The Song Remains The Same

 

We left off with evil mutterings, downcast at the prospect of a future run by evil men, and worse, evil and incompetent, the worst fucking kind. But this is an organization that would probably hire a Hitler reenactor if he made the proverbial trains run on time. I say a reenactor only because the actual Hitler is dead and there is little doubt that they’d hire him if they could. Remember, the OG Ford was not only a Nazi apologist but an outright admirer of the regime. These monstrosities are in this family’s blood, and thus this moribund organization, which is a mockery of everything Detroit is supposed to stand for. They ain’t hiring Joe Louis’ fist, that much I can tell you.

 

Yes, it’s another season of Lions football and we’re already scrambling in the hellscape, which is not a good place to be, but fuck it, it’s our place, so let’s try to set up a shambly cottage somewhere in between these circles of hellish despair, wave at Dante and Virgil as they wander by. That’s all we can do, after all, make the best of things, hope for . . . something. It’s hard to say what. The Catch 22 of being a Lions fan, now more than ever is that if we win we’re only encouraging a certain moral decay that calls itself the Patriot Way, and is represented by a probable rapist and a coward who wanders the locker room with a baseball bat in a sad attempt to look tough. Of course they just signed Adrian Peterson, who beats children with literal sticks, and a certain segment of the fanbase is diving headlong into Believing in this Shit because that’s what they do every year, and it’s easy to make excuses for these dudes when that is what you’ve been doing your entire fan life.

 

Loyalty is a funny thing for a fan. I don’t want these jackasses to succeed because they are bad people, but neither do I want my shitty team to fail as it has failed so many times over the years. What we’re left with is a sort of weird and desperate wish for something Better without being able to define it in terms that this team can achieve. I just don’t see it. These men are tremendous assholes, and it sucks because Matthew Stafford has revealed himself to be a decent dude, I think, and I want to root for him if for nothing else.

 

But I don’t want to reward the sycophants who cling to a sort of Bastardized Hope either year after year, whitewashing these villains of their crimes because they don’t know how to do anything else. These people are worse than Matt Millen on a magnitude that is tough to explain. He was simply incompetent. These fuckers are vile.

 

But I have said all this already, and this year the New Hope seems to be More Patriots like Danny Shelton and Jamie Collins, still battling with the insanity that is the belief that the Patriots were anything more than Tom Brady’s team. Being a Patriot is meaningless outside of the Brady context, and it is almost sick how addicted this regime is to styling themselves as some sort of second rate Patriots team, like downcast mothers sifting through the boxes at Goodwill.

 

Hope rests as always on the arm of Matt Stafford, and Hope is a fragile thing indeed, existing despite the coaches and management instead of with them. That is a bad place to be, but it is the only place to be, a sad little island of the heart that we have to live on until something, anything, changes with this fucking team. The Fords are eternal, and that is probably the central problem, but what else is there?

 

But again, there is Matthew Stafford, and the epic amount of time he has put into this franchise cannot be overlooked or dismissed. I want him to win now and that, I suppose, is what I will cling to on my sad little island. Maybe I can build a ramshackle hut to live in and watch the world go by.

 

It is perhaps appropriate that all of this takes place in the midst of a horrific pandemic which has changed society permanently. The stands will not be filled, and the only “fan” noise we will hear will be some artificial nonsense that the league has cooked up, like some second rate WWE enterprise. It’s a profoundly weird season, devoid of data to work with as we move forward, and it gives off a sort of empty feeling, a feeling of doing it just to do it, an ordering of men to enact a national addiction more than anything else, ghosts chasing ghosts.

 

It is somehow comforting that this week one game is so predictable then, the Bears coming in with a monstrous defense, at least on paper, and a fucked up offense led by Mitchell Trubisky whose seat is so hot it might as well be on the fucking sun. Nick Foles looms, as he seems to always loom somewhere, to take the job away, but there’s a reason he has always failed outside of that one weird Super Bowl run with Philly. It’s because he’s not that good, but that Super Bowl run exists and so wherever he turns up he is a ghostly threat to whoever the starter may be, which again, is appropriate in a season ruled by the ghosts of a national mania.

 

It’s comforting because we know who the Bears are. They are a familiar cousin come to town, and they probably feel the same way about us. The Lions, after all, will always be The Lions and all that means. Maybe one day the Lions will face off with the Browns in a deeply weird Super Bowl, but probably not, and the Bears know that and will seek to keep the Lions swimming in the shit.

 

The Lions need to win this game, of course. It is on home turf, and if they have any hope of validating the loathsome Patriot Way, this must be it. I will have to separate my disdain for the fascist loving Fords and their newest acolytes and try to root for Matthew Stafford and his In It For Life marriage to this team and to these fans. It won’t be easy. None of it is easy, and that sucks. Sports should be fun, not an endless morality play that sucks the soul dry, but that’s where we are. That’s where we always are. No different than my first words writing about this team in 2008, that legendarily miserable year of 0-16 and Marinelli slandering. We’re living in a year that will never be forgotten, a year that will change society one way or the other, a year that historians will wrestle with long after we’re dead, and in that year, as far as the Detroit Lions are concerned, the song remains the same. They are the one constant of dread and misery and all around Bad Times. I guess it just took the rest of the world a long time to catch up with us. But here we are now, and here we’ll always be. If it’s not these idiots, it’s that Hitler reenactor. Or fuck, maybe they’ll just dig up his bones and Martha can get him to read the Bible. Our only hope is that The Great Willie Young is named GM somehow, but he’s too busy fishing and I don’t blame him for not having anything to do with this nonsense, mine or the Lions. I just want it to be better but I have no idea what that even looks like anymore. Viva Matthew Stafford and fuck the rest.

 

Bears 28 Lions 17