Tuesday, September 26, 2017

NFL's takingAKnee is Trump tweets

Bill Murray tells a fantastic joke that covers most of everything we are seeing today.

The joke, badly paraphrased from memory:

A man comes in to see a doctor and the doc starts him out on the standard inkblot test.

The man winces and says "a couple making love under a tree!"

The doc flips to the next, and the man says "a couple having sex on a table."

The doc flips through five more.

"sex sex sex sex sex"

The doc says "I think I know what the problem is, you're obsessed with sex."

The patient slams his hands against the table, outraged, "I'm obsessed with sex? You are the one with all the dirty pictures!"

...
What we have is an inkblot test with people seeing very different thinks. It really does NOT matter what the intent of the players is, their intent is the inkblot. Failing ratings proves millions of people are seeing something very offensive, and tuning out.

We can argue over what the inkblot (taking a knee) "really" means, but it's not going to be any more successful than telling the man that he, not the doctor, is obsessed with sex.

This is the same phenomenon we see with the inkblot called Trump. Millions see a Hitler (with a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren), while others see that 'Hitler stuff' as absurd. It's an inkblot. Both are inkblots that tell ONLY what THE VIEWER sees; and what the viewer sees has NOTHING to do with the truth of the inkblot and everything to do with what's going on in the mind of the VIEWER. Inkblots illuminate the illusions in our own minds, not reality.

An inkblot is just an inkblot, they are pictures of nothing.

Football means what the viewer THINKS it means. The NFL and the Players have as much control over what "taking a knee" means as the doctor has over what a patient sees in an inkblot. And Trump has no control over what people "think" he means by his tweet. Half of America "thinks" it means the opposite of what the other half "thinks" it means.

"Taking a knee" is, literally, the NFL's version of the Trump tweets everyone says he should stop doing.

The difference is that Trump does not need the people who think he's Hitler, he already got elected without them. He actually benefits from driving them insane, he benefits from having them screaming 'sex sex sex' at everything they see, it destroys their credibility. Where the NFL can't afford to have half their audience "think" the NFL hates the police, the military, and America.

It doesn't matter what the inkblot really is a picture of, to the NFL it matters what the audience THINKS the inkblot means, and right or wrong, too many "think" taking a knee means the NFL hates America.