Multiple Offsetting Fouls: Foul III--Gun-spiracies?

This writer has opined elsewhere that no one should offer an opinion regarding the 2nd amendment until they've read Adam Winkler's Gun Fight, Michael Waldman's The Second Amendment: A Biography [this one should especially required reading for ostensible "originalists"], or anything/everything Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has written on the subject. However, one particular conspiracy being proferred in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre reminded me of something I learned in my yeshiva days: the Sabbatical gatherer of wood executed in Numbers 15:36 is identified as such by his own daughters [as Zelophchad] in 27:3, the theory being that he sacrificed himself so that the rest of the Children of Israel would take the Sabbath seriously.

Forget for a second that there are those saying that Stephen Paddock was a patsy [THAT might be more reminiscent of Christopher Hitchens' travels in Pakistan after 9/11, where he encountered people who praised Osama bin Laden for bringing down the Twin Towers, while saying at the same time of course he didn't, it was the Mossad]. Mark Steyn--whose writings I usually admire to a point--seems to have gone overboard by giving any credence to this particular theory: "[Paddock] wished to telegraph to America in graphic form the hard irrefutable evidence that guns and gun ownership, and the ease of gun purchase in America are an evil and must be controlled." This reminded me of the aforementioned lesson of Zelophchad, at which point I reminded myself that, as his daughters note, "he died because of his own sin"; he didn't take others and innocents with him.

Additionally, another generally admirable pundit, Peggy Noonan, seemed to present gun rights as so fundamentally linked to a whole array of legitimate conservative concerns that she started to sound like a conservative hybrid of a Linda Sarsour intersectionalist and a Karen Armstrong-style apologist; almost as if, despite herself, upholding the Obamanian "clinging to guns and religion". [Then again, the "2nd amendment people" might not have appreciated her going on the air with Mika and saying "I never think it’s the wrong time to talk about gun control."]

Rule of thumb for conservatives: when you start to even sound apologetically intersectional or intersectionally apologetic, stand athwart yourself and yell "Stop!!!"

[I would try suggesting not shooting yourself in the foot, but "2nd amendment people" would rebuff me by arguing that the gun is protected. Didn't work for Plaxico Burress, though.]

Multiple Offsetting Fouls: Foul II--Everyone's an enabler

Last September, after the Billy Bush "grab 'em" tapes went viral, Jonathan Tobin wrote: 

"...many [] on the right—including those who specifically present themselves to the public as religious conservatives—no longer seem to think virtue is a prerequisite for the presidency...many of these same people who spoke about the impact of the death of outrage with regard to [Bill] Clinton are now willing to rationalize Trump’s egregious behavior makes their hypocrisy even worse than that of their liberal counterparts."

Whatever moral high ground these ostensible "liberals" had has been leveled by the Harvey Weinstein revelations.  Consider that an entire industry almost uniformly dedicated to taking one side in the culture wars and the attendant politics has not only not been practicing what it preaches, but enabling for decades one of its primary drivers and bundlers who, as he started to finally realize that the game was up, tried to throw out a lifeline with a pathetic "we're on the same side!" shout.  It was interesting to see that a couple of his ostensible remaining "allies" tried to mitigate his situation using slut-shaming and "think-of-the-family" tropes that they and their ilk usually ascribe to those on the other side of the culture war.   [DKNY already was on #GrabYourWallet, so maybe Karan had nothing to lose.]

If there ever is a third "Clinton" ticket, it wouldn't feature Chelsea as the candidate.

The most Clintonesque ticket would comprise Harvey Weinstein and Anthony Weiner.

Multiple Offsetting Fouls: Foul I--Flag Football

Let's start by using the President's specific terminology--you are an SOB if:

• you particularly use the flag and anthem as a platform for protest by singling it out as a symbol of oppression while touting the policies and eulogizing the dead leadership of a regime which is known to be one the most oppressive on the planet;
• your activist girlfriend touts the culture of the land of her childhood which only recently decided they might let women drive (you have to wonder whether she gives Castronick more nightmares than his getting planted by Kiko Alonso);
• and your newest comrade in arms ("comrade" designation is deliberate) is an outspoken supporter of terrorism and terrorists.

