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!