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.
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