A Culture of Denial is a Culture of Failure

Jim Schwartz addressing the media about Matthew Stafford's "outstanding" mechanics.

It occurred to me earlier that I had yet to even think about the Lions game this weekend against the Colts.  These are the things that happen when your season degenerates into a forced death march through the desert of the damned back to the hell fires that have slow roasted our souls for far too long.  I haven’t really thought much about the game against the Colts because I simply don’t want to.  My brain is in revolt.  When it comes to the Lions, it has gone on strike.  Solidarity, brother.

Earlier today, though, the name Titus Young started being thrown around again and at least a few synapses of my brain decided to cross the picket line and so here we are.  I wish it was a better place, a place where Titus Young didn’t get suspended for acting like a passive-aggressive five year old, but well… yeah.

Just in case you haven’t heard the rumors, here’s how it basically breaks down: against the Packers, Titus decided to throw a petulant little shit-fit because he didn’t think he was getting the ball enough, so, naturally, he did what all rational adults do and intentionally lined up wrong multiple times because, uh, that’ll show ‘em I guess.  Of course, this then led to Jim Schwartz basically exiling Titus from the team for a while (and if this is true then “for a while” probably should have been “permanently”) only to welcome him back to the fold this past week.  And now practice observers report a sullen Titus Young roaming the sidelines of the practice field, picking up trash like he’s been sentenced to community service or some shit.  No word on whether or not he’s been wearing an orange vest.

I don’t really have anything to add to that.  The inanity of it speaks for itself.  It practically screams out LIONS DISEASE in big, flashy neon lights for the whole world to see.  It is the Lions equivalent of the infamous SPARTY NOOOOOOO, which if you don’t know is a reference to Michigan State’s almost supernatural propensity for fucking up at exactly the worst possible moment in the worst possible way.  It is a well-known phenomenon in this here state of mine, and while those on my side of the aisle laugh uproariously and use it as a punch-line, I can understand how my Spartan friends feel about it because goddammit, that’s how shit like this Titus Young news feels to me as a Lions fan.  It is just so quintessentially LIONS, you know?  In that strange and terrible way we are all too familiar with.  ROARY NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!  Indeed.

It is with that crawling its way laboriously through the halls of my shattered mind that I sit down to write about this weekend’s game and while parts of me are trying desperately to cling to shreds of whatever leftover enthusiasm is still littering those weird halls (at least the ones that Titus Young hasn’t metaphorically scraped up along with his literal janitorial duties – and by the way, I think I’m going to nickname Titus Young “The Janitor” from now on.) other parts of me – and if I’m being honest, the more dominant parts of me – have simply ceased to care.  At least in a way that doesn’t feel like some false put-on, some forced attempt to throw up shredded pom-poms and lead some sort of perverse spirit rally for the congregation.  This season has sucked, yo.  Actually, it hasn’t just sucked, it has suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked, and I will not pay fealty to it out of some misplaced sense of loyalty and honor.  Fuck it and fuck this team.

I’ll still watch – why not? – but I’m not going to pretend that I’m into it just to placate some foolish juvenile need to engage in some sort of dumb tribalism.  I have been through too much, I have seen too much, and goddammit, I will not put myself through this just to prove a point.  I have too many scars, too many old wounds that never quite healed.  I walk with a permanent limp, my face is disfigured and I drool when I talk.  I have been beaten upside the head too many goddamn times and people look away when they see me because I make them uncomfortable.  I go to support groups and am surrounded by people who tell me to love myself and that everything will be alright but goddammit, I can’t even feed myself without making a mess and I have to wear a diaper and sometimes the diaper leaks.  Things are not alright and I’m not going to lie to myself.  I am a Lions fan, and that is a truth that is filled with stark, naked horror, a truth that cannot be spruced up or made into an inspirational holiday story for the kids.  My team’s mascot is Titus “the Janitor” Young and nothing I gibber on about is going to change that.