If you don't necessarily support all of these talking points but still feel compelled to kneel during the flag display and anthem as a "protest against oppression":

• you may not necessarily be an "SOB", but anyone with any real connection to the flag--particularly those who served in the military--reserve the right to call you that should they so desire;
• you might recover some moral currency if you "protested" the flag but disavowed Castronick and his fellow travellers;
• you also might be more credible if you didn't non-compare/compare Castronick to Rosa Parks, especially when your 0-5 team's play starts to resemble your ability to make historical analogs.

If you are disingenuous enough to believe that you can compartmentalize your "protest" from "disrespecting the flag":

• you also violate your identitarian tenets regarding "cultural appropriation", because you don't get to decide what that symbol means, or when you are violating it;
• you therefore don't get to make that call, because again, only those who have any real connection to the flag through service get to decide that.

If, however, you call out "protesters"/"kneelers" but simultaneously believe that

• Confederate symbolism and service deserve respect and preservation, because they embody timeless virtues;
• that those who want to preserve that particular iconography outside museums and places where they can be viewed outside any context where they can be honored are "fine people"--

--you also might be an SOB.

Furthermore, any attempt to decouple "southern heritage" from the racial supremacism that embodied the raison detre of the Confederate cause, as well as the de jure segregationist regime that persisted in the South until at least 1967, is even more disingenuous than attempts to decouple kneeling from disrespect.

(Two side notes about the Stars and Bars:

a) Those who ask "what about those who rode into battle in World War II and liberated the camps with Confederate flags painted on their tanks and jeeps" should be reminded that there were jeeps and tanks with the Hammer and Sickle that also fought the Nazis and liberated numerous camps.  Let's see if the Confederate flag advocates would accord the same respect for the "timeless martial virtues" represented by the flag of the USSR as they would for that of the CSA.

b) Those worried that "if they come for that flag, they'll come for the Israeli flag"--quit being so idiotically guilt-ridden like the "liberals" you decry.  The color standard that actually embodies an secessionist ethnic supremacism analogous to the Stars and Bars is the Palestinian flag.  There's a reason you see neo-Nazis flying Palestinian flags and a market for  Confederate/Palestinian friendship crosspins.  No one flies a Magen David with the Stars and Bars.)

That said, the NFL owners may have made their own mess, but have been given an unwitting opportunity to clean it up.  Until 2009, when the DOD and National Guard began paying the NFL for patriotic displays, teams stayed in the locker rooms until the anthem finished.  Unfortunately, the NFL's flag policies apparently left too much wiggle room, and one player's attempt to make himself relevant while his on-field skills went into a Steve Blass-like decline while simultaneously TL-ing his new celebrity girlfriend metastasized into a PR crisis when one ostensible billionaire who first sued the NFL and lost and then got rejected from buying into it tried to one-up 32 other billionaires who, like POTUS, don't like being told what to do--ever.  And fans are left with a distraction from something that's supposed to be a distraction in the first place. 

(Side note: anyone focusing on Castronick's TD-INT ratio as proof of his competence as opposed to his recent W-L record should remember that the last quarterback who had a similar stat set was Neil O'Donnell.)

Enter ESPN and the suspension of Jemele Hill.  ESPN was likely reluctant to punish an ostensible rising journalistic talent for making political statements [although they were less reluctant to do so in Curt Schilling's case for reasons I need not identify], but when she explicitly made statements threatening the bottom lines of the company she worked for, they had to act.   This is what the NFL should seize on: as the flag is a symbol of a sponsor, attacking said sponsor affects the product.  Nothing clearer than that.  The NFL might then have to admit that its "patriotism" is as plastic as a football helmet, and it might give more credence to the notion that the flag might not even belong at sporting events when the country isn't at war [definition of which is usually eminently arguable]; however, in the end, neither the flag nor the game will be going anywhere.

