NFC East Preview

The Eagles are the defending Super Bowl champs, which makes them the obvious favorites in the NFC East, but the problem with that is this: the Eagles, as representatives of Philadelphia, are bound to fuck it all up.

Maybe that’s not fair, and maybe the Eagles win changed an entire city’s psychic energy, but I doubt it. That is a lot of history to have to change. I mean, this is a city that was basically replaced twice over as the preeminent American city: by New York, and then by Washington as the nation’s capital. It’s very history is an inferiority complex. The reason It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is such a good show is because it’s true. It’s the only real show that Philly could produce. Sure, The Cosby Show worked too but that’s because the universe already knew and understood that Bill Cosby was a wild rape-fiend.

All of this is to say that there is something inherent in the character of Philadelphia that causes everyone to fuck-up. Sure, they might transcend it for one beautiful moment, but that just makes the tragedy of it all the more acute. They’re like white trash who wins the lottery and then blows it all on bullshit before ending up worse off than before, being sued by multiple relatives, kids in jail for organizing bum fights or whatever bullshit they think rich people are supposed to do, horrible, horrible.

This transcends the actual football talent of the Eagles, which should be considerable. They have a burgeoning star at quarterback in Carson Wentz, but Wentz also tore both his ACL and his LCL, which famously opened the door for Nick Foles to win the Super Bowl. This seems like it should be a luxury – two good quarterbacks – but it really isn’t.

Start with Wentz, who really only did it for ¾ of a season. He’s not really proven in that sense, and who knows how he’s gonna come back from that knee injury. Foles, meanwhile, is a career journeyman who was ready to retire only a couple of years ago. Yeah, he won the Super Bowl, but that seems like sort of a miracle exception rather than the rule. Relying on him for a full season probably isn’t gonna work out. And then there’s this: Foles winning the Super Bowl means that there will be controversy here no matter what. There is no way to get this kind of psychic energy right. Wentz should be the man, but is he really? Foles was the man for a day, but is he really the man? Both believe they are, both have fans and surely players on the team and in the coaching staff who think they are, and that sort of thing is what leads to Mac, Dennis and Charlie bickering in the bar while Sweet Dee makes a fool of herself and Frank gets caught importing Vietnamese hookers. It’s Always Sunny indeed.

One more thing: no team has repeated as NFC East champion in 14 years. That’s pretty fucking crazy. The last team to do it was actually the Eagles, which sounds like a good omen until you realize that team was the one that ended with Donovan McNabb puking all over the field as they lost the Super Bowl. Now that’s Philadelphia.

So, who will actually win the division if not the Eagles? Well, that’s where things get tricky. The Eagles might still win this damn thing by default. The Giants are fucked. Let’s just get that out of the way immediately. They bottomed out last season in the sort of “let’s just burn this thing to the ground and start over” season that teams have to go through every now and then. It was a transition year, only the Giants insanely decided not to actually transition and kept Eli Manning around instead of drafting a new quarterback. This, uh, this won’t work. Not only is Eli shit from a butt now, but he’ll forever represent the Giants of the past, and as long as he’s around, the Giants will be stuck between two worlds, and in this purgatory there is nothing but misery and despair.

The one saving grace for the Giants is that they drafted Saquon Barkley, who I think is the Real Deal. He’s a physical freak who can do things on the field that are ghostly reminders of, yes, I’m gonna say it, Barry Sanders. Like Barry, he had games where he could never quite get going, but to be honest, I’m gonna blame a lot of that on Penn State’s horrid offensive line. I watched them enough times to know that it really wasn’t his fault. But, like Barry, he also had games where it was clear that he was in another league, that he belonged to a class of athlete that comes along once in a generation – if we’re lucky.

That’s all well and good for the Giants, but here’s the thing: today’s NFL isn’t really geared towards allowing a running back to dominate like back in the day. It’s a passing league, and while Barkley is a great receiver out of the backfield, his impact is limited simply by what the NFL is now. The Giants are sort of like a dude who grows up in the country, say Montana, where there is nothing but open roads for miles and miles. All his life he’s dreamed of owning a Ferrari, of getting out on those roads and blasting off at 220 mph, of transcending the limits this world and society puts on him. He moves to the city, gets rich, and is finally in a position to buy that Ferrari. He does, only now he lives in the cramped city and can’t really drive it anywhere. His neighbors see it and go “Holy shit, that’s amazing!” but all he can really do is pull it out and shine it up for them. Maybe he can drive it to the corner store at 15 mph, but that’s about it and what’s the point? That’s the Giants with Saquon Barkley. He’s a beautiful Ferrari meant for a different place, a different age. He’s a tragedy and he hasn’t even played a game.

