My New Children's Book: Curious Hank and the Bad Simile

This story is going to be remembered this way: Hank Williams Jr. compared Obama to Hitler and ESPN fired him for it. It's a perfect microcosm of our news media today: succinct, sensationalized, and completely inaccurate.

First of all I'll put my linguistics/grammar hat on and analyze what HW Jr actually said. He said that Obama and Boehner playing golf together "would be like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu." So let's parse this down. Suppose that instead of using this poorly conceived wording, he had instead opted to say "Obama and Boehner is like oil and water." Would we then expect the headline to read "HW Jr. Calls Obama Oil". No; that would be nonsensical. But it's just as nonsensical here. The "point" he was trying to make is that Obama and Biden are the enemy and "our guy" (Boehner) should not be fraternizing with the enemy.

The reason it is important to draw this distinction is that when this becomes a "dumb celebrity says dumb thing" story, it completely buries the real issue here. And that's the fact that we have a large contingent of people in this country who believe what HW Jr believes: that Obama and Biden are not political adversaries that need to be engaged, persuaded, and/or voted out, but that they are enemies that need to be alienated and eradicated. Such is the political climate in this country right now. It was not created by the media but they have certainly done their best to stoke the flames. Thus, I did not want to see an apology from HW Jr. for the Hitler comment; I could care less about that. I want an acknowledgement that people on the other side of the political spectrum are not "enemies".

Shockingly, I'm going to make a sports analogy here. My team is the Bears. Every Sunday I want them to beat the living crap out of their opponents. I will get angry when my team loses, and in the middle of the game I don't have fond feelings for the other team. But once the game is over I don't balk when I see players from both teams shake hands and maybe hug in the middle of the field. The game's over, there are winners and losers, and you move on. So it should be in politics. You fight, you win/lose, you shake hands and move on. Opponents today may be allies the next and vice versa. You're not enemies; just on different teams.

The "HW Jr" mentality isn't like that though; it's more akin to gang warfare. You're wearing the wrong colors and therefore you're my enemy and I hope you die. It's sad because politicians generally DO have the NFL and not the gang mentality. You would hope that when the public sees politicians on different sides of the aisle socializing together that it would dawn on them that "hey, they just disagree; they don't actually hate each other." Sadly, that doesn't happen. Politicians could do a lot to help their own cause by placing a lot more emphasis on stating that they are attacking a position and not a person. Yeah, I don't see that happening either.

Now we come to the 2nd part of the story, which is that HW Jr got fired from ESPN as a result of his comments. I've already written about this kind of thing numerous times on here so I won't harp too much. But it's absolutely ridiculous that someone loses their job over something like this. He wasn't on the air representing ESPN, or the NFL, or anyone other than himself. Yeah, it's not technically a violation of his free speech rights since the government isn't doing anything to him, but it's still a croc. It's becoming a de facto law that what you say in public cannot contradict the position of your employer. That's just very dangerous, especially considering that the definition of "in public" is expanding by the day.