Living in America

I always get a little fired up whenever the Lions play the Cowboys. This is true for a couple of different reasons, I think. First, there’s the obvious historical reasons: my most cherished Lions memory is sitting in the Silverdome and watching the Lions obliterate the Cowboys for the only playoff win of the last 60 years, of watching Barry Sanders disappear beneath a pile of Cowboys and then somehow emerge out the other end like fuckin’ Houdini and race towards the endzone while everyone in the building lost their collective shit. And, of course, there’s whatever the hell that abomination was in the playoffs a few years ago in Dallas where the Lions should have had their second playoff win of the last 60 years only for the refs, fate and the sheer awful Lionsness of it all to combine to fuck it all up.

But second, and deeper I think, is that the Cowboys – and the city it represents – are everything venal and awful about this country, the exact opposite of the Lions – and the city it represents.

Dallas is a huckster’s paradise, a city of oil conmen and new money, existing for the sole purpose of sucking both the Earth and the people who live on it dry. It’s giant cowboy hats and fake swagger, a sociopath with a bullhorn mouth, a bully that stomps on vulnerable people in order to mask his own pathetic weakness. Dallas is the leering, sweaty brow hanging above the sour stale-beer breathed mouth of a vulture, waiting to pick the bones clean of anyone who lets their guard down for even a moment. It is the New Americanism, an ugly unrestrained capitalism that just takes and takes and takes. It’s no wonder that this is home to the NFL’s America’s Team.

And the Cowboys fall right in line with the whole bullshit mythos of it. They’re worshipped by a certain type who believes in the noisy veneer of the Military-Industrial complex, who wraps themselves in the flag and Lee Greenwood songs, who thinks America exists as an extension of that bully swagger, who doesn’t understand that it’s all just a massive inferiority complex disguised as “power.” The Cowboys are that franchise and always have been.

They are owned by a literal and metaphorical oil man, a dude who’s spent his fortune sucking the earth dry and oozing through life with a rictus grin, a slippery fucker, tasteless and washed in arrogance, a poor man’s idea of a rich man, a dumb man’s idea of a smart man, a stupid cartoon representing everything wrong about this country. The Cowboys are his team. Even before he owned them, they were his team, belonging to the JR Ewings, the fake cowboys of the world.

Their most iconic stars are two quarterbacks who were never their best players, but they represented exactly what the sort of people who love the Cowboys need in their heroes: square-jawed and empty, asses clenched around a permanent stick as they thanked God and saluted the flag, good Christian boys with good Christian values. It didn’t hurt that one was a literal military man, and it really didn’t hurt that both were white as snow, both racially and in terms of their souls.

It didn’t matter that the rest of the team was ugly and mean, cokeheads and whoremongers, as long as you had a Roger Staubach or a Troy Aikman smiling blandly and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while standing, hands on heart, in front of a flag that their privilege never gave them cause to question. Shallow and empty.

And then you have Detroit, sad, broken Detroit, spit-on and scorned Detroit. Where Dallas was built on a people who took, Detroit was built on a people who built things. Dallas belongs to the bosses. Detroit belongs to the workers. Detroit is the city of the voiceless, of men and women who made their way north after decades of living in constant terror on tenement farms down south, who went to work in the factories, on the assembly lines and built America and each other. They were and are the backbone of this country. When it went to war, they stopped building cars and started building tanks, building planes, building anything and everything to help this country defeat fucking Nazis.

You wake up every day living in a country with problems. You wake up in Dallas’ America. But you also wake up in the most affluent country this world has ever known, in a country where things like “safety” and “liberty” were until recently taken for granted. You live in a country where once upon a time you actually had the chance to get a good job without mortgaging your whole life away, in a country where the poor, the wretched, the sons and daughters of slaves, could get a fair wage for a fair day’s work and buy the very things that they built. That is Detroit’s America. It is a ruined, broken idea, and yet, there was a time when it came the closest to achieving the ideal that we all want to believe in, the basic idea of America. That is Detroit and goddammit, it always will be.

And the Lions are its team. Once proud, a long, long time ago, it is now a broken franchise, scorned and mocked by the Dallas proudbois of the world. It’s a team left behind, a franchise that always sees its Hope stolen by the same corrupt assholes who ruined it all in the first place. The NFL has been turned into a conman’s paradise, a league determined to turn the whole world into the slick oil-fields of Jerry Jones, to match his rotten soullessness, and it’s no wonder that the Lions are always on the shit-end of that stick.