The thing is – the singular macabre piece of tragicomic horror that drives this whole absurd thing – is that I can’t help it.  I can’t look away.  I can’t turn away.  I can’t abandon the idiot’s carnival that is the Detroit Lions because it is a part of me, they are a part of me.  They are the scars, the wounds, the limp, the drool, the shit-filled diaper.  I can’t abandon the Lions because abandoning the Lions would be abandoning myself.  You can’t choose who you love, even if who you love is a crackhead family member who keeps stealing your shit and ruining your life.  It is part of your DNA, encoded into your being and to try to extract it is a fool’s endeavor, like medieval charlatans trying to turn lead into gold.

I’m still here and I will be here until the end of time, just a ragged and broken skeleton, rotting under a hell-sun, wearing Honolulu Blue and setting fire to my eye-sockets and screaming a horrible death wail, a banshee scream that never ends, that just circles through time, frightening those in the past and those in the future, wrapping us all in one big goddamn horror show that is eternal.

Jesus Christ, this is maudlin and bleak, even for me.  But this is where I am as a fan and I’m not going to lie about it.  But what the hell, a new week is a new week and like they say in the support groups, we just have to take it one day at a time, or in this case one game at a time.  The good news – if you can call anything “good news” in this season of the damned – is that this one particular week has the chance to be not a total and complete butt.  And by that, I mean I actually expect the Lions to win.  This is not that farfetched – I mean, let’s be honest here, for all the woe is me stuff above the Lions are not a horrible football team, they’re just a horribly dysfunctional football team which is a fatal flaw I have become completely convinced they will be unable to overcome anytime soon.  This means that they will still win games, just like the Wayne Fontes era Lions won some games.  If that’s good enough for you, then what the hell, have fun.  I just wanted more.  Fuck that, I needed more.  But if Jim Schwartz channeling Wayne Fontes and coddling Matthew Stafford while he Scott Mitchells his way down the field and our one transcendent superstar, St. Calvin, takes the sins of the world upon his shoulders a la Barry Sanders is what works for you, then by all means, enjoy.  It’s just that you and I remember that time very, very differently.

I should have mentioned this earlier when I was discussing the Janitor Young incident but I forgot and hey, these things happen when you sit down to write and have no idea what to say – you just free-write and hope that you make sense somewhere along the way.  But yeah, anyway, that quick mention of Schwartz coddling Stafford reminded me of something I saw a couple of days ago.  It was a headline on MLive that said “Matthew Stafford’s mechanics ‘outstanding’ according to coach Jim Schwartz.”

Yeah.  What in the hell do you even say to something like that?  That level of denial is so deeply ingrained that the only thing you can do is sort of shrug your shoulders and then collapse into a heap of tears, muttering “Oh God” over and over again and then writing maudlin suicide notes like this infernal post.  That, coupled with the Titus Young story, is everything that is wrong, everything that has ever been wrong, with the Detroit Lions.  It is exactly that sort of ridiculous Baghdad Bob bullshit that turns hard times into a culture of losing, into the culture of Lions Disease.  It is a culture born of denial and passive-aggressive dickery.  You can read the failed wailing and idiot epitaphs of a dozen catastrophic Lions head coaches in Jim Schwartz’s words.  You can hear their ghostly whispers dancing around the word “outstanding.”  Jesus, they have poisoned his mind and oh, the horror, the horror . . .

Look, I have kinda gotten carried away here the last few paragraphs.  I meant to segue into a discussion about why I think the Lions will beat the Colts on Sunday – and I think they will – but there are more important things to discuss here.  I am sick and goddamned tired of the willful denial which props up our fanbase.  When things are going well  (I know, I know, this occurs at roughly the same rate as the appearance of Halley’s Comet)  the fear-mongers refuse to embrace it because they don’t want to be hurt again.  They deny reality in order to save themselves.  But when things take a turn for the Millen, people deny that shit too and claim all is well like Kevin Bacon screaming his ass off in the street in Animal House while anarchy reigns because they need to believe in order to protect themselves.  It’s two sides of the same miserable coin and I’m fucking sick of it.  This is not okay and if you say that it is, then right now you’re part of the problem and you’re just helping to perpetuate this miserable cycle of denial.  You are feeding Lions Disease.  You are making it strong.  Congratulations.