The Redskins are an insipid franchise. All name controversies aside – and I know you don’t want me to start Discoursing here – they’re owned by a dude who’s little better than a sleazy used car-salesman, a caricature of a rich dude who spends most of his time looking for ways to fuck over his own fans, most famously illustrated by that time he sued an old lady over her season tickets or whatever the fuck dumb reason it was. Dan Snyder has pissed away a culture, an entire psychic destiny, and replaced it with his own sleazy failure. Raven Mack, beloved founder emeritus of Armchair Linebacker, was completely chased away from football by Snyder. My boy Paul had the same thing happen. The Redskins are doomed as long as Dan Snyder owns the team.

They’re also changing quarterbacks this season. Out is Kirk Cousins, who I have my own hate-boner for, owing largely to tribal reasons. In is Alex Smith, formerly of the Chiefs, who I just said the other day is underrated. But doesn’t this kind of feel like a lateral move? I mean, the only real reason the Redskins traded Cousins is because they didn’t want to commit to him long term. So, they turned around and picked up Alex Smith and then committed to him long term. The only problem is that Smith is almost five years older than Cousins, so unless the Redskins really, really hated Kirk Cousins – certainly possible given my own feelings about the dude – this is a move that seems puzzling. And even if Smith is better, it’s likely to only be fractionally, hence the whole lateral move thing. And since the Redskins went 7-9 last year, a lateral move isn’t exactly a good thing. Maybe they go 8-8 now, but so what?

And then there’s the Cowboys. My God, the Cowboys. I was dreading writing about them – still am – because it’s really hard for me to encapsulate the full terrordome of feelings I have about the Cowboys. I’ll try anyway.

I have always hated the Cowboys. This is because I am a decent human being buried beneath the degenerate surface – hence my charm. This is because they represent a sort of America that is revolting to me, nakedly greedy and repulsive, hidden beneath a clean-faced salesman’s smile. The Cowboys are truly America’s Team in the sense that they have always been the team of the hidden ugliness of America. I know I said the Raiders were the true America’s Team, and I meant it, but to be honest, Las Vegas doesn’t really need the Raiders because it already has a team: the Dallas Cowboys.

The Cowboys are – and always have been – the Las Vegas of teams. They are a team of bright lights, luring people in with the promise and aching memory of the American Dream. But it is a twisted and perverted form of the American Dream. Beneath the bright lights and welcoming exterior, the glitz and the glamor, is a sort of mean, naked greed, the team of an oil baron. Hell, even their cheerleaders are basically just well-worn Vegas showgirls.

Even the team’s own history mirrors a sort of contemptible version of American history. They began small, as underdogs, and quickly rose to power and glory behind a sort of Puritan sociopathy embodied in the team’s head-coach, the cold and repressed Tom Landry. That sort of Grant Wood American Gothic dude appealed to the “plain”, “hardworking” and “clean” image that Americans long-loved to think about themselves. But there is a sort of cold ruthlessness beneath all that, the sort of clinical, almost viper-like way of viewing the world that is the true heart of the American Dream – you take what you can, and you don’t stop taking until you die, and you do it in a way that allows you to clothe it all in a sort of self-righteous missionary zeal. That was Tom Landry and that was the Dallas Cowboys as they became America’s Team.

It is an Americana that I find personally distasteful, ugly and destructive, but eventually the American Dream itself became ragged, frayed by reality, by the Truth that it is rotten and ugly inside. And so Tom Landry gave way to Jimmy Johnson, a sort of slicker, more nakedly ambitious version of America. He fit perfectly with the times. Once the Holy American Mission was exposed for what it really was, the hucksters and the self-righteous, the hypocritical holier-than-thou types simply dropped the mask and became Gordon Gecko, they became Wall Street, and that was Jimmy Johnson. He was just nakedly ruthless, cruel and greedy, and the Cowboys rose again in a sort of corrupted version of the American Dream. It was always bound to end badly, and ugly, because without that “clean” façade, you just had the naked truth, horrible and macabre. And like Gordon Gecko, the need for the veneer caught up with Jimmy Johnson and he was run out of town.

