Salon.com > Aaron Traister

Are fans responsible for Jovan Belcher?

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:12:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote about how football wasn’t good for me and I was trying to quit. Since my rant I’ve managed to avoid a lot of football; I’ve missed my favorite player, Lesean McCoy, getting severely concussed in garbage time of a meaningless game, I have no idea how Peyton Manning is doing in Denver, and I only have a vague understanding of what’s happening under center in San Francisco. Last week I backslid a bit when I watched three quarters of the Eagles’ Monday night game against the Carolina Panthers; I justified this lapse by telling myself that it was OK because at this point Eagles’ games bear almost no resemblance to actual professional football.

Sadly, this weekend there was a terrible and all too serious reminder of why I’m cutting football out of my life for the time being.

I’m not going to focus on what happened in Kansas City beyond saying that if you cannot see this weekend’s awful events fitting into a larger pattern of football-associated tragedies (Chris Henry and Junior Seau came to mind very quickly) then you are being willfully blind.

Is there a war on men?

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:44:00 +0000

I’d like to thank Fox News contributor Suzanne Venker for having the balls to write about the War on Men this weekend. It was an important story and I want to share my important opinion about it.

Suzanne Venker was right about what’s got me — the American Male — down. Three words: Increased competition. And feminism. Since this crazy feminism stuff really started getting popular (thanks, Mom) and ladies have started acting (and smelling) like dudes, I’ve been withdrawing from higher education, from family, even from some parts of the labor force. (I want to make it very clear that I’m withdrawing, not quitting; quitting sounds way too harsh.)

But can you blame me for withdrawing? I’m so tired and angry about feminism and the increased level of competition I have to deal with at school, at home and in the workplace that it’s just easier to not even bother competing at all. Instead, I spend my mornings pulling bong rips on the couch while catching up on reruns of "Boy Meets World." But then I catch one of the later episodes where Topanga clearly asserts her dominance over a neutered Cory and I’m back where I started before I decided to get stoned and not leave the house.

Obama’s renewed message of hope

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 21:23:00 +0000

In 2008, I was not “in the tank” for Obama. I was a Clinton supporter in the primary, and thought Obama was too inexperienced to be a good president. Back then I had just finished working with incarcerated and at risk kids in Philadelphia and it frustrated me when my friends would talk about Obama like he was magic, like he could wave a wand once he was elected and fix the myriad problems facing the country. I thought that people who used terms like “post-racial” should be forced to work a few days in the prisons that I had just burned out on. But I recognized that this was a historic election and I wanted my 2-year-old son, Noah, to be a part of it, even if his memories of it wouldn’t be clear ones. So I took Noah to see all the candidates: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Joe Biden. (We would have gone to see John McCain, but they wouldn’t give us tickets to the event because we weren’t registered Republicans.)

And I took him to see Barack Obama.

We saw him two blocks away from a GED program where I was still teaching kids who had dropped out of high school.

Learning to hate football

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 16:00:00 +0000

On the evening of Oct. 22, 2001, I found myself riding around a bar in New York’s East Village on the back of a gentleman I’d met only a few hours before. It was the final minutes of a Monday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the New York Giants. Eagles’ quarterback Donovan McNabb connected with James Thrash for a touchdown putting the Eagles ahead of the Giants 10-9; the score would hold and the Eagles would win the game. The gentleman was the only other Philadelphian and Eagles fan in the bar and the minute I saw the official's arms go up and signal touchdown I leapt on that guy’s back and he gave me the craziest piggyback ride I’ve ever had. He had surprisingly strong legs and he used them to run all over that New York City bar while we sang the Eagles fight song in front of the assembled Giants fans.

We only stopped when a large security guard came over and said, “All right, you boys have had your fun, now knock that gay shit off.”

During the course of that game I must have eaten about 30 chicken wings, smoked a pack of cigarettes and had about 12 to 80 beers. I spent three hours giving in to some of my most hedonistic impulses in an effort to ease the delicious torture of a close football game, and the payoff was a euphoric two-minute victory lap in hostile territory on the back of a stranger.