It’s time to take a goddamn Big Boy Pill.  It’s time for Jim Schwartz to walk up to Matthew Stafford and say “Yo, your mechanics are kinda fucked up so let’s fix this shit before it gets even worse.”  It’s time for everyone involved to take a look at the situation and admit to themselves that what they’re doing isn’t working.  You can cherry pick stats all you want and tell me that this is the same team that went 10-6 last year but they’re 4-7 and that’s all that matters.  And honestly, even while you’re over there gibbering about them being an 8-3 team that’s just had some bad breaks I can point out that they could just as easily be 1-10 right now so let’s just split the difference which puts them at, well, it puts them at 4-7.  You know who does that whole WELL WE COULD HAVE WON THIS GAME AND THIS GAME AND THAT ONE AND IF THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN THEN WE COULD HAVE TOTALLY WON THAT ONE???  Losers.  That’s who.  Denial worshipping losers. 

I know these are incredibly harsh words and I am basically standing alone yelling at literally everyone else who calls themselves a Lions fan, and hell, I’m even yelling at myself because I’ve done that too, but goddammit guys, at some point you have to stop whining and playing the victim and denying that real, substantive problems exist.  The simple fact is that the Lions didn’t win those games.  They lost them and you’re right, they lost them because they didn’t get the miracles that they got last season.  But what’s so fucked up is that so many people don’t seem to realize is that that’s the problem right there.  If you’re relying on miracles to be the foundation of your team’s winning strategy then you’re not just up shit-creek without a paddle, you’re drowning in that foul son of a bitch.

I don’t want to be writing these words right now.  I want to be praising Glorious Leader Schwartz and writing odes to The Great Willie Young but enough’s enough.  Things are not right, Matthew Stafford’s mechanics are not outstanding, the Lions don’t somehow deserve to be 7-4 or 8-3 or whatever fantasy land scenario y’all have concocted in order to call a temporary truce with the horrors of your own heart, and this is not a good football team, or even anything approaching a good football team.  This has nothing to do with offseason arrests or any red-herring bullshit like that and everything to do with the fact that this football team is fucking failing before our eyes.  No one is out to get them.  No one is unfairly persecuting them.  STOP MAKING EXCUSES.  THE LIONS ARE NOT A GOOD FOOTBALL TEAM AND THEY’RE NOT A GOOD FOOTBALL TEAM BECAUSE THEY WON’T TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR BEING ONE.

Sorry about the all-caps meltdown there but I’m sick of this shit.  I’m sick of the excuses and all the mewling bullshit that accompanies it.  Just stop it already.  Christ. 

Okay Neil, deep breath, we’ll get through this.  You’re right, other Neil.  You’re right.

Anyway . . . sorry, but a man needed to say some things and a man has said them.  I wish I had talked more about the actual game against the Colts this week – I certainly intended to – but Great Truths got in the way and when Great Truths decide to speak, you just have to get out of the way and let them.  The Lions should beat the Colts and, well, honestly that kind of says it all right there.  The Lions should beat the Colts because they are just objectively a better, more talented football team.  And yet the Colts are 7-4 and the Lions are 4-7.  This is not a mistake, or a fluke or any other excusatory bullshit you want to throw out there.  The Lions come into this game with a shittier record because they have earned that shitty record.  If they stop reveling in their own denial and coddling those parts of themselves which tell them that it’s okay to be a 4-7 team because it’s not their fault but everybody else’s then they will beat the Colts.  It’s as simple as that.  If they stand up and take responsibility for themselves, for their record, for who they are and who they want to be as a team then goddammit, there’s no reason they shouldn’t win this game against a rookie quarterback leading a team without a head coach a year after that same talent-deficient team went to zombie town.  If you can’t beat a team like that without making love to excuses then goddammit, just get the hell out of the way and let somebody else take a shot because I have no time for that weak shit anymore.

Lions win and if they don’t, it’s their own goddamn fault.  It’s time to grow up.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Somewhere, in the midst of the broken place that is my idiot fan heart, there still lives that thunderous whatever the hell that was I wrote only a couple of days ago, when I dragged myself off of my little corner stool, mouth filling with blood, spinal fluid pouring out of my nose and I challenged the whole world to a fight.  The problem with doing that is sometimes the world answers the bell too and when it does it is often hideous and gruesome and, well . . . you saw what happened.

