Wednesday, August 12, 2009

This sporting life

You may or may not have followed the Michael Vick story—the football player for whom having 11 steroid-infused behemoths piling on him once a week wasn’t violent enough, & was running a dog fighting ring. The evidence of his criminality was so egregious that he didn’t have the chutzpah to plead not guilty; but by pleading guilty he was sentenced to only 23 months.

Released from prison he was reinstated by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. His home team, the Falcons, won’t touch him with a barge pole, but if he can prove himself able to throw a football, some team probably will and he’ll be back in the tall cotton.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has a few comments on this travesty, which should enrage any person of sensibility. Which excludes any sports fan who thinks that the only thing that matters is that their team win, whatever the cost and however morally reprehensible the members of that team may be.

Here’s my vision of cosmic justice for this son of a bitch and all his dog-fighting pals (the ones who ran the business and the ones who paid for it): when they die (as soon and as painfully as possible), the ever-afterlife should be all the dogs they mangled and murdered tearing them apart again and again. Whenever the shreds of their miserable carcasses are scattered over the terrain of Hell, they are sucked back together like a motion picture special effect so another dog can rip them apart again.

Except that it would only extend the pain of the dogs’ existence. Maybe I’ll use mechanical dogs.

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