. But just because he didn’t need the money doesn’t mean he didn’t want it. St. Louis and its fans were his pawns.

But St. Louis was not exclusively a pawn of Stan Kroenke. It was a pawn of the entire league, a league which voted 30-2 in favor of relocating the team, citing the inability of the country’s 20^th largest market (by combined statistical area) to sustain a team in a league in which twelve of its franchises were in smaller markets, a claim met with virtually no non-local media scrutiny. St. Louis was a pawn of Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys owner whose outsized influence and vocal support of the Rams move made him league ownership’s biggest mouthpiece, as Stan Kroenke would rather do anything than speak publicly. St. Louis was, and remains, a pawn of Kansas City Chiefs chairman/public facing owner Clark Hunt, who voted for relocation and wasted no time turning around and claiming St. Louis as his own turf (the franchise’s value has nearly doubled since 2015, including a 22.5% increase in the one year after the Rams left St. Louis). The only teams which can claim some level of innocence in the exploitation of St. Louis as pawns in the NFL’s game are the Raiders, who deserve no credit for their vote as it was motivated by their own desire to abandon their loyal fan base in Oakland, which they did a few years later, and the Cincinnati Bengals, whose owner, Mike Brown, threatened to relocate the team not long after assuming control unless he received a publicly financed stadium, which he did. St. Louis may not be Brown’s pawn, but Cincinnati sure is.

Of the thirty relocation votes, none is more startling to the naked eye than that of the Green Bay Packers, who have voted for every franchise relocation since the AFL-NFL merger. Unlike the league’s other owners, most obviously Kroenke, Green Bay Packers ownership did not have an obvious financial motivation for the Rams relocation. Rather than a billionaire or a group of billionaires, the Green Bay Packers are owned by Green Bay Packers, Inc., a publicly-held nonprofit in which 361,300 people hold over five million shares of stock which does not yield dividends and cannot be sold for a profit. The ownership structure, unique among major American sports teams (and now illegal in the NFL), is frequently cited as a point of pride for the National Football League. It creates an ownership pool that, while hardly impoverished (it does, after all, require one to have $300 to spare on a financially worthless asset), is certainly less affluent per capita than the league’s other owners. And yet, with absolutely nothing financial to gain from it, the Packers have routinely signed off on team relocation.

It’s not as though shareholders of the Packers conducted votes on these relocations—it seems as though Packers team president Mark Murphy rubber-stamps them without much thought or input from the owners themselves. But by a country mile, no fan base has a stronger sense of entitlement to their right to an NFL team than the Packers, and the community ownership structure is a large part of why. A solid majority of “Well if St. Louis wanted an NFL team, they should have just supported them more” takes that I have heard in my life have come from fans of the Packers, a pro-billionaire stance seemingly incongruous with the state of Wisconsin’s socialist leanings and the dark-blue city in which the St. Louis-based Packers fans with whom I grew up originated. The ownership structure spawned a cottage industry of deeply insufferable statements from pro-Packers media, such as this embarrassing essay from SB Nation’s Green Bay Packers blog Acme Packing Co., in which the writer concludes that “Fans of the Oakland Raiders are probably wishing they had the opportunity to buy their own ‘worthless piece of paper’ right about now”, callously and myopically ignoring the fact that Oakland Raiders fans were never given the chance.

And yet Packers fans/owners aren’t all that much more powerful than the fans of any other team. In a world of meat-eaters, they are household pets—spared from the worst of fates but hardly regarded as equals by their ultimate masters. It may seem like an overstatement of the power of voters who don’t even get a say in what their so-called ownership peers get to do with their teams, but the Packers are essentially pawns promoted to the power of queens (or perhaps underpromoted to a knight, if you want to keep it to some semblance of scale). Sure, they are more powerful than an ordinary pawn, but ultimately, no matter who holds the power, it all acts in service of the king. And they, and you, will never get to be the king.

Why the 2014 movie Draft Day is about the JFK assassination

A complicated question about entertainment properties, particularly ones which include a bunch of famous people set in what is otherwise reality, is whether other entertainment properties including its stars exist. It is weird, for instance, that The Office’s Michael Scott was not one of those obnoxious dolts who constantly quoted Anchorman as a substitute for an actual sense of humor, but it also would have been way weirder if the guy who played Brick Tamland started quoting Brick Tamland lines. Does Anchorman exist in the Office Cinematic Universe? Maybe, but it’s just way less distracting to side-step the issue.

