We Bards Have Our Work Cut Out for Us!

Time for the Bards to rise up and save football!

Having unsheathed my word processor of late in the great cause of shining light on hypocrisy, oppression and outright stupidity, I find myself being called "mean-spirited" for characterizing yesterday's Thanksgiving football game here on the left coast as the San Francisco Homeless vs the Seattle Porch Pirates. I'm sure some snowflake out there must be offended by the names of those two teams. The 49'ers for whom the San Francisco Football team were, after all, money grubbing gold-diggers who certainly didn't pay their taxes. And a Seahawk is a predatory bird who kills for food - hardly an example of proper Veganinity for the youth of California and Washington. So I said we should, in the spirit of the Washington "Commanders", change the team names to something more in keeping with the image of the two great cities they represent.  

And at least such a name change wouldn't ruin the whole point of the matchup like they did by changing Texas' Thanksgiving day classic between the Cowboys and the Redskins into something that makes no sense. Everybody knows Cowboys don't pay any attention to commanders. At least the Cowboys did respect the Native Americans with whom they shared the Great Plains, mutual respect, buffalo meat and the occasional burst of gunfire. Actually, most Native Americans, at least the ones with functioning hormones appropriate to their sex, didn't seem to have a problem with the name of the Washington DC football team. 

 I'm just waiting for an expansion team to show up. I think it should be named "The Whiteskins." Every snowflake in America could root against that team and feel much superior to the redneck rubes that merely come to watch a good football game without any need to have their culture insulted. 

In ancient times, my Celtic ancestors had a tradition. Wandering and not so wandering troubadours and comedians known as bards attended the courts of the ruling class, visited the village squares and the homes of the wealthy (sort of like early social media) and they sang scurrilous songs, told scandalous jokes and because the culture protected such rogues, they poked fun at the wealthy and powerful - kind of a pressure valve that kept the peasants from rising up in the middle of the night and murdering the upper classes in their beds. 

Today, folks like me, the guys at the Babylon Bee, the late great Rush Limbaugh, Ray Stevens, South Park, Saturday Night Live (which has, of late, taken some pretty hard swipes at the omnipotent moral busibodies of the regressive left), Internet sensation Oliver Anthony and others are driven to create satire, to spoof egregious behavior by the rich and oppressive and to make fun of their foolishness. We are the bards of the 21st century. The current wave of so-called wokeness that has overwhelmed our traditional and much-loved cultural icons like Disney, the six o'clock news, and, God help us, the halls of Congress threatens us regular folks out in the heartland. Sadly, the perpetrators of wokeness have lost their sense of humor almost entirely. 

Our betters, back in the olden days tolerated the teasing of the bards and jesters for if they were too thin-skinned about being teased, people figured they were weak and someone with a big sword would come along and relieve them of their heads on behalf of "the people" that Karl Marx claimed to be fighting for. Back when Karl was unemployed, living in his mother's basement, and trying hard to come up with something that would catch on with the hoity toity set, he created socialism, which the British upper class immediately recognized as an ideal mechanism by which to re-institute the old divine right of kings nobility and hierarchy of the leader class. And that is all Marxism/communism is after all and it's why the elitist upper classes love socialism so much. They figure they will be the big dogs after the revolution comes. 

The dismal history of socialism is also why I believe it to be my duty and the duty of every brave soul with a rapier wit and an Internet website to poke fun at and let a little air out of today's over-inflated self-important unearned but self-proclaimed morally superior gasbags. It's part of our heritage. Let's face it Americans were kicked out of every decent country in the world mostly because we just couldn't keep our mouths shut. We come from long lines of sarcastic, loud-mouthed troublemakers. I consider myself a bard, the descendant of generations of bards (and like bard's of yore, I have a sword nearby just in case some over-entitled busybody takes umbrage.)

© 2023 by Tom King