Saturday, August 15, 2009

MICHAEL VICK

I am not an Eagles season-ticket holder, and over the years, I’ve only been to a handful of games. I’ve been a fan, however. I watch every game on TV, and read all the stats in the paper, and I like to listen to the local sports-talk-radio station when Ray Didinger is on because he knows more about pro football, and the Eagles, than anyone on the planet. I have had long discussions with friends in anticipation of an Eagles playoff game.

That’s all over now. The Eagles are dead to me. I stopped caring last night about 9:00 when I learned they had signed Michael Vick. I don’t want to watch Michael Vick play football. I don’t even want to see him on the sidelines. The sight of Michael Vick makes my stomach churn.

Do you remember Peewee Herman (nee Paul Rubens)? He created two successful movies, and his Saturday-morning kids’ show, “Peewee’s Playhouse,” was so clever and innovative that it garnered a large adult audience, including me. Then, in 1991, he was caught performing an act of self-gratification in a porno theater in Florida.

Rubens was the same brilliant, creative guy the day after his arrest as he had been the day before, but his meteoric career came to an abrupt end. There was no blacklist or conspiracy involved, but it was immediately understood by everyone in show business that parents would no longer allow their children to be entertained by Peewee Herman. The idea of him doing another show for kids was just too creepy.

That’s pretty much the way I feel about Mr. Vick. I don’t doubt he can run fast and throw passes and even catch them, but I have zero desire to see him do it. In fact, I will go out of my way to avoid watching him play football.

Please understand me. I am not outrageously outraged. I am not engaged in a one-man boycott. I just can’t care about the team anymore. I have followed the Eagles, and their wins and losses, and their injuries, and the deals they made, and the internal team strife, and the travails of Andy Reid, and the saga of Terrell Owens, and I invested a fair amount of time and emotion in the team because it was entertaining. It was fun. That’s what sports are---entertainment---and the Eagles have entertained me for many years. Now, they simply can’t entertain me anymore, so I’m done.

There are many people who do not share my sense of revulsion, and I’ve heard some of them on radio and TV. Many fans will remain fans; some people even like the idea of signing Vick because they envision wonderful possibilities for the Eagles offense. And that’s fine with me. I’m used to being a minority voice. Some of the justifications offered for the Vick signing, however, are almost as offensive as Vick himself.

1) It’s time to move on.

Sorry, I can’t move on. I’m not ready. And why should I? For six years, the man made dogs kill each other in the fighting ring, then electrocuted some, or drowned them, or strangled them. These are the acts of a man steeped in evil, and I recoil at what he did. Decent people must condemn evil---when you refuse to embrace the moral relativism of our age, your view of evil doesn’t get any more complicated than that.

2) He has shown remorse, so we must forgive.

Has he? At his trial, he appeared to accept responsibility for his actions, including those he did with his own hands. Now, he says he was “naïve” and that he should have put a stop to things other people were doing. Well, which is it, Mike?

He also describes his behavior as “mistakes.” Are you as sick of this as I am? To me, leaving your car keys in the freezer is a “mistake.” Calling your intentional immoral acts “mistakes” is merely a pitiful attempt to blur the link between those acts and your responsibility for them. It’s a form of denial, a fashionable variety of denial, but denial nonetheless. Acknowledgement of one’s deeds is the first step toward rehabilitation, but there is scant evidence Vick has taken even that first step.

Besides, what if it’s true? What if he is truly remorseful? Well, that would be a good thing, but it’s really a matter between Vick and his God. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t have to forgive him, and I certainly have no obligation, moral or otherwise, to watch him play football. In addition, I reject the idea that even genuine remorse would entitle him to reinstatement. I don’t see the connection between the two. Remorse can be good for the soul, but it does not erase the crime.

3) Everybody should get a second chance.