Ultimately, my perception of this is that Anchorman and Steve Carell (and also guest actors like Will Ferrell and David Koechner) do exist in the Office universe and that Michael Scott and Deangelo Vickers and Todd Packer also exist and that bearing a resemblance to these actors simply isn’t that big of a life event. I’ve known people in my everyday life who looked like a famous person, but that does not dictate their entire lives. I make a rare exception to this rule for Draft Day.

I enjoy the movie Draft Day for what it is—a star vehicle sports movie with moderate amounts of humor and drama and a plot so incoherent and idiotic that, to enjoy it, you have to either ignore it or embrace it. For those unfamiliar with its plot, Kevin Costner, the greatest sports movie star of all-time, stars as the general manager of the Cleveland Browns who, over the course of the single-day-set film, functionally gains a top-ten first-round draft pick and a punt returner good enough to merit interest but not good enough to not be considered a throw-in in exchange for three second-round picks. The plot strikes a balance that confused football fans and novices with equal fervor but it does lead to Kevin Costner getting a bunch of latter-day Jimmy Stewart mini-monologues, which is the whole point of this stupid movie.

Draft Day works hard in many ways to be hyper-realistic—real-life draft analysts such as Rich Eisen, Chris Berman, and Mel Kiper Jr. portray themselves, as does NFL commissioner Roger Goodell—despite the fact that the motivations of the teams depicted are largely nonsensical—while the sheer actuarial results show the trades as mostly believable, the notion that the Cleveland Browns making a surprise selection at #1 would compel other (albeit, largely bad) NFL teams to become scared of drafting the falling star is ridiculous. But most of the team casting works—the Jacksonville Jaguars, for instance, have a panicky doofus calling the shots. The St. Louis Rams, drafting #2 overall, eschew a quarterback for an SEC offensive tackle (a thing which actually happened, to fairly disastrous results, in the actual 2014 NFL Draft).

But there is one fairly distracting exception to this—in the Draft Day universe, the #1 overall pick, presumed to have been earned rather than acquired, belongs at the beginning of the day to the Seattle Seahawks. In real life, the Seahawks did not have the #1 overall pick of the 2014 Draft—they were Super Bowl champions. They very much did not need fictional University of Wisconsin Heisman winner Bo Callahan to be their franchise quarterback, as a different Badgers alum, Russell Wilson, had just led them to their first title. It would be unfair to critique Draft Day for casting the single worst team they could to have the #1 overall pick—they didn’t know Seattle would win the Super Bowl two months before the movie came out. But in 2012, the season before the movie started filming, Seattle went 11-5 and won a playoff game with a rookie quarterback, again, out of the same school as the film’s Golden Boy quarterback. Surely, the movie could have found a more convincing patsy. More on patsies later.

One of the major plot points in Draft Day centers around Costner (calling characters by their names seems deeply unproductive when basically every major character is played by a famous person) feeling uneasy about drafting Bo Callahan (who I will call by name because I figure most people reading this won’t remember the name of the guy who got replaced by a CGI Armie Hammer as the other Winklevoss twin in The Social Network) and continuing to fixate on a The Ohio State linebacker played by Chadwick Boseman, despite obvious red flags such as his being projected as a mid-first round pick at best, his tweeting out disparaging remarks about him earlier that day, and clearly being played by a 37 year-old man. Costner has a conversation with Jennifer Garner, the team’s salary cap analyst/his pregnant girlfriend (the fact that he should be incredibly fired for sleeping with his employee never comes up), in which he references, basically with no further purpose, Joe Montana’s drive to win the Super Bowl in 1989. The best I can guess is that Callahan comes across as an off-putting creep that nobody seems to like and that Costner enjoys that Montana, in a high-pressure situation, pointed out to his teammates that John Candy was in the stands as a way of relaxing them.

John Candy, pointedly referred to by Costner as “the actor John Candy”, was primarily known as a comedian from SCTV and low-to-middlebrow comedies in the 1980s and early 1990s before his premature death in 1994 at the age of 43. But he did make one very rare appearance in a dramatic film in 1991’s critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated courtroom epic JFK, portraying extremely New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews Jr. In his lone scene, the heavily accented Candy meets with the film’s star, Kevin Costner. In a vacuum, I don’t mind that Kevin Costner, as a character, referenced a real-life person that we know the actor knows—if anything, it allows me to reminisce about a movie that I think is a lot better than Draft Day. But what I would like to suggest is that, although it is never explicitly stated, Draft Day takes place in a world in which the film JFK was never made.

