Tag: Blue Angels

Super Bowl season is like the holidays — a celebration shared by people more accustomed to arguing than sitting down together. Meanwhile, advertisers fret that running any ads at all could be read as a statement one way or the other. It’s a normal thing to want a break from arguing. It needed recruits, and it needed a compliant public. To sports fans. A Senate investigation revealed that the military dumped tens of millions of dollars into the NFL and other leagues for PR help. “Consider the display put on at Super Bowl 50,” recalls writer Stephen Beale for The American Conservative: “A flyover by the Blue Angels fighter jets, and 50 representatives of all military branches singing ‘America the Beautiful’ against a backdrop of a giant flag.” Some even speculate that the NFL’s national anthem rules were bought by that Pentagon money. Despite this thoroughly political staging, it was only Kaepernick and his supporters who were attacked for “bringing politics” into football. (In fact, it was veteran Nate Boyer who advised Kaepernick to take a knee in the first place.) That’s no comfort to the beleaguered football fan (or their friend who just watches for the commercials).

A reader recently emailed me to ask that I not mix politics and beer in my writing. Casual banter, after all, is laden with politics, as are so many elements of our lives. Facebook is political. Riding a bike is political, as is driving a big car. Carbon dioxide, for crying out loud, has become political, at the machination of the conservative right. Politics saturates the human world, and I can’t, in good faith to reality, pretend that beer and politics must never cross paths. When the billionaire ran for president, the game of naming craft beers emerged as a popular vector for opposing his campaign. Trump, by the fall of 2016, had already revealed his values and agenda: He had boasted about groping women, gushed over his gaudy hotels, bragged about — so it seemed — his success in avoiding paying taxes and proposed the U.S.-Mexico border wall — and brewers noticed. — I invite people in — and it’s a little disingenuous to completely wall off your beliefs and separate your business world from your personal life.” A year after Trump was elected, Marin Brewing released Dotard, a double IPA whose name quotes the illustrative insult Kim Jong-Un, supreme leader of North Korea, hurled at Trump in a North Korean government news statement in September 2017. President Trump has also presented himself as a bitter enemy of the media and free press, throwing the insult of “fake news” at many news outlets.