Ain’t No Such Things As Halfway Crooks

Shook Ones Part II by Mobb Deep off of The Infamous.

For the Love of the Game

People who like college sports more than pro sports don’t actually like sports. Instead, they like the other things that college athletes do well: represent a community, foster a sense of historical continuity, and create the occasional Rudy-esque story where a regular person gets the glory. All of that is well and good, but none of it has anything to do with sports.

I get it, it’s easier to identify with college athletes, we lived where they lived, we wore the colors they wore, why that could even be us out there instead of young Mr. Ruttiger. None of that is true for professional athletes. They live in multimillion dollar homes, they never have to eat at Arby’s, and we sure as shit can’t imagine playing out there with them.  Rudy never made it to the NFL because a linebacker would have ripped his dick off and eaten it after breaking both his legs Theismann style. And you know why that story would unfold that way? Because pro-athletes are better than 95% of college athletes by an almost superhuman degree.

If you care about sports, if you want to see it played at the highest level, you’ll prefer watching professional athletes. Watching Michael Jordan is where you just might see the platonic ideal of basketball; the same can’t be said of some 5’7, slightly chubby point guard from a forgettable school who gets by on moxie and who plays the game the right way (“playing the game the right way” being code for either 1) I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about or 2) I really prefer white people).

Now your average college sports fan might concede these points (except the racist thing) but will then proceed to list several reasons why college sports is still superior. College athletes play for the love of the game instead of money, they always play hard, and the competition means more. As someone who values rationality you’ll want to counter these arguments. And rest assured these points will be addressed, but if you want to skip ahead, here’s the lowdown – they’re all bullshit.

The idea of college sports teams playing for the love of the game is silliness rooted in an antiquated notion of what the term student athlete represents, where the first word in that description has just as much weight as the second one. Maybe 75 years ago you had some square-jawed kid who took to the field because he just enjoyed being out there and he wanted to fight for his alma mater. That was just college though, when it was all said and done he never expected to do anything other than sell mattresses in his father’s store after graduation. That world does not exist anymore.

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Hello Bebop

Space Lion by The Seatbelts off of Cowboy Bebop.

Reflections On 9/11 As A Muslim In America

This past weekend, many Americans commemorated the tenth anniversary of September 11th. Some retold the stories of losing loved ones amidst the constant buzz of news stations replaying the images and sounds of planes hitting buildings. Others celebrated the vicious assassination of Osama bin Laden and death of Saddam Hussein as proof that we are, in the inspirational words of George W., “kicking ass” in the War on Terror. Underlying all this pageantry was an almost cultish romanticization of American democracy and freedom. But these commemorative moments of neologistic patriotism were not felt equally by all: for me and other brown-skinned Muslims, Arabs, and look-alikes in this country, our memories of 9/11 have been clouded by what has happened since that fateful day.

The day after airplanes full of civilians from my homeland were hijacked and crashed by terrorists from my motherland, I arrived at Portage West Middle School to find that my locker had been broken into and most of my belongings stolen. Later on in the day, I was asked to report to the Vice Principal’s office, where most of my belongings were strewn across the floor. Whatever remained of my overpriced but underused graphing calculator, extensive collection of rainbow gel pens, and outdated textbooks was beyond repair. In what was most likely a pre-pubescent frenzied mess of patriotic post-9/11 R.A.T.M. (Rage Against The Muslim), my things were smothered in and dragged through the mud in the woods behind my school, where a jogger eventually found them. Absent any evidence at all, the school administrator proceeded to accuse me of staging the hate crime as an attention-seeking ploy, implying that I was a twelve-year old sociopath.

I was nothing of the sort – at least not then. If I did suffer from anything remotely pathological, it was shame for my name. Born on the eve of the Gulf War, my parents named me Hussain, and so my first grade peers nicknamed me Saddam. I was even asked by my fourth grade teacher to explain to our social studies class the Arabic translation of “Saddam” – because I was named Hussain, like Saddam Hussein, the late Iraqi dictator who was both partner to and victim of U.S. American political powerbrokering.

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On The Bush Doctrine And The Arab Spring

As the Arab Spring has blossomed into the Arab Summer, there has been an effort among members of the conservative community to align the narrative of the Bush Doctrine and the resulting endeavors in Iraq and Afghanistan with that of the Arab Spring. While promoting his memoir, Cheney claimed that the Bush Administration and its subsequent doctrine that it prescribed in the Middle East are to thank for the eruption of empowerment and action witnessed today:

But make no mistake: neither the Administration nor the President deserve any credit for the remarkable things happening now in Northern Africa and the Middle East. The only thing that the Bush Doctrine — defined by top-down, deregulated and contracted transplantation of one-size-fits-none “democracy” — deserves credit for is the “democratic” decrepitude that is so present in the leaders and institutions of Iraq and Afghanistan today.

Afghanistan’s crooked and corrupt state can largely be attributed to its President, Hamid Karzai. Chosen as interim president in 2002 by the Bush Administration, Karzai’s alleged lure was that despite being a southern Pashtun, he had good relations with the non-Pashtun and Taliban-leaning North, and could hopefully unite the two and begin the transition down an American-guided path. Unsurprisingly, this was a myopic vision on behalf of the Bush regime, as according to Abdullah Abdullah, former Karzai foreign minister and current political opponent, Karzai has only “[distanced] the Afghan government from the Afghan people” and that “the Taliban is taking advantage of this.”

The company Karzai keeps isn’t comforting either. One of the most feared and powerful opium and heroin traders in the Kandahar region happened to be Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali. Oddly enough, Ahmed was elected as a Kandahar province representative until he was killed in July by one of his own bodyguards.

And then there was Gul Agha Sherzai, the man who, according to The Globe and Mail, received millions of dollars from the CIA and US government to get rid of the Taliban, yet after doing so proceeded to allow them to become part of the de facto government. He was also the man who admitted to receiving $1 million a week from his share of import duties and from the opium trade. Keep in mind that most Afghans live on less than a dollar a day.

Ever-so characteristic of a Bush selection, the elections in which Karzai ran were rife with chicanery and general corruption, along with ‘support’ from people like Karim Khalili, current Vice President who has also been accused of war crimes and killing thousands of people. And we thought quail hunting gone awry was bad. After being confronted about the alleged ballot stuffing and intimidation, all Karzai had to say was that “there was fraud in 2004, there is today, there will be tomorrow.”

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