Topic: WorldNetDaily
Anthony LoBaido -- the guy who wrote a post-9/11 God-damn-America screed so extreme and hateful that WorldNetDaily eventually removed it from its website despite editor Joseph Farah defending it (we named a Slantie Award after him), and also the guy who hung out with white supremacists in South Africa -- is back. And this time, he's trying to extract social commentary out of observing Oakland Raiders fans.
LoBaido's very long Feb. 9 WND article is filled with clumsy metaphors (describing a woman who attempted suicide by jumping off the top deck of the Raiders' stadium as having "tumble[d] downward like a stunt dummy, or the parachuting gang of bank robbers in the film, “Point Break”) and clumsier self-aggrandizement (he touts how Raytheon "offered me a position of senior training and development director working with the new National Armed Forces of Afghanistan" but didn't take the job becuase "I wanted $345,000 per year to put my life on the line").
But clumsiest of all are LoBaido's attempts to shoehorn his griping about the world into a study of rabid football fans, to the point where it's unclear just how LoBaido really feels besides superior and judgmental. He laments that some female Raiders fans "would cut and alter their tops to show off their cleavage just enough to make them enticing, as if they had it down to an exact science." He then adds: "You have to wonder what happened to modesty, but considering the siege of pornography in society, the thirst for modesty has been all but quenched."
A few paragraphs later, LoBaido serves up this train wreck of a paragraph:
People were chanting “USA!” even though both Iraq and Afghanistan have long since been lost, military suicides have climbed to more than 20 per day and egregious criminality from Abu Ghraib to Robert Bales have unraveled before our eyes. Yet it was good to see the American spirit was still alive, and it made me proud to be on hand, and proud to be an American. The giant American flag spread across the football field was almost awe inspiring. That said, one could not avoid the feeling that we were cheering for both an American mystique and an Oakland Raiders mystique that have evaporated like the morning fog, as the prestige, influence, financial might, morality, prosperity and standing of our nation steadily declines.
Elsewhere, LoBaido takes numerous odd digressions, including a brief history of the city of Oakland and about how his mom's favorite football player was Jim Plunkett, and repeatedly misspells the name of Raiders quarterback Matt McGloin. He also serves up this:
Another memory that I can’t seem to shake is that of all the security at the games. When I was walking in to the stadium for the final game of the season against Denver, one of the security guards told me, “Christians are dangerous.” He was actually checking me for a knife.
He said, “We don’t want you stabbing anybody.” You know, as if …
I said reflexively, “I’m just a boring, Christian guy.” I mean, I used to work at a grocery store when I was a teenager. I used to work at a gas station, too. Just like Jim Plunkett.
The security guard then said, “We all know Christians are dangerous, too.” (Like Kurt Warner?)
We were thinking more like James Kopp, or perhaps the militias in the Central African Republic. Or maybe the South African white supremacists LoBbaido hung out with.
LoBaido concludes that football keeps our collective minds off real problems, like China or deadly gamma rays:
Perhaps some will say that these thoughts deserve additional introspection. How does the NFL, with its violence, showmanship, antics, drinking and criminality, reflect postmodern America, if at all? There were the shootings at Sandy Hook in Connecticut and the storm we came to know as “Sandy.” Is our society, and our world, coming apart? Yet while we may indeed live in a society where is seems that nothing is sacred, we can at least hold onto the fact that for many Americans, football is still sacred. That, in and of itself, offers at least a modicum of comfort.
Distractions like the NFL will have to be enough to keep us from slipping into the “Black Hole,” as we live in a world where China has launched a new fleet of stealthy submarines loaded with intercontinental ballistic missiles bought and paid for at Wal-Mart, and a constant flood of immensely powerful gamma ray bursts threaten life on Earth.
An editor's note states that Lobaido "was given season tickets to attend the Oakland Raiders NFL home games," which apparently resulted in this. Let this be a lesson to anyone thinking about giving away such things.