It is fitting and terrible and gross and maddening and all too preciously perfect that the game turned on a play so heinous, so absolutely and slavishly devoted to the worship of the Necronomicon the NFL calls a rulebook, that 9,000 pound leviathan that hill trolls bring out of storage, rampaging orcs riding them and whipping their backs as they trudge and drag that monstrosity to the field anytime there’s a replay or a challenge or any other decision a referee has to make besides whether or not he is confident that he can make it to his car before he’s lynched by outraged fans.  And it was appropriate because after all that blathering I did about the New Americanism, there could be no more perfect moment to illustrate that the NFL, with all its corporatized double speak and Orwellian “No, the sky is not blue, it is electric green just like we tell you it is and no that knee was not down even though it was and everybody knows it was but argle bargle argle bargle and so on and so forth” inane bullshit, is the ultimate league of the New Americanism.  It embodies everything gross and stupid and asinine about that world, and that play and the hideous aftermath, itself gross and stupid and asinine, drove that point home more clearly than just about anything else I can imagine.  And in the end, it made me feel stupid for tricking myself into believing that real things matter, that what actually happens matters, that when a dude’s knee touches the ground and everyone sees it and knows that he’s fucking down that it matters.  My mistake, I guess.

Of course, it wasn’t just that.  The entire game felt like one that the Lions should have won, and for the second straight week they had the game pretty well in hand and then pissed it away in the final minutes, which is a new and oh so precious wrinkle that Fate and the Failure Demons have decided to send our way in this, the year of our great cornholing at the hands of the universe.  Like last week, the Lions had a chance to go up by ten points with only minutes left in the game, and just like last week they failed in that way that is far too familiar to all of us by now.  Last week, they settled for a field goal when a touchdown would have put the game out of reach.  This time, Matthew Stafford took a bad sack to take them out of field goal position and keep the game in reach for the Texans.  (God, I hate that senseless name.)

What followed probably deserves its own chapter in the long book of shame that is the story of the Detroit Lions.  Nick Harris managed to pin the Texans deep in their own end (something he managed to do a few times in this game so, uh, yay Nick I guess.) and then, naturally, the Texans drove the length of the field to tie the game at 31.  By the time they scored I was actually relieved that they did it fast enough so that Matthew “Sidewinder” Stafford could lead the Lions down the field and kick the game winning field goal because goddammit, in a just and fair world that is what is supposed to happen.

But this isn’t a just and fair world and you would think that I would have learned that terrible lesson by now.  No, instead the Lions drive stalled out and they were forced to take the game to overtime.  But, lo!  What’s this?  The Lions won the toss and continued to taunt my idiot heart and make me believe that they were going to finish what they started and finally win a goddamn Thanksgiving game.  They moved the ball with ease, taking it into Texans territory and . . . and then Brandon Pettigrew remembered he was Brandon Pettigrew and decided to reenact the heinous week 3 fumble against the Titans. 

And so it goes.  But Fate wasn’t done with us.  No, not by a long shot.  The Texans painfully and depressingly moved the ball into field goal territory of their own but the Lions defensive wall stiffened and drove those sons of bitches back just the extra yard necessary to force Shane Graham to put one just wide of the uprights.  And in that moment, despite the years of failure, the incessant misery, the constant pain, the misguided Charlie Brown optimism, I lined up, smiled at Lucy, got ready to kick that fucking ball one more time, more sure than ever that the Lions were going to win the game.  Again, it was the only just and fair outcome, and besides, a way of life, proud and hard Detroit vs. soft, carpet-bagging New America Houston, was at stake.

And then Jason Hanson did what Jason Hanson never does and missed the game winning field goal.  Dom Raiola was the picture of perfect failure on the sideline, squeezing every last drop of hope he had left in his idiot body into a desperate prayer, a prayer that fell deaf and dumb on whatever football gods were hanging out at Ford Field, ready to bend us over and break one off in our fool asses.  The ball went up and it hit the upright.  It hit the goddamn upright.  One inch to the left and we’d all be celebrating the Lions triumph – and Detroit’s – over the Texans and the scions of the New Americanism.  But it didn’t go one inch to the left and Dom Raiola winced and felt the gods slap him upside the head just as they have for more than a decade and in that moment the Lions and their fans and everything about us was utterly broken.