For the (mostly) men involved in its creation, JFK didn’t matter that much in terms of their career arcs. The cast is littered with established stars and its director/writer, Oliver Stone, already had two Best Director Oscars on his mantle. But, even beyond the Seinfeld homages and concepts of mysteries wrapped inside enigmas, JFK did have a tangible real-world impact. Upon release, the film, despite its politics being largely ahistorical nonsense, invited a new generation of skepticism about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, even if the focus of the film is on probably the least credible theory ever put forward. And perhaps more significantly, it sanctifies John F. Kennedy, despite his being a mostly unseen character in the film itself (the Zapruder film, shown in detail in JFK, had rarely been viewed publicly prior to the movie). It turns Kennedy into a one-man army who could have personally destroyed the military-industrial complex (and thus spared Stone from serving in Vietnam). It turns Jim Garrison, whose half-baked assassination theories seem to have been deeply rooted in homophobia, into a hero. Despite Stone’s politics being considerably further to the left (back and to the left, as it were) than those of the Democratic Party, his hero protagonist is a conventional Southern Democrat. While further scrutiny of JFK, a film I greatly enjoy but whose historical worth is minimal, has exposed its flaws over the last three decades, Garrison was a paragon for good in the public eye in 1992, the year in which Bill Clinton was elected president, as a Southern Democrat with a discernible accent and a penchant for folksy likability. While the 1992 presidential election is viewed today as a relative blowout, this was not seen as the case in late 1991, with a re-election of George Bush perceived as likely.

Does Bush get re-elected if not for JFK, a film enamored with Southern Democrats and disdainful of the intelligence community, from which Bush’s political career originated? I mean, probably not still, but does Draft Day suppose otherwise? It’s not as though the film explicitly mentions any presidents, nor should a movie about the NFL do so, but it does give us a glimpse into an alternate universe in which the Seattle Seahawks are the worst team in the NFL. So something changed.

The stadium now known as Lumen Field is widely perceived as having one of the strongest home-field advantages in the NFL for the Seahawks, but this stadium has only existed since 2002, and prior to the construction of the architecturally unique venue, Seattle was not especially ballyhooed for their fan support. They were largely an afterthought during their time playing at the Kingdome, which they shared with the Seattle Mariners. And in the mid-1990s, the long-term future of both franchises was an open question. The Seahawks threatened, as did basically every NFL team seeking free money in the 1990s, to relocate to the then-vacated football market of Los Angeles, and extorted nine figures in public money for a stadium. And although the lines blurred considerably in the ensuing decades, George Bush was an old-school lower-case-c conservative politician who disdained spending almost as much as he disdained the taxes which paid for it. Public stadium funding during the Reagan years was minimal (though largely as a function of most teams having relatively new stadiums), but perhaps a continuation of this austerity mindset with regards to sports stadiums—to be clear, one of the few areas in which I would wholeheartedly agree with the traditional conservative mindset—would keep Lumen Field from being built.

Perhaps this means relocation, as the Mariners threatened and the Seattle SuperSonics did, though Draft Day suggests otherwise. Perhaps, it suggests, Seattle was unable to become a semi-dynasty as it did in the 2010s explicitly because they were still playing in the relatively cavernous Kingdome. This is certainly the sort of thing the NFL wants its fans to believe—if you want to be happy in sports, you need to give them hundreds of millions of dollars. Draft Day never references Seattle’s stadium—the only semi-nod was a visible “12” flag, but given that the franchise retired the number in 1984, a flag being utilized in their old stadium is hardly a reach. It’s certainly a cheaper bit of fan service than actually building a first-class facility for your team yourself.

Little is known about Draft Day’s Bo Callahan aside from that he won a Heisman Trophy at Wisconsin, but we do know one detail that goes remarkably unmentioned otherwise via W. Earl Brown, the Browns director of security who for some reason is also tasked with major scouting tasks in his best movie in which the two main characters discuss Joe Montana since There’s Something About Mary—he mentions that Callahan was from Washington (he references him being the finest thrower in Washington and Wisconsin). At this point, Seattle has already traded the pick that would be used on Callahan—this is clearly not a reference to that. In a film where the Cleveland Browns, whose former iteration’s relocation to Baltimore is reference, are obsessed with hometown fan favorites, ultimately drafting a linebacker from their state’s flagship university and a running back whose Hall of Famer father played for the Browns within the film’s fictionalized universe, Callahan’s Washington roots are never discussed by the Seahawks. Perhaps they realize this doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, or perhaps this is yet another piece of evidence that the football culture in the state of Washington has decayed.

In Draft Day, commissioner Roger Goodell is cheered by fans. This is only possible in a propaganda piece. The NFL wanted to send a message. And that message is that if your market does not pony up for more playgrounds for his teams, you will face the consequences.