Un-American Idols

It’s a shame that the ostensible catalyst for the recent conflagration in Charlottesville and the attendant political fallout on all sides is attributable, however remotely, to the attempt to rescue a statue.  Furthermore, one can’t help notice that more than a few conservative eminences not only defend those who want to to keep the statutes up even if they theoretically disagree with totality of the iconography, but now there are those who actually go so far as to defend the totality of the iconography itself.  In so doing, they ironically subvert conservative ideals, American ideals, and salient historical narrative.

At the outset, one can dispense with the notion that the ultimate motives of those clamoring for the statues’ removal are rooted in righting historical wrongs and restoring historical truths; one need not argue that “they see America as the Evil Empire and the Confederacy as a face of that evil…[t]o them this is not a campaign about racism or slavery; it’s one more step in transforming America by effacing and defacing every aspect of its history, going back to the founding.”  That, however, may be precisely the point: one should not combat historical revisionism by engaging in same, particularly when the foundations of one’s politics and worldview demand otherwise.

As regards General Lee, a number of the arguments proferred concerning his being worthy of monumental honors revolves around his willingness to foster national reconciliation after Appomattox, particularly in the fact that he would not countenance continued guerrilla warfare to maintain Confederate aims.  This portrays Lee more as a craven, if smart, political opportunist rather than a paragon of morals: aside from knowing the damage Sherman had done to the South, the self-immolation of Richmond and the possibility that the retreating Rebels might complete their pre-Wagnerian Gotterdammerung indicated to Lee that the South itself, let alone its Cause, might cease to exist, leaving no Cause to remember with no one left to remember it.

Compounding the treachery: Lee was not completely unaware from the outset how dishonorable said Cause was--he claimed to be against secession--and then gave a mealy-mouthed excuse for resigning from the US Army and joining the Confederacy because he "couldn't fight against his beloved Virginia”.  This marks Lee as a traitor on two fronts: betraying his country in the Civil War and retroactively betraying the Revolutionary cause his father had fought so tirelessly for, making Robert simultaneously a Rebel and a Tory.  Either way, Lee’s cravenness—which he likely knew would be lavishly rewarded by an overly gallant Grant under orders from a conciliatory Lincoln—speaks to both his consistent willingness to dishonor any cause as well as the dishonor inherent the Cause he eventually fought for. 

By way of comparison, those touting Lee's erstwhile heroism in his postbellum role in national conciliation should consider more heroic models.  There’s Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who saved a considerable number of Jews while a Nazi intelligence chief, enough to get him executed before V-E Day and to have some campaign for his status as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem.  To a lesser degree, there’s Emperor Hirohito, braving assassination by his own troops and general staff that preferred possible atomic annihilation at the hands of the Americans and wholesale slaughter at the hands of the now hostile Soviets, better to preserve the “honor” of their civilization; instead Hirohito catalyzed the transformation of Japanese civilization by asking his people to reject the ''false conception that the Emperor is divine”.  In contrast, the postbellum honors accorded Lee start to more and more resemble photographs of Hermann Goering’s initial surrender to US forces; the casual conversations depicted there between a fully uniformed Goering and his too-friendly interrogators infuriated General Eisenhower enough that Goering was remanded to the custody of Col. Burton Andrews who treated him with the contempt due the arch-war criminal.

Even still, the aforementioned Cause is whitewashed along with its statuary, “...monuments to timeless virtues…[not] monuments to “traitors.””  Eerily reminiscent of today’s progressive-sympathetic media when placing the word “terrorist” in quotes?  Maybe militants adhering to a "cause" that dates back to the 7th century also can promulgate “timeless virtues”?  Furthermore, even if “Lincoln set that issue [traitors] aside as soon as the war ended by making it clear that there would be no trials or punishments for the rebels”, settling a legal issue for the sake of a national rebuilding does not thereby sanction a carte blanche to construct eternal encomia to the leaders of the rebels who catalyzed the national carnage.  

