{"id":17,"date":"2014-12-05T03:05:25","date_gmt":"2014-12-05T03:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hologen.net\/wp\/?p=17"},"modified":"2025-09-08T23:19:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T04:19:08","slug":"ray-rice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/traitsandstates.net\/?p=17","title":{"rendered":"Let Ray Play"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I don’t like Ray Rice. He is a cry-baby on the field, and he played for the Baltimore Ravens, a team that all Bengals fans in all of Bengaldom the world over are sworn to despise with the same vitriol that we despise the Pittsburgh Steelers. To make matters even worse, he’s a wife-beater too. It’s that last bit that have got people debating the NFL’s indefinite suspension of Ray Rice in light of of the video footage where he clearly cold-cocks his then fiance, now wife in an elevator, knocking her unconscious. Now that an arbitrator has overturned the NFL’s decision, the debate continues over whether Ray Rice should be allowed to have a career in the field that he has devoted his life to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So let me offer this: Ray Rice might have been a cry-baby. He might have played for the disgusting and cowardly Baltimore Ravens. He might have been a wife-beater. But the NFL are hypocrites, and hypocrites are worse than just about anything. Roger Goodell, from his ivory tower, handed down judgment on a guy to whom the NFL owes their very existence, and who on any given Sunday puts on his uniform and spends the better part of his day attempting to stomp other people into submission while they attempt to stomp him into submission. For the NFL. Because that’s the job, and that’s what the fans want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now don’t get me wrong: I love football. I love watching these guys crush each other’s over-sized bodies into pretzels 18 weeks out of the year. I am also fully aware of what I am watching when I settle in with a bowl of salty nuts and a nice cold one: I am watching live, televised violence, packaged and marketed as wholesome family entertainment, and branded with a logo as patriotic as the Star Spangled Banner itself. It is the Roman Coliseum of our time: highly-skilled perfect specimens of human form on the field of battle attempting to impose their will on one another, for sport mind you, through physical and psychological violence, for money, fame, and in many ways, civic and national pride. I’m okay with that. I’m a participant in that. I really look forward to it. I’m just not deluded about what it is and why we all like it so much. I’m reminded of Lawrence Taylor, who made me a football fan in 1986 when I saw the fear that he instilled in his opponents, particularly the quarterbacks whom he sacked 20.5 times that year. Nobody wanted to face him. Everyone who did had in the backs of their minds that nagging fear that they might get hurt really bad. They might have their careers ended. And all of the Giants fans in all of Giantdom the world over loved him for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will resist the temptation to go off on a tangent about why Americans might like this more than people in other countries, who prefer soccer. Let’s just say that it’s part of our national narrative about who we are. For better or worse, Ray Rice lives in a world where the bigger, stronger and meaner you are, the better you are, the more money you make, and the more people love you. So how can any of us act surprised when a guy like this resorts to throwing a punch to settle a dispute? I’m not saying it’s right; it’s not. It’s very, very wrong. But people make mistakes, nobody died, and nobody was disfigured, paralyzed, or otherwise deprived of having a happy life by this. So why are we still talking about it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some part of us knows that we are all complicit in this. Some part of us sees that Ray Rice is every one of us who ever yelled “get that motherfucker” on 3rd and 5 when the clock was running down and our team had a chance to get the ball back for that game-winning drive. Or watched an action movie. Or played a video game that involves shooting, punching, kicking or blowing up things or people. And it’s all entertainment. And I love it all. And now we feel like we need to isolate ourselves from it, because we enjoy violence immensely as long as we feel like we can contain it somehow, as long as it’s in a box or on a screen or on a field where there are lots of rules to regulate it. If we control and contain violence, it is an indulgence that we will allow ourselves.When it intrudes into the normative, civilized constructs of modern Western life, we recoil in horror as if it were something alien and grotesque. It’s always going to be there inside all of us, as it is essentially human. And the NFL would never acknowledge in an honest way what their product actually is because in order to consume that product we need to have at least a little bit of denial about it. And I’m okay with that too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime, I just cannot wait to watch Ben Roethlisberger get sacked on Sunday. I hope it happens at least four or five times. And I hope Ray Rice gets picked up by one of the teams on our schedule so we can stomp his little whiny wife-beatin’ ass too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t like Ray Rice. He is a cry-baby on the field, and he played for the Baltimore Ravens, a team that all Bengals fans in all of Bengaldom the world over are sworn to despise with the same vitriol that we despise the Pittsburgh Steelers. To make matters even worse, he’s a wife-beater too. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/traitsandstates.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/traitsandstates.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/traitsandstates.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traitsandstates.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traitsandstates.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/traitsandstates.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":325,"href":"https:\/\/traitsandstates.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/325"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traitsandstates.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/traitsandstates.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traitsandstates.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traitsandstates.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}