Thinking back to the pain and frustration that was the Bush years there is really one stunt of the American right that today stands out as the tipping point in which the media and the population in general stopped buying wholesale every idiocy that they uttered. They overplayed their hand and made an accusation too wild about a cow too sacred. A cow, I might add, who played for their team. But no matter, they had been emboldened by years of passing of whatever tax cuts they wanted and starting any war they desired and now they turned their focus to Clint Eastwood and his masterful Academy Award winning film Million Dollar Baby. You see, what Rush Limbaugh and company saw in that movie was not a heartbreaking tale of one man’s sacrifice in the name of ending his friend’s suffering but rather a chest pounding left wing conspiracy to normalize, even glamorize, assisted suicide. It was a bridge too far for most American’s and to this day the right has yet to regain that trust.
I bring this up on an MMA page because last week, in a much quieter setting, New York Assemblyman Bob Reilly (Democrat, it must be noted), may have made the same fatal error. After discovering that a few fans had gotten a little rowdy at the US Open tennis tournament he declared that the hooligans were acting out something they “probably saw on a UFC fight.” There are so many holes in that argument that it really does sting to think about it. There is also the rather obvious fact that this is a shameless game of self promotion that he is playing. Clearly he is more than happy to take any old incident he sees on TV to use as an excuse to bang his anti-MMA drum as loudly as possible. If he had been active in the 1910’s then he would have certainly seen this (perhaps correctly) as being alcohol’s fault as opposed to their hypothetical viewing habits. Of course for him the most important reality is that before his MMA tirades he was irrelevant, today, because of it, he is at least a somebody.
Then we can move onto the too easy to make argument that if the violence in MMA is too much for him to handle then why is it AOK in NASCAR, boxing and football? With all the negative press football has been getting lately (Real Sports on HBO even went so far on this latest episode to implicate head trauma in cases of Lou Gehrig’s Disease) he can hardly feign ignorance forever. NASCAR, despite its recent streak of good luck, seemed to have been devised as a way to sanction violent deaths. And no top of that we live in a country that never tires of telling you just how free you are. So if somebody wanted to make shit tons of cash entertaining the masses and risk his health in doing so shouldn’t that trump any do gooders and their view of what life should ideally look like.
Appearing on Inside MMA this week Joe Rogan came out swinging in his attempt to defend the honor of MMA and called Reilly “Anti-Freedom” and “Anti-American.” I’ll give him the first one but sadly nowadays being anti-freedom is all too American. No trans fats, no unions, no smoking anywhere, no mosques, no civil liberties. . .we complain about political parties being the “party of no” but we have become a people of no. Sadder still is the fact that right now, politically speaking, it is safer to play the ignorant racist than it is to defend liberty.
To this day New York remains one of the 6 remaining states in which MMA remains illegal but their finances are in such disarray that Governor David Paterson build legalized MMA into his budget as a way to earn tax money. But still the dream of MMA in NYC remains just that. Sure both entities will survive without the other though certainly both would be helped out if the two sides could come to an agreement. Fans from New York City can still, technically, get live action and even though the commute to Newark or Philadelphia can be a bitch they really aren’t being deprived. But what is tough to live with is the knowledge that they live in a state where elected officials are keeping themselves in the headlines by comparing mixed martial arts to dog fighting even though he is so unschooled on the topic he uses “ultimate fighting” in place of mixed martial arts. I guess it’s just more proof that being a caveman can really get you places in the dirty world of politics.
