Last week, in an attempt to be funny, I contributed a satrical post to "Behind The Steel Curtain," a blog I've been frequenting since August. The premise of the post was what I thought the Tea Party's all-time NFL team would look like if members of the party got together and had a vote on it. The team consisted of all white guys and about 90% of them played before 1980. To give you an example of what I mean: Jerry Rice, a black man, is considered the greatest wide receiver of all time. But on my Tea Party list, I have Don Huston, a white man who played in the early years of the NFL, as one of their all-time receivers.
It might seem pretty stereotypical for me to write that, but hey, if you worried about stereotypes, there would be no jokes.
The Tea Party has gained popularity since President Barack Obama took office. The party is a movement of people who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it any more. They lean to the right, but claim to not be fans of the previous presidential regime, either. Funny how I didn't hear much from them when George W. Bush was running things for eight years. From all the rallies I've seen on tv, the party is made up of mostly middle age-to-elderly white people.
They really started to get vocal around the time the health care bill was passed. There was an incident where members of the party had shouted racial slurs at some African American congressmen just before the bill was passed and that's when I was inspired to write "The Tea Party's All-time NFL team as voted on by Tea Party members."
Originally, I posted it on craigslist because I thought that would be a way to get people to respond in an angry fashion. Nobody bit. Then, about a month later, I was reading about how some members of the Tea Party had paid to have billboards display propaganda comparing Obama to infamous political figures like Hitler. That's when I was inspired to post my satircal propaganda on my own blog. Again, nothing. I think the problem was that unless you knew a whole lot about football, you might not know that every single player on the list was white and mostly really old.
This past Summer, I discovered the blog "Behind The Steel Curtain" and I immediately fell in love. It is a place where Steelers fans from all around the world can get together and demonstrate their love for the Black and Gold.
And it really is love. There is so much love for the Steelers on this blog, it's quite remarkable. There is someone who contributes a weekly thread called: "Predict The Score" before the upcoming game, and about 99% of the scores are not only in favor of the Steelers, but blowouts.
Anyway, since my discovery of this blog, I've become a regular contributor, posting two or three things a week, because, much like everyone else on that site, I have a disturbing obsession with the Steelers. And the great thing about this site is if you post something, you get tremendous feedback. It's not always positive, it's often critical, but it's mostly quite respectful.
A couple of weeks ago, I was reading an article in the Tribune Review from an African American reporter. I can't remember her name, but she was following up on an article she had written previously on the ugly "N-word" and how she received some pretty nasty hate mail from people who, as it turned out, where members of the Tea Party.
And this inspired me to write something nasty about the Tea Party, but since I'm not overly political, what could I do? That's when it hit me to post my "The Tea Party's All-time NFL team" thread on BTSC and see what happened. I posted it last Tuesday evening and couldn't wait to get up on Wednesday and see how much feedback there was from it. When I logged onto the site Wednesday morning, I discovered that my post was disabled.
I posted a thread asking what happened to my post, and that's when I realized that "Behind The Steel Curtain" was no place for any political leanings whatsoever. Left, right, liberal, conservative, it didn't matter. "Take it outside, politics boy!" was the general response I got. Basically, they want the blog to be for the Steelers and about the Steelers and their fans. Even a satircal political post was not welcome there.
And even the thread I posted asking why my joke was was disabled was also, eventually taken down because the discussions were starting to get a little heated on the board.
And then someone else posted a thread on censorship and was saying stuff like we might not be interested in politics but politics is always interested in us, and that it's just a game and we should care about politics as much as we care about the Steelers. And that we should give more funding to the arts than we do to sports in this country. Ok, that last part was what Cliff Huxtable's daughter said in the "Sweet Feet" episode of the Cosby show, but I could see this person saying that.
And then that thread got pretty heated and eventually had to be taken down.
You know how, sometimes, a person will accidentally leave a shoebox on a bench in a crowded mall and people will panic and think it's a bomb and the whole place is shut down and the police and bomb squad are called in to blow up the shoes just in-case they were left there by terrorists?
Well, as I was reading all the mess that I started with my little joke post about the Tea Party, I felt like that person who accidentally left the shoe box at the mall.
I was even worried that I would be banned from the site even though I meant no harm. I was just trying to have some fun, although, the thought of getting vicious hate-mail from tea party members like that Trib reporter was kind of intriguing and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hoping to get some hate mail from my post.
I guess I will stick to blogging about sports.
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