Saturday, January 25, 2003

I just do not get this column from NRO. If I read it right, the author is saying that real pirates and buccaneers were horrible people, and it is incongruent that pirates have rather a rebellious, devil-may-care image today when in real life they were horribly frightening. So far so good. Then he tells us that he thought it was appropriate that the Patriots won the Super Bowl last year because of their name. OK, no prob. Then he says we should root against the Buccaneers because their name is so inappropriate, like calling a team the Rapists or the Robbers or the Murderers. I'm still with him, but the problem here is that the Buccaneers' rival is the Oakland Raiders. Uh, the Raiders use pirate imagery, too, and have been using it for more than forty years, while the Bucs have only existed since '77. In order to be consistent, we would have to root against both teams for glorifying pirates. I always root against the Raiders, no matter what--I could no more root for the Raiders, ever, even if they were playing the SS Amerikanisch Fussball Reichsformationgruppe team, than I could for the Cowboys, or the Yankees, or the Lakers--so I'm going to ignore the whole glorifying-pirates issue and root for Tampa Bay. Even though they have some insufferable loudmouths on their team and I like Rich Gannon and Jerry Rice.

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