Inept Verticals

I’ve always wanted to start up a barnstorming basketball team that is the cripple equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters. But I’m afraid that plays right into the hands of The Oppressor.

My cripple team’s mission would be a variation on the tried and true box office formula that is the essence of the enduring appeal of the Globetrotters: beating up on inept white guys. Anybody who has ever felt squashed under the thumb of The Oppressor knows what I’m talking about. We find therapeutic relief in some form of fictional entertainment where an inept and bungling symbol of The Oppressor gets a pie in the face from someone of our kind. We laugh at what a fool The Oppressor really is! Tables are turned! Justice prevails!

Revenge!

Wouldn’t it be great, I say to myself, to tour the world with my crippled basketball team, providing cripples with this same sense of political relief from The Oppressor’s suffocating bureaucracies and charities? Except instead of beating up on inept white guys, our team would beat up on inept verts (which is short for verticals, which is slang for people who walk). It’s ridiculously easy to find inept verts to be our comic foil. Take any NBA All Star team, put them in wheelchairs and shove them out onto the court against any wheelchair basketball team. The cripples will make those most breathtaking of athletic specimen look like helpless little trembling lambs.

But then I remind myself that the one thing the ever-paranoid Oppressor cannot and will not tolerate is being mocked. So then why hasn’t The Oppressor shut down the Globetrotters, declared them all terrorists and thrown them in the brig? In the McCarthy era, why weren’t the Globetrotters dragged, in their full uniforms, before HUAC?

It must be because the twisted logic of The Oppressor perceives Globetrotteresque hijinks as somehow serving His evil purpose. It’s all part of His bread-and-circus appeasement strategy. If indulging in such crude amusement is what it takes for the unwashed masses to endure their lot another day, let them have their fun. Let them release spurts of steam from the pressure cooker so the lid doesn’t blow. Let them entertain the fanciful notion that at least for a fleeting moment they are the ones in charge. It is fiction, after all.

And so, for our slapstick amusement, The Oppressor offers up a sacrificial army of pawns, in the form of the Washington Generals or the New York Nationals or any of the teams the Globetrotters routinely humiliate. They are His stand-ins in the political dunk tank. And He writes it all off as collateral damage.

So I won’t fall for it. I’m here to tell The Oppressor that if He’s reading this, and I’m sure He is, I’m on to Him! I’ll not be used to advance His sinister agenda!