Predictably, the Texans cruised right on down the field and Shane Graham kicked the game winning field goal while Ford Field turned into a half-living tomb, a sarcophagus filled with slack-jawed zombies stumbling aimlessly towards the exits while the players and coaches milled about the field like lobotomized cattle, lowing at the fates, tongues lolling idiotically out of their mouths, and in that moment the Failure Demons all laughed and if there was any justice in the world, the giant foot from Monty Python would have taken that moment to make its triumphant return to pop culture.

But it didn’t and so everyone in that goddamn stadium, zombie and cattle alike, were forced to try to come up with something, anything, that would both explain just what in the fuck just happened and give them all a reason to believe there was a point in continuing on with this mad charade, this chimera of the soul masquerading as belief.

And that’s where we find ourselves right now, looking for answers, for people to blame, for something, anything, that we can do to justify the heinous bullshit we had to experience today.  And the truth is, is that you can blame everybody and everything.  It was just that kind of a game, a hideous amalgamation of everything that we have come to fear as Lions fans.  The refs boned us and didn’t even bother to lube up or wear a goddamn rubber (let’s not forget that aside from that horrendous non-review was the earlier review in which they refused to acknowledge what was a clear fumble by the Texans – or rather a ball that bounced off of a Texan knee on a kickoff and into the hands of a waiting Lion), Matthew Stafford continued his decline into outright boobery, throwing damn near every pass with that side-armed, back-footed DON’T MIND ME I’M JUST SKIPPIN’ ROCKS FELLAS way of his, missing open receiver after open receiver, there were the ill-timed fumbles, the lead-blowing, the coaching nincompoopery, and the beating of the hideous heart.

But Edgar Allan Poe references aside, let’s talk about that coaching nincompoopery for a moment, okay?  Coach bashing is a sacred rite of passage for all Lions fans and God only knows that I have wielded a bloody club myself from time to time but for the most part – certain misgivings aside – I have stuck with Jim Schwartz and the general gameplan even as others began to turn on him like a savage cannibal army.  But today was unforgivable.  It just was.  It was the sort of bullshit we’ve come to loathe about this team all wrapped up in one petulant idiotic gesture.  And what’s worse is that Schwartz knew it and did it anyway.  This wasn’t a case of a dude who simply didn’t know any better and threw the damn flag anyway.  No, he knew what he was doing but he did it anyway because he was pissed off.  Hell, he even admitted it in his press conference after the game!  He knew and he did it anyway, just like his goddamn team has done time after time after time the last couple of seasons.

I mean, what can you say to that?  What can you say that will make that okay?  This was his moment, that one horrible, shameful, clownish moment that strikes every man who dares to try to coach this insipid franchise.  This was the moment that Jim Schwartz went from embattled savior to just another punchline.  This was the moment he lost Lions fans, the moment that he became Wayne Fontes, Darryl Rodgers, Rod Marinelli, Marty “Take the Goddamn Wind” Mornhinweg.  This was the moment he was struck down fatally by Lions Disease, and it happened on national TV with every Lions fan – even the casual, casual ones who only watch on Thanksgiving – watching.  This was the moment that crystalized who he was, for better or worse, in the minds of all of those fans and naturally, it was for worse, and when I say worse I mean it was about as worse as worse can get.  He could have shit his pants, sat down and started weeping and his reputation wouldn’t have suffered as much as it did following that descent into petulance and madness.  When people talk about him years from now, this is what they’ll talk about.  This was his Take the Wind moment and hey, that might not be fair – it almost certainly isn’t given how damn miraculous is was that he dragged us from 0-16 to 10-6 – but that’s just the way this turd disguised as a cookie crumbles.

That sucks but it is what it is.  It is what it goddamn is.  And while that was just one moment in an admittedly exciting game, a game the Lions should have won a thousand times over and a game the Lions managed to lose a thousand and one times over and in a thousand and one different ways, that’s the one that everyone will remember.

There is a lot that people can be happy with in this game – the Lions led the whole way against a 10-1 team, they were physical, they broke out the big plays, St. Calvin nearly rose to heaven, and when Matthew Stafford wasn’t flipping it underhand while falling backwards to a wide open expanse of nothingness he was making the plays that make people coddle him and overlook and enable all of the aforementioned bullshit.  Everything that we love – or want to love anyway – about this team was on display.  But everything that we hate was there too and in the end, that outweighed everything else – yet again.

People will nitpick this shit to death, because that’s just what fans do, especially hyper-obsessive internet fans, but really what’s the point?  We all know what the problems are, they’re pretty damn obvious by now, and now it’s just a matter of whether or not you have faith in the dudes in charge to fix it.  Unfortunately the dude we’re supposed to have faith in just entered the Mornhinweg Zone and shit, that’s almost an impossible place to come back from, you know?

In the end, I’m just sort of sad, not necessarily because the Lions lost (after all, what’s one more loss in this lost world of a season?) but because this felt like the type of game that represented a tipping point, a “there’s no coming back from this” point, because the symbolism was just too perfect, the fuck-ups crystalized in a way that will hang over this team’s head until they either obliterate them in a way we’ve never seen a Lions team do or until somebody else comes along and fools our idiot hearts into believing in something better one more time.  This was the type of game that defines a team, not just in the present but for the future as well.  This is the type of game that becomes a ghost and follows the team around, a ghost that howls and whispers terrible things in their ears at the worst possible times, a ghost that ultimately breaks them and us and everything and everyone involved with this accursed franchise.

It’s been a hard season, a miserable season, the sort of season that puts fans down for good, but on Thanksgiving, one more time, I dragged myself out of the corner, mouth filled with blood, spinal fluid pouring out of my nose, and I dared the world to knock me out.  And the world rose up before me, toyed with me for a while, and then it did.

This is Detroit and This is OUR Game

Well, it’s Thanksgiving and as usual various writers and cretins have popped up and written their annual dirge about how disgraceful it is that the Lions have the honor of playing on Thanksgiving every year.  I feel like I write this same thing every goddamn season and so I won’t hammer it home too heavily this time (okay fine, I am going to lay it on THICK this year) but I will say that we invented the Thanksgiving day game, it is ours, it is the only thing that is ours (other than soul-crushing ennui) and to try to take it away from us is both unconscionable and disgusting.  It is the act of a soulless monster, a heinous lizard man who speaks in perverted maths and worships the New Americanism and I have no time for your heartless bullshit.  No sir.

It is perhaps appropriate then that the team that is strolling into our den this year is an icon of the New Americanism.  Yes, the Houston Texans, with their corporatized and shameless red, white and blue veneer, their senseless name meant to convey some sort of dumb tribalism, the worship of the mad sunbelt capitalist living in the unfettered oil dystopia of Texas, bathing in both black gold and the blood of anyone born with a soul, chasing the dark heart of the perversion of the American Dream, wide-eyed with a fervor unique to the greedhead, driving on and on and on into a senseless and soul-withering end, a dead-end street at the end of a subdivision in which every house looks the same, white men in khakis and polo shirts harangue the paper boy and fuck their plastic wives while they just lie there in their Barbiturate haze and wine comas, numb to the horrors of their enslaved existence.  Yes, that is who and what the Houston Texans represent and it is our duty as Americans and human beings and preservers of a truer and nobler ideal to smash them into their base particles, snort them and get high on their misery and shame.

It has been a hard season, in many ways a lost season, and things have gotten . . . unpleasant.  All you have to do is witness my own descent into madness, my shameless self-pity and despair, the flogging of my own doomed fan heart, to understand just how truly dire the situation has become.  And yet, on this one day, this one day that is ours, that we invented and that we clutch to ourselves as the one perfect remnant of a once glorious, barely remembered past, none of that matters.  The present is meaningless and all that matters is the destruction of the infidels who come to take the remnants of what was once ours away from us.

