Dear Real, Credited, Respected, I-Went-To-School-For-This-Shit Journalists,
I’ll be honest with you. I want you to win this so called mainstream media v. blogs war. I mean, you created it, you should come out on top. I don’t start seasons in Madden to go 6-10, right? But over the last few weeks, a few of you aren’t making it any easier on yourselves. First, ESPN.com’s Jemele Hill likened rooting for the Celtics to saying that Hitler was a victim, which even by the “yeah it’s fucked up but I get where you’re going” paradigm, still doesn’t make any sense. Then just a few days ago, Bonnie Bernstein saw the need to draw similarities between basketball prodigies growing up here in America and Palestinian suicide bombers. Goddamnit Bonnie! I was just putting the finishing touches on a delightfully zany 2,500 word post comparing BJ Mullens and Fayez Nassir Hameed Al-Kahlout Abo, this year’s top suicide bomber recruit according to Istishhad-Prospectus.com. I even managed to cleverly work in relevant pictures of Erin Andrews and Alison Stokke. Extra Mustard, FanHouse and Deadpsin would have eaten that shit up. It was guaranteed 50,000 hits. That was 100% pure, uncut blogosphere gold and now you’ve gone and stolen my thunder.
I’m absolutely overjoyed every time someone like Bernstein goes on tv or radio and says something overtly irreverent like this and thinks it’s just par for the course and will go unnoticed or as if Golic and Greenberg would think “Oh wow what a fresh perspective Bonnie has. Fuck Schlereth, we’re bringing her on once a week from now on”. Even better, if you watch the video over on Awful Announcing, you can see how much prefacing she does before she makes her comment. “I’m about to say some off color shit, but I know it’s off color so that makes it ok and I’m not making the comparison, I’m just a vessel created to carry a message forth from higher power. I get it. I’m one of you. I’m hip. I got this shit.” My Brett Perriman “Mediocre Receivers of the 90s” commemorative plate was delivered with less padding than that. ¡Zing motherfuckers!
Here’s a suggestion for Jemele Hill, Bonnie Bernstein or any other media figure trying pass off insensitive analogies as insightful observations: just start a blog. Create an alias (Bernie Bonstein has a nice ring to it), go over to Blogger.com and start a site and feel free to throw out all the sourceless, stupid, callous shit you want. Watch, I’ll show you. Here we go. I swear what Bill Belichick is doing in New England is just like what Pol Pot was doing within the Khmer Rouge. Let me look out the window real quick. Just what I figured. No protesters outside the Tirico Suave offices. No calls for apologies or retractions. No one cares what I write or if it even makes sense. Want another example? Sure. That was fun. How’s this? Man, I’m so tired of the Florida Gators recent success. It’s a shame Danny Rolling still isn’t around. Again, no protests, no requests for my resignation. See what I’m talking about? Everything’s fair game out here.
As a way to wrap this up and as a final service to all legit sports journalists, here’s a beginner’s list of people that you should never, under any circumstance, use in comparisons with sports figures for you bookmark and comeback to, in case you again find yourself at these comparative crossroads: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mengele, Eichmann, Ruhollah Khomeini, Idi Amin, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Klebold/Harris, and Seung-Hui Cho. This obviously is not a comprehensive list so a good rule of thumb to follow is ‘if the person has committed mass murder or rape in any form, it’s probably best to move on and reference somebody else.’ Of course if tomorrow Ricky Davis retires from the NBA to fulfill his secret lifelong dream of becoming the dictator of Uganda and begins to call for ethnic cleansing then everything previously stated here becomes a moot point and you have the freedom to make any and all of the analogies you see fit.