Further, most of these monuments were built long after 1865, by which time the the South had reestablished a reworked Cause through essentially a successful sustained campaign of terror largely conducted by the Democratic Party in the South (Michael A. Bellesiles’ "1877" illustrates just how bloody it was).  But even if one were to discount the fact that “timeless virtues” being celebrated by these monuments were inculcated postbellum by the 19th century equivalent of enemy noncombatants, more important is that during the actual Civil War, the soldiery of the Confederacy was fighting for the enshrinement of slavery as a foundational and constitutional matter.  It is to be expected that doctrinaire progressives that “see America as the Evil Empire and the Confederacy as a face of that evil” would be unwilling or unable (or both) to make a distinction between North and South; for conservatives with any modicum of historical literacy to fail to make that distinction is intellectually unforgivable.

Then there’s the question of “fine people” defending “beautiful statues”.  Those who might have wandered into the Unite The Right pest fest at Charlottesville either share the Presidential disinterest in historical topics, or they are disingenuous enough to hope that everyone else in America might be as disinterested; those concerned enough about the preservation of their “Southern heritage” might reconsider coming within four cubits of a rally featuring unmistakeable white supremacist iconography and icons in its publicity campaigns.  A prominent Trump-supporting Rabbi defending those preservationists who would not go so far as attending the rally but “see...true military heroes and patriots who gave their everything to protect…critical aspects of their way of agrarian life” might need to be reminded that said “way of agrarian life” was, again, predicated upon a de jure and de facto system of strictly racially-based enslavement.   Likewise, one wonders why the Rabbi, on his Southern sojourns, “read the inscriptions that breathe not a word about slavery nor the social injustices of the Confederacy” and ironically failed to recognize how successful Southern historical revisionism was.

(Should one also mention that a nod to the “aesthetic beauty and passion that went into sculpting those monuments” conjures up a classical Greek notion of using said aesthetic as a possible moral arbiter, which is in direct contravention to the classical “Judeo-Christian” moralism that underpins much of contemporary conservative philosophy, especially as promulgated by the aforementioned Rabbi?)

Those worried about historically revisionist “slippery slopes” leading from dismantling of Confederate statues to the destruction of ostensibly more benign monuments, let them try this one: what prevents other states and erstwhile civilizations from honoring the “true military heroes and patriots who gave their everything to protect” causes that ranged from mistaken to outright indefensible?  Where are the statues of General Cornwallis at Yorktown?  General Robert Ross in Washington DC?  Yamamoto in Pearl Harbor?  Glubb Pasha in the Rova haYehudi?  Saddam Hussein in Kuwait City?  Why not move the Arch of Titus to the Temple Mount?  Heck, like General Lee, Benedict Arnold was a quintessential American military hero, until he became the paradigmatic American turncoat: where's his West Point monument?

(In a similar debate, a more conservative political sparring partner asked me whether I would be inclined to burn the Confederate flags attached to the tanks of soldiers that liberated the German concentration camps.  I replied that I would, along with the Hammers and Sickles that adorned the Soviet tanks that liberated the death camps further East.  Two short-lived, thankfully dead "civilizations" that deserve no posthumous honors.  Thanks for your service.  Maybe you were worth something.)

To repeat, no one from the center rightward harbors any illusions about the motives of progressives or their many talking points elicited in these “monumental” battles.  More than a few liberals recognize, even if in a distorted fashion, that there are destructive amoral and immoral elements both within and to the left of their camp, even if they can’t decide whether to condemn or co-opt them.  However, these considerations should not determine the correct attitudes towards the proper historical and cultural contexts in which specifically Confederate iconography should be judged, and the moral opprobrium that should be directed at them and everything they represent.  

