Implosions

Fall is my favorite time of year.  The weather is perfect, the smells are heightened, the foods are more to my liking, college football is upon us and holiday season is back.  Add to that it was in October when I first met my bride and it's understandable why I enjoy fall so much.

This fall, however, has an added bonus.  Simultaneously, three industries are imploding.  Two of them I detest, one of them I tolerate with indifference.  Never in my wildest dreams did I think any one of them would teeter so much, let alone all three of them teeter at the same time.  But the planets aligned perfectly to cause the NFL, the Democratic Party and Hollywood to all go through massive implosions one right after the other.  And the beauty of each one is that each implosion just keeps going and going and going....

The NFL has faced a backlash of fan discontent when the players decided to emulate Colin Kapernick and kneel during the national anthem.  Reports vary as to the motivation behind the kneeling, but it hasn't resonated with the fans.  Fans in droves are staying away from the stadia to the point that the owners are concerned.  This weekend there's supposed to be a boycott of the games to show support for veterans, given that tomorrow is Veteran's Day.  Add to that the ongoing struggles addressing abuse of women and the CTE issue and the NFL is a hot mess.  It's so hot that now renegade owner Jerry Jones is threatening to sue the NFL a la Al Davis because the compensation committee is about to renew commissioner Roger Goodell's contract for $44M.  Needless to say, it hasn't been a good year for the NFL.

If the NFL has issues, the Democratic Party is beside itself.  Having lost the presidential election to a non-politician after harrumphing that there was no way on God's green earth that Donald Trump would ever be president, Cankles lost all but the coastal elites at the end of her Inevitability Tour.  She then took to the book tour where she tried to explain away her loss on everyone but herself, further casting the party into disrepute.   In the meantime Wikileaks provided evidence that the DNC rigged the primary so that Cankles would win and Bernie, despite the groundswell of grassroot support, didn't have a chance.  Recently, Donna Brazile, who took over the chair of the DNC for the disgraced Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, has written a book wherein she pointed the finger at Cankles for taking over the DNC.  As if all that weren't bad enough, an ultra-liberal activist group referring to itself as Antifa (short for Anti-Fascist) has been wreaking havoc nationwide because it feels that President Trump is racist and fascist, for some reason.  In the process, antifa has highjacked the Democratic Party, causing even such liberal stalwarts as Nancy Pelosi to criticize its tactics, which are, ironically, reminiscent of Nazi tactics.  Donna Brazile is now sniping with Cankles and Cankles is accusing Ms. Brazile of being a Russian agent.  It's so aburd that it almost sounds like the plot of a Hollywood political farce...

...Speaking of Hollywood, I've detailed the notorious indiscretions and possible crimes of movie czar Harvey Weinstein.  Given Weinstein's girth, it's not a stretch to claim that his fall broke the dam, so to speak, on other powerful men who have groped their ways to power.  Now, other moguls have been accused of being Weinsteinian, as have high-profile actors like Kevin Spacey.  The shooting inside Hollywood's tent is fascinating.  People are claiming everyone knew, while others claim not everything was known.  As this goes on, movie ticket sales plummet, a la the NFL's attendance figures.  Virtually every day another story comes out about some actor or actress who was violated in some fashion.  The interesting spin on the Hollywood implosion is that it goes from heterosexual to homosexual abuse and, sadly, even into abuse of minors. 

Why am I so tickled by all of this?  First, the NFL is a behemoth that I've said for years is too full of itself.  Football is football, but compared to the college game, the NFL is sterile, stoic, almost robotic.  The Democrats have been fooling people for years, touting itself as the more moral of the political parties (is that even possible?) and hypocritical as hell.  That they've been shown to resort to decidedly undemocratic tricks to win elections even within their own ranks is telling.  And Hollywood?  Those people who imitate other people for a living have been so busy telling the rest of us that we don't know what we're doing, that we are racists, rapist enablers and worse, and yet within their own community, they're worse than anyone.  Either they were involved in the abuse, or they knew about the abuse and condoned it with their silence, or they were willfully ignorant of the rumors.  Yet they acted as if they owned the moral imperative and had the right to criticize the rest of us.

I don't know much about the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned, but I wonder if anything that was burning while he fiddled was like the NFL, the Democrats or Hollywood...

(c) 2017 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles