Thanksgiving

In 1934 – that’s 84 years ago – the first televised NFL Thanksgiving game was played. And it was played in Detroit, Michigan. The Lions played the Bears, and, naturally, lost to the Bears. The Lions have hosted the Thanksgiving game every season since, and every season it’s the same thing from people who don’t get it: “Why do the Lions get the Thanksgiving game every year? They suck.”

This misses the point. The Lions get the Thanksgiving game every year because it’s ours. It has always been ours, and it always will be ours. And I say the Thanksgiving game because the Dallas Cowboys stole it from us, copied it, and lived off of what we built to become “America’s Team.” As metaphors for gentrification go, that one is tough to beat.

We’re used to people taking from us. We’re used to being left broken in a ditch while the Dallas Cowboys of the world leave town counting their money – counting our money. We understand this because it has been woven into the very character of Detroit, of Michigan.

These days, people mock Detroit, mock Michigan. They sneer and make jokes about abandoned buildings, about burned out husks of our history, about people who can’t even get a glass of clean drinking water, and it’s all true. It sucks, but it’s true. But the thing is, is that it wasn’t always true, and the other thing is that it’s not our fault. You want to blame us? We’re the victims here. We built something, we made something, and that something is called the United States of America. And you clean-faced bastards stole it from us.

You wanna know why the Lions got the first televised Thanksgiving game? Because Detroit was the heart of this country. Detroit was bigger then, swelled with internal immigrants, the broken, the downtrodden, the oppressed, who came up from down south to find the American Dream, to find it in a hard day’s work and a fair wage, to find it 40 hours at a time, to find it in the satisfaction of being able to afford the very things that they built with their own two hands. They found it, and they thrived. They built a city, they built a culture, they built a state, rooted in that belief: that any man, born anywhere, could roll up his sleeves and get what was promised to him. This is the Only place where the American Dream was Real.

There are still murals in Detroit that show men – black and white – working hard, side by side, to build something. And it wasn’t just something they were building for others, for rich con-artists and carpetbaggers, but for themselves, for each other. That mural will never die. It is part of Detroit forever and ever. So is Joe Louis’ fist. You know the statue. It’s just a giant goddamn fist. That is Detroit. That is who we are.

And when World War II came around, what did we do? Detroit took all of its might, all of its knowhow, and built the machine that would win a goddamn World War. You want to thank someone for saving the world? You thank Detroit. You want to sit down on Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day or, yes, Thanksgiving, and give thanks to someone? You thank Detroit.

But money always talks, and the people who control the money always listen to it, and what they hear makes them just want more and more of it, and so people like the Dallas Cowboys came and took it from us. These rank hypocrites who wear the flag on their chest, who cry crocodile tears whenever a soldier is paraded through the streets, stole the very heart of that flag, pissed on the men and women who did the work that made it all possible. And so the American Dream broke, because in the end, that’s all it’s turned out to be: a Dream.

It’s a dream that’s been leveraged, used and abused by the Dallas Cowboys of the world, to get others to do their work for them and then reap all the benefits. These leeches have always been here. Hell, a Civil War was fought once upon a time over this shit. But these Spiritual Confederates, these traitors of the American Ideal, that thing we’re all taught growing up to believe in, never really went away. They just slinked in the dark until real people, working people, built something that they could take away again. And they did, and, well, welcome to the hellscape that is America in 2018.

It’s ironic that the very people who the Spiritual Confederates rely upon to prop them up are the people who they’ve been robbing blind all this time. It’s ironic, but it’s also kind of the point: the only reason these assholes are even allowed to exist is because not only have they robbed us all, but they’ve convinced us that it’s our fault, that we deserve it, that all of our hard work and sacrifice exists simply so that they can take it from us. They’ve conditioned us to believe that we’re inferior, that we don’t deserve our piece, that a man who breaks his back everyday doesn’t deserve anything more than minimum wage and then a layoff when even that becomes too inconvenient to the bottom line of these vultures. They’ve made us embarrassed to be who we are, and then have encouraged us to lash out against people who are just like us, hard working people who just want their piece of the Dream.

So when you ask “Why does Detroit get the Thanksgiving game?” that’s why. When you look at Detroit, and you sneer at its husk, you remember who you’re sneering at. You’re sneering at yourself. You’re sneering at the Heart and Soul of what America was supposed to be. You’re sneering at that Dream, at the very thing you were taught from birth to revere.

Detroit is a fragile thing these days. It’s been drawn back and drawn back until it exists as little more than a downtown area huddled by the river. It’s an idea more than anything else these days. And yet it’s an idea that people like me still want to believe in. I love Detroit not just because I have lived in Michigan all my life, but because it is the city of Dreams, because it is the city where once upon a time, those Dreams were Real, where America – the romantic myth that we all grow up believing in – was Real. I love Detroit because it’s tougher than you, because despite all its been through, it will still stand the fuck up and puff out its chest and tell all you bastards to go fuck yourselves. Nobody believes in Detroit, but goddammit, deep down, Detroit still believes in itself. It still believes in an Idea, in Possibility, in the heart and soul of a working man’s mural, in the giant fist of Joe Louis. That is MY Detroit, and I will love it forever.

It’s a hard thing, though, to know what you could be and to not really be able to do anything about it because the Spiritual Confederates, the Dallas Cowboys of the world, came along and took it all from you, left you with only that Attitude. We’re still Detroit and we always will be because it’s who we are, and that makes it extra painful when we can’t even afford the basics, when we have to choose between shit like getting clean water and fucking garbage service. It hurts when your football team, the same one that has been playing on Thanksgiving Day since Joe Louis was the Champ, can never get their shit together. It hurts to get up everyday knowing that all you need is a chance because you know who you are, you’ve proven it to the world already and they just forgot. It hurts to know that no one will give you a chance, that they’ll all just sneer and look down on you while they count the money that they forgot they stole from you in the first place. It hurts to know that these swine are out there believing that this is their country. It hurts to live in the most powerful country, the richest country, in the history of the world, a country that we built, and to be left out of it, treated like low class scum by those who stole it. It hurts. It all hurts. But what I want you to do is to stop and think. I want you to be thankful for everything you have this Thanksgiving, and while you’re thinking and giving thanks, I want you to thank God, to thank Detroit, that you get to have it all. You’ll never give us back what’s ours and that sucks, but goddammit, you will turn and you will look at us and you will say Thank You.

Thanksgiving is ours. It is our holiday. It belongs to us. And you will never take this away.

Lions 27 Bears 0

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

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.