If there are idols that need to be slain, conservatives should start with those.

Broken Record, Broken Mirror

This morning, the Miami Herald’s Leonard Pitts Jr asked “Who cares what’s wrong with Donald Trump? What’s wrong with us?” and then immediately labels “63 million people” who must be the “us” in which he obviously doesn’t include himself.

Pitts may have missed that even on his side of the political fence, while none of his cohorts are letting up on Trump [yet], there might be some stirrings of engage in self-criticism.

There has been a lot more of it coming from the right, even after having won an election, on a consistent basis. 

Witness Andrew McCarthy in National Review making even a stronger possible legal case for impeachment than Vanity Fair’s Thomas Frank,  who can only sputter that “breaches of decorum…may be cause enough.”

Witness Ben Shapiro warning that “pretending to care about the sins of the Left in order to justify the sins of the Right…because many people believe that fighting the Left requires tossing out morality of means in favor of morality of ends….actually throws into sharp relief the hypocrisy of the Right.”

From the Left, we have the ADL finally noticing that there is a pervasive Judeophobia coming from the corners of the “new civil rights movement”, even if they haven’t quite brought themselves to notice that it is way more trenchant than the version emanating from the alt-right, precisely because it tends to be tolerated, if not outright excused.

More notable because it came from a prominent media figure and unrelenting Trump critic  was Jake Tapper specifically calling out “progressives” for celebrating a well-known cop-killer, and naming Linda Sarsour and the Dyke March for "ugly sentiments" which must have irked the former Obama staffer and now DNC Vice Chair who had recently threatened Sarsour's critics with an order to "Fall back!"

And yet.

Conservatives allow for the possibility that there is some substance to any of the assertions that the President committed some forms of political malfeasance that might be indefensible, legally or otherwise.  There has been no such parallel admission from the mainstream liberal press or any Democrats regarding anything that happened before or during the election cycle as might pertain to Hillary Clinton.   Further, the fact that Jill Stein herself spearheaded some of the recount efforts should obviate the salience of any such “criticism” that might come those quarters further left; the Sandernistas came around, and the resistance can do no wrong.  Because Trump.

This is important because there is one element of “whataboutism” that might be legitimate: while conservatives might not necessarily want to, as Shapiro puts it, “toss[] out morality of means in favor of morality of ends”, what they can assert with some credibility is that any criticism from the left and even center-left is ipso facto tainted by both the obvious attempt to score political points and the inability or even unwillingness for them to even minimally scrutinize their own standard bearers, whether a Sarsour or a Clinton.  [Was there any mainstream or Left acknowledgement of even “reckless irresponsibility”, then or now?]

Therefore it would be logical for Trump supporters to conclude that oppositional criticism is anything but constructive.  While eminently plausible that the President is immune to any criticism, constructive or otherwise, the majority of his conservative critics aren’t interested in tearing him to possibly mitigate the damage he’s doing to their cause; the sustained criticism from those such as Shapiro, McCarthy, the Weekly Standard and at least half of the staff at Commentary which predated the election and hasn’t let up gives it a lot more credibility than anything coming from the President’s left.

[Plus, you have to give them credit for speaking freely despite the fact that they might hand talking points to the “resistance”.  Tapper and the ADL notwithstanding, the MSM, DNC et al certainly aren’t going to do the Right’s work for them.]

Tapper and the ADL have proven at least the possibility that what constitutes mainstream liberalism has something to contribute in discrediting doctrinaire progressivism [in a way that anyone to their Right might not be able to do].  Whether that capacity for self-criticism will carry over to more mainstream members of their party—ones who defend the Sarsours, Ellisons, Max Blumenthals and Soroses—remains to be seen.

Pitts' version of self-reflection: “…63 million…people who dislike Mexicans and Muslims, people who oppose same-sex marriage, people mortally offended at a White House occupied by a black guy with a funny name, they voted for Trump.”  We've seen this before: after the 2004 elections, the British Daily Mirror screamed "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?”  