And who replaced him? Barry Switzer, a degenerate hillbilly, corrupt in his own way, who rode the excess of the dying last burst of the American Dream through the 90s, inhaling its fumes and careening without care or understanding that things had gotten Too Fucked Up to further glory. But good times don’t last forever, which should be the lesson of the Clintonian era. Back then, we were just careening towards oblivion with a smile on our faces, without a care, because we were America and America – and America’s Team – has to live forever, right? Nobody cared that it had already been corrupted years earlier, hell that it was born corrupt, and that over the years, the carefully crafted veneer, the con that we played on ourselves forever and ever was stripped away piece by piece until finally it all collapsed, weighed down by naked greed and a fatal misunderstanding of the real thing that made it all great in the first place: regular, hard-working people who were willing to believe the con because it allowed them to dream something greater than themselves, allowed them to imagine a world in which they too could be Tom Landry, rich and clean, strong and powerful, righteous before God and the world. It was a con that said you could have it all without sacrificing your basic decency, your human dignity.

But that’s just not real, at least not in the America that we have collectively built for ourselves, and it’s not real for the Cowboys either, who exist after The Fall as sort of a grotesque caricature of America and themselves. Jerry Jones is the perfect man to own the Cowboys. He is grotesque, a carnie’s version of a success, a slick manipulator who uses his own wealth, his own oil money, which these days is almost literally blood money, to remain in power. It is a gross cartoon of power, though, a poor man’s version of a rich man, a stupid person’s version of a smart man, loud and crass, ruling through naked fiat. Sound familiar?

The thing is that Jerry Jones doesn’t just own the Dallas Cowboys. He owns the NFL. It is his league. He is the most powerful owner – and thus the most powerful man – in the NFL. Roger Goodell is his useful idiot, an instrument, a lever of power that Jones can pull without having to look Trumpian himself. But just look at the NFL. Look at how obscenely gross it has become over the years. Look at how it treats its own players, treats the fans, treats everyone. It is a debased league run by con men, a Las Vegas of a league designed with nothing other than taking your money in mind. It is a Las Vegas of a league run by a Las Vegas of a man in a Las Vegas of a country. This is America now. It is the country of Donald Trump, the country of Jerry Jones, the country of the Dallas Cowboys. After all this time, they really are America’s Team.

Naturally, they’re also losers. They haven’t really won anything in over twenty years – again, sound familiar? – despite all the bellicose thundering and the shrill bleating which only serves to underscore their own failure. Jerry Jones, for all his power, for all his bullshit swagger, is a Failure. He fired Jimmy Johnson because he had to prove that it was all about him, that he was the one who built the Cowboys. And he’s failed. Jerry Jones ain’t shit, and nobody should be afraid of his old, hillbilly ass. Fuck him.

Under Jason Garrett, who is little more than Jones’ boy, the Cowboys have only had three winning seasons, only two playoff appearances, and have won only one goddamn playoff game. Naturally, that win was the game against the Lions – sigh – but even that travesty, in which the Lions were gangbanged into a sort of feral stupor by the NFL’s secret police, AKA Jerry Jones’ secret police, only highlights how pathetic and flimsy that single victory really was. The Cowboys are a team of nothing, ruled by men of no worth, no account, swaggering their way through the world as if they are supposed to matter. The only problem is that no one really believes it anymore.

This season, the Cowboys are relying on Dak Prescott to prove that he’s not just another flash-in-the-pan after spending over a decade watching Tony Romo try to prove the same thing. Not Quite Good Enough is a terrible phrase in the NFL, a painful phrase, and it will kill you. They’re also hopeful that Ezekiel Elliott comes back and runs wild after being suspended for being a piece of trash and beating the shit out of his girlfriend. This is dark, but I suppose fitting for America’s Team in the Year of Our Lord 2018.

If they get both Prescott and Elliott rolling, then the Cowboys will probably win the division. But it will be a hollow victory, owing as much to the Eagles own psychic despair as anything else. And it will be a victory that probably won’t mean anything given the Cowboys inability to do anything at all in the playoffs since Troy Aikman could still read. In the end, the Cowboys will be just good enough, just powerful enough, just rich enough to still pretend. But you have to remember, pretending is all they have left. And everyone knows it.

Final Judgment:

1. Cowboys 11-5

2. Eagles 10-6

3. Redskins 7-9

4. Giants 5-11

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.