Ok listen, smurfs. We don’t take this lightly. Being compared to Trump is pretty severe, we know. We’d really prefer to compare no one to Trump, but alas, the whole exercise would feel a little empty if we left him out. So we have to give it to someone. And, well all this being said, we don’t really like you, you know that, we both know that. But many of you, we assume, are good people.
The branding has been years in the making. To a degree, you understand the appeal -- the money, the grandiose environs (that are actually owned by someone else), and the growing lineup of high profile, albeit late arriving, endorsements. You can’t deny that the crowds are impressive. Although unsettling and often containing unsavory elements, they’ve brought a lot of eyes and voices to the arena that weren’t necessarily there before, at least not in this way. As often as you wish you’d never heard from them at all, you know you can’t ignore them. At times you’re sympathetic to the argument that it’s necessary, perhaps even good for the league country, to publicly exorcise these demons and have a larger populace tuned in and participating week in and week out. And hey look at all this swag! It’s everywhere. It’s not a bad design, you know.
But then you snap out of it. Did it have to happen quite like this? A manufactured claim to authenticity, wearing the robes of (civic) nativism, and funded by the very sources of modern excess many of its adherents claim to abhor? Blind to the irony that many of those in attendance once called somewhere else home? Do we really need the ties to unethical labor practices and misogyny? The belief that, despite never having won anything in their life, they feel entitled to all the glory of a hard-working long-suffering base? The arrogance towards others, and insistence that they, single-handedly, will somehow both elevate the league country to a new level and return it to a false image of an imagined glorious past?
Look, we’ll be the first to tell you the corporatization of our team league country is a problem -- but there are better alternatives than this.
Ted Cruz - the Nazi Prison Guard Team from Escape to Victory