Yes, of course. All men can be redeemed, and should have a chance to prove themselves. And I would be fine with Michael Vick getting a job selling cars or working at Wal-Mart or maybe running the Michael Vick Football Camp For Troubled Teens. But the NFL? What theory of redemption is it that requires us to place a man back in the same exalted position he once occupied when he has fallen from that perch because of his own disgraceful acts? In his later years, Nixon was reported to have many regrets about Watergate, but nobody wanted to make him President again. And if Bernie Madoff ever gets out of jail, do you think we should let him start a hedge fund? I sincerely hope Michael Vick becomes a decent human being, and I think it’s possible he can do that. But that will happen, or not, depending on the kind of person Vick is. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HIM PLAYING FOOTBALL.

4) Three cops killed a black guy and didn’t get punished at all.

(I heard this argument at work today.) Of course, this can be used to excuse anything. There’s always somebody worse, unless you actually happen to be Joseph Stalin.

I don’t think you ever heard this argument thirty years ago, when it was accepted that justice resided in meting out punishment to an individual because of the deeds that individual committed. “Let the punishment fit the crime” was how it was expressed. Now, the argument goes, the act and the actor don’t matter so much. What matters is the background of the actor, or his nationality or skin color, or some other factor completely extraneous to the crime.

For example, there was a time, not long ago, when a man who broke into the home of an elderly couple, and robbed and killed them, would be convicted of murder and executed. Today, however, whenever such a criminal is a member of a minority group, the argument is made that it is unfair to execute him because at various times and in various places, a white man who committed a different heinous crime may not have been sentenced to death. The individual’s responsibility for monstrous acts, in other words, doesn’t matter nearly as much as his status as a representative of some demographic group. The act is the same, as is the depraved heart that committed it, and the elderly couple is still laying there in a pool of blood. And we are never told exactly why we must know the sex or race of the criminal before we can condemn his act.

The idea that justice resides somewhere other than in the relationship between the act and the actor is not really a new one---a thousand years ago, the crimes of noblemen were viewed very differently from the crimes of peasants---but it is odd that such an archaic, primitive notion can gain so much support in a modern Western democracy.

Down this road lies barbarism, a state in which no one can distinguish between right and wrong. As Natan Sharansky wrote, “The challenge in the Soviet Union was finding a way to fight evil; in the West, the challenge is to recognize it.”

5) It’s a cultural thing.

This is what the bad guys always say, isn’t it? It’s how white Southerners defended segregation. “It’s our culture; you just don’t understand.” In fact, it’s how slave-owners defended slavery; us Northerners just didn’t see how happy everybody was. “Culture” is why Muslims keep their women in bags, and why they mutilate the sex organs of little girls. It’s why the Bosnian War happened: “Hey, back off! We’ve been killing Muslims for 700 years---it’s our culture!”

Culture indeed! I think it was Blaise Cendrars who wrote, “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver.” If you paint Easter eggs with intricate patterns, that’s a cultural thing. If you drink a pint of Guiness on St. Patty’s Day, that’s a cultural thing. If you paint hex signs on your barn, that’s a cultural thing too. But if you torture dogs for pleasure, and you call it your culture, then there’s something seriously sick about your culture and maybe you need a different one.

Copyright2009MichaelKubacki

3 comments:

  1. This Vick piece is one of your best, Mikey. Outstanding.

    pete

    ReplyDelete
  2. You think allot of yourself. You presume much and rattle on from the perspective of your own shoes incessantly.

    I have no time or interest in expounding point by point a different and in some case opposite view of yours as that would be more of the same. Instead I will point out that Michael Vick is an American and can take advantage of the freedoms that title allows just as he is subject to our laws.

    You write and write and write about this but your passion is misguided. There are countless stories of people you might have issue with doing time and later reaping the benefits of our society. Instead of chronicling your contempt for a man taking advantage of his born American privileges I suggest you spend that time appreciating the people you love.


    Domenic Magliaro

    ReplyDelete
  3. WHO IS THIS MASKED MAN?

    ReplyDelete