You take Dallas’ heroes, the Staubachs and the Aikmans, and now contrast them with the Lions heroes. Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson. Both of them quiet, unassuming, just men who wished to go about their business, men of supreme grace, infused with a quiet dignity, who hit the factory floor every day, every week, every year, because you are told that if you do that, you will find the American Dream. That it will find you and everything will be okay.

But it’s not okay. It wasn’t okay, and they were eventually broken by the Lie, by living in Dallas’ America, an America that peddles that lie in order to keep people like Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson coming to work every day, that peddles that lie so that they will keep building things that the Dallas robber-barons, that the Jerry Jones’ of the world, can coopt and steal and finally just take away altogether because no matter how hard you work, the American Dream is not for you, it is for the bosses, and worse still, the moment it becomes cheaper to let some poor slave in fucking China or wherever do the job, to prop up their stolen prosperity, they’ll even take that away from you and leave you to rot in a city surrounded by other betrayed people. This is what Dallas has done to Detroit, and whenever someone decides to snidely go in on Detroit, this is what you should think about. You should think about a people lied to, a people betrayed, a people robbed of their dreams, of their dignity, of their very security, of a desperate people with nothing left. You think of a Barry Sanders, of a Calvin Johnson, of their beauty, their grace, and you think that they have nothing left to show for it other than their own memories, memories themselves tainted by The Lie.

You assholes in Dallas stole our world. You stole what we built and you corrupted it. You stole what Detroit made and you ruined it with your petty greed and with your hearts made of hate and poison. You wanted it all. Well, now you have it, and your empty-ass souls have wrecked it because that’s who you are. The America you live in today is the America that Dallas deserves because it mirrors the wretched inner-life of a Jerry Jones. Fuck you.

Well . . . shit. Football, eh? I’m fired up! It’s everything I just wrote, but it also comes from watching the Lions dismantle the Patriots, from watching the Broken People pull it together for one beautiful moment and live again in a world that they see for themselves. Maybe the Dream was stolen from us, but the truth is that you can’t steal a Dream. You can’t steal Hope. You can beat it down until its almost nothing, you can make people almost curse it as some sort of sick, ironic joke, but Hope is a thing that lives in everybody, even if they don’t realize it, and sometimes all it takes is something like a stupid game to stoke those embers and then shit baby, we got a little fire going.

It’s not that I suddenly believe that the Lions are gonna take it all back, it’s just that it makes me remember . . . well, all of this. It makes me remember that there are better things, that we don’t have to live in this wretched world, in this Dallas’ America even if its only for one stupid symbolic Sunday afternoon.

The Cowboys don’t really look so hot this season, and still, it was only a week ago that I would have probably written something vastly different, something detached and bored because I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel those embers. This is all stupid in a real sense. I mean, it’s football, who cares? But that is the beauty of a dumb game. It’s just a game, sure, but the magic time is the time when it becomes so much more to you, when it truly becomes your city against theirs, when it becomes you versus them, when it becomes Your Way vs Their Way, and when you’re allowed to believe that, when you’re allowed to believe in that, “sports” becomes something powerful, a kind of ritualized metaphor you can’t find in anything else.

I’ve been woken to that. Maybe it was seeing the Lions hammer the Patriots, and maybe it was seeing the Cowboys next on that schedule. Maybe the timing of it all is just serendipitous to me. I don’t know. I once had some dude chide me and tell me to just write about football, that “this isn’t the New Yorker,” but fuck that. Why do anything, why care about anything, if you can’t make it mean something?

There is an exquisite beauty in allowing yourself to believe, in allowing yourself to feel, for something so obviously dumb. It is nakedly honest in a way that we don’t allow ourselves to be anymore because we’ve had our spirits mangled and abused by the Dallas conmen of the world. They’ve convinced us that we’re dumb, that we’re wrong, that believing in things is a meaningless and futile exercise only done by small children. This is just one of the ways that we’re kept in our place, but fuck all of that.

A couple of weeks from now, the embers might fade a bit, and I might be back to watching this all through ether dulled eyes, wondering how in the world I could have ever felt so goddamn much about such a stupid thing, but for today, for this week anyway, for this game against the Cowboys, I feel it, and it feels good, it feels righteous. It feels like anything is possible, and that is the America that Detroit used to represent. And even if its just symbolic, even if its just a dumb game, I want to believe in that again, and for three hours on a Sunday afternoon, I want to live in that America again.

Lions 27 Cowboys 14