Detroit is not Houston.  It is not a carpetbagger’s nirvana, filled with grotesque oil-men with thousand gallon hats and gaudy leather cowboy boots, strutting the streets, a sneer on their face while they eat the poor and shit out despair.  No, Detroit is a hard place, a real place, an American place, the promise of everything good and noble and true about America.  It has seen hard times, but hard times are what make men strong.  Hard times are what forge the iron of the heart, the steel of the soul.  Detroit built this nation, built it strong and tough and yes, a little grimy, a little wild.  Houston is the parasite that came to feed on what we have built.  Houston is the hideous beast that has nibbled and nibbled and nibbled until it seems sometimes as if there is almost nothing left.  Houston has perverted the American Dream, turned it into something ugly, something perverse, something to be leveraged and sold, processed and strip-mined.  Houston is everything we are not.  Houston is everything that has been taken from us.  Houston is the mockery of everything we hold dear, of everything we have broken ourselves to make, to be, to cherish.

They send their team, their fake red, white and blue soulless zombie team to break us further before a national audience.  They laugh at us and tell the world that what we are, who we are, our ideals, our identities, everything that we have done, everything that we have made, that we have forged in the furnace of America’s soul, this place called Detroit, where the sons of slaves came to find salvation, where the poor, the hungry, the tired came to shape for themselves an almost impossible dream, are meaningless and stupid.  They come to tell the world that our vision, our American Dream, is dead and that their perverted New Americanism, with its black, befouled heart is all that there’s left to believe in.

Well fuck that and fuck them.  They will not rest until the world is broken, poor, utterly without meaning, bereft of spirit and they will not sleep until the masses huddle before their throne of lies and worship, sorrowful souls wailing to a false god because the world has become senseless and cruel and that seems the only way.  But for one day, for one moment, our Spirit Warriors can pull their shit together and stand before them and say not today, say that we fight to protect not a mere endzone or a simple playoff dream but a way of life and an American Dream.

The Lions are in a bad place.  They have not won on Thanksgiving in almost ten years.  The world forgets us, they laugh at us, they mock us and more of them turn to the grotesque ideals of the New Americanism every day.  They blame us for everything that has gone wrong in this country, tell us that we are weak, that we are failures, that our people and our football team are embarrassments to everyone else.  They tell us that we don’t belong anymore, that this world, this place called America is not ours but theirs and that we should just capitulate, leverage our souls and buy into the false prophets of the New Americanism.  They tell us that we should shun our own team, our own beleaguered Spirit Warriors and accept a new order, an order which decrees that the Thanksgiving game should come to places like Houston, like Phoenix, to places bereft of spirit, sprawling metropolises spreading out over an endless horizon of depressing homogeny, home to broken people, wrecked people, who worship the darkness and make love to their own shame, hateful wretches who piss on everything good and noble and true about America, who sneer at brown people and greedily count their heavily leveraged assets and tell the whole world that they are proud of their own disgusting ignorance, that they revel in their own barbaric hatred of anyone who is not down with their insane sickness.

This is an important game because it is not about football but about the need to take a stand, to remind everyone that we are still here, that we cannot and will not be forgotten, that you cannot spit on us and ignore us with your sneering pomposity, and that there still exists a better way, a nobler way, a more American way.  We are the team of the dispossessed, the team of the hated, the pissed on, the marginalized.  We are the team of the brown, the black, the yellow and anyone and everyone not deemed pure enough for the New Americanism.  We are the team of iron and steel, the team of the people that demand more of ourselves and of our country, the team of the people who are tired of the leveraging of the American Dream, the people who go to sleep every night and worry about what those cocksuckers will do to rob them tomorrow, the team of the people who are sick and tired of taking shit and just want to wake up on Thanksgiving, turn on the TV and watch their team fight back in a meaningless, symbolic silly way that in the end means everything.

The Houston Texans are coming to town and they will be favored by everybody.  And we will spend every moment up until game time shaking our heads and wailing with despair because our team has seemingly let us down, because Titus Young has betrayed his brothers, because our dysfunction is just one more sorrowful reminder of how long we have had to try to fight and crawl out from underneath this avalanche of decay, how long we’ve had to slam ourselves, seemingly without hope, headlong into that savage tide of the New Americanism.  But once that game starts, we will remember who we are, and as disgusted as we are with the present, as broken and battered as we have been by the past, we will still fight and we will still smile a bloody smile and rage against the dying of our own beautiful noble light because we are the soul of America, we are where the American Dream was forged, and that is all we know how to do.  You’ll never take Thanksgiving from us and you will never win.

Lions win because fuck anything else.