I will be succinct. On Sept. 29, after years of negotiation and debate, Major League Baseball voted to move the Expos franchise from Montreal to Washington, D.C. As the team is relocated, it will be renamed. Current candidates include the Washington Grays (was Whites too edgy?) and the Washington Senators (was Undersecretaries too big for the jersey?). I propose that the team be renamed the Washington Terrorists.
But terrorists are evil! you say. Precisely the point, say I. Temporary identification with evil allows the human soul’s worst tendencies to be exercised and then purged within safe confines; and so sport gives us any number of teams styled after the unsavory, the repugnant and the downright malevolent. We chant “LET’S GO, DEVILS!” over and over at the top of our lungs, and yet none of us are Satanists. We have the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. We have the Cavaliers, because Clevelanders evidently enjoy rooting for Charles I and the divine right of kings. And if Tennessee fans are unaware that their beloved Titans once tore the god Dionysus limb from limb and devoured his flesh, that is the fault of our public school system.
You say “Washington Terrorists” demeans the victims of terror? Consider the peasants of early medieval England, their women raped and their villages burned to the ground, cowering in their sod hovels as they pray, “Lord, save us from the fury of the Norsemen,” and then go put on your Randy Moss jersey. If “Washington Terrorists” demeans the victims of terror, so does “Minnesota Vikings.” There is no substantive difference. The difference purely psychological; and the psychological drawback of naming a team after our enemies is more than balanced out by the benefits.
Let’s begin with the economic benefits. MLB, of course, reaps increased gate revenue and merchandise sales when teams establish a distinctive brand identity. Teams identifiable on sight, like the Yankees and Red Sox, raise more money, support higher payrolls and win more games than their ugly cousins.
And what’s more identifiable than an angry, bearded, racially nondescript man glowering from behind his rifle-scope on baseball caps? Kids will buy them by the gross. The Terrorists can play in Tora Bora Ballpark, enter the field from cave-shaped dugouts and watch the Dancing Bin Ladens during the seventh-inning stretch. Announcers can say things like, “If Derek Jeter strikes out, the Terrorists will have won.” It all adds up to a comprehensive marketing package sure to lift the former Expos out of mediocrity and into the ranks of the elite.
Not that national security ramifications should be ignored. Will a team named after our enemies foster a fifth column here at home? Quite to the contrary: Where our enemies repress, we cathartize. They have virtue patrols, we have strip clubs. So why not turn this liberalizing quality to the end of stamping out the domestic opposition? Give them a ballteam and turn terrorist sympathizers into Terrorist sympathizers. Let them purge their hatred with anti-American chants during the game.
Adlai Stevenson once said, “America can choke to death on a gnat, but it swallows tigers whole.” He was referring to our country’s ability to tie itself up in McCarthyism and hanging chads and yet still defeat fascism and communism. But America has triumphed precisely because it not only swallows, it digests. It assimilates; it has turned revolution into Gorditas, Christianity into jewelry-store crosses and black culture into P-Diddy. And we can make terrorists into Terrorists, enemies of freedom and capitalism into one more cog in the money-making machine.
I see a day 10 or 15 years from now, a detachment of special forces in the hills of Afghanistan are standing in a circle around a bent old man.
“Hey, it’s that guy from the baseball team,” says one of the soldiers.
“I’m not from the baseball team, I’m Osama bin Laden!” says the old man. “I destroyed the Twin Towers! I’m the world’s most fearsome terrorist!”
“No you’re not, you’re that guy from the baseball team. Do that dance you do.”
And the soldiers will laugh and poke him with the butts of their rifles, and then they’ll hurry home in their Humvee to catch the Terrorists facing the Pirates in Game Seven of the NLCS.
And on that the War on Terror will be over; Osama bin Laden will be as good as conquered. We will have assimilated him like so many Che T-shirts. And nothing he does can ever hurt us again.
Rob Goodman is a Trinity senior.
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