If Pitts and his ilk would make even a faint attempt as bipartisan criticism, as Tapper and the ADL have begun to and the aforementioned rightward pundits have been doing all along, maybe it would do some good.  Otherwise all they’ll do is chase their own tails until they see their own reflection.

Stephens Scores A Safety

Bret Stephens has made it safe to be a skeptic again.

One of the sole voices on the mod-right who have been consistently anti-Trump, he kick-started his jump from the WSJ to the NYT by penning what amount to a plea for tolerance of mild skepticism toward climate change alarmism.  Even this was too much for the doctrinaire alarmists who began calling for a boycott of the Times.

[Just in case it needed to be explained: there is no comparison between calls for boycotting the NYT from those rightfully outraged by their recently providing a platform to convicted terrorist mass murderer Marwan Barghouti and eliding that fact, because they pretend that a system of absolutism [eliminationist anti-Semitic Palestinian nationalist terrorism] isn’t; plus, most of the calls for a boycott were from people who could afford to take the NYT out of their news diet, as many of them probably view it rightfully as having credibility problems in the first place.  On the other hand, as Stephens’ column actually does explode an absolutist viewpoint, when the knives came out, the knife wielders are the types who usually otherwise swear by every word in the NYT [unless they will solely rely on PuffPost and BSNBC from now on].  So those who proposed boycotts in the wake of the Barghouti piece are correct; the climate alarmist boycotters are simply being characteristically ridiculous.  Yes, I’m “certain” about that.  Boo hoo.]

In my next post I will further explain why Stephens’ approach might provide a perfect fulcrum to explode the all-encompassing absolutism behind hard left intersectionality and allow liberals to disengage from them.  But for now, we focus on one absolutism at a time, so that hopefully climate change alarmism will be discredited by a burden of proof so heavy that it would become impossible to carry out any aspect of its political program, forced to reveal its fringe radical absolutist agenda, and thereby reflexively eject itself from the mainstream of rational human discourse once it becomes recognized as the bastard offspring of Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich that it truly is.

In Talmudic hermeneutics there is a principle employed called a “double doubt”, or more specifically: in determining “if X then Y, if Y then Z”—even if X applies, if Y is in doubt, Z will always be in doubt; surely, if no X, no Z. In the case of climate change alarmism and the demanded policy proscriptions, I will posit that said doubt isn’t double—it’s septuple.

The “doubts” stack up as follows: first, has there been a significant aggregate warming across the planet, and for how long; second, if there has been, will it inevitably continue; third, are its effects necessarily damaging and irrevocable; fourth, is all of this uniquely attributable to human activity, specifically the consumption of “fossil fuels”; and fifth, are the concomitant policy proscriptions technically/practically implementable; sixth, without—in contradistinction to Skinnerian doctrine—compromising freedom and dignity; finally, seventh—in a way that is ultimately not counterproductive on multiple levels?

Which leads me to my next Talmudically-derived principle, loosely translated: “when the defendant is in possession, the burden of the proof is upon the plaintiff when there is any doubt”.  Climate change alarmists raise two of their assertions to the level of moral axioms: one, “the system isn’t working and innocent people will suffer as a result — these are blazingly obvious points”, and two, “climate change is, at its base…more about money than about carbon… an environmental-justice issue, in which the rich nations of the world are inflicting damage on the poor ones.” The second statement especially quashes the proposition that questioning ACC as a “Marxist redistributionary conspiracy” is a reactionary trope, and instead reframes that charge as nothing more than a radical progressive canard.  Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate”  should put the lie to the notion that alarmists don’t simultaneously agitate for global economic redistribution, or even “planned economies”.

So: if you’re going to be able to back up both of those assertions—your “science” has to be bulletproof.  If it isn’t—and there’s even an inkling of politicization—casting doubt on the entire alarmist enterprise is worth more than two points.

And after a safety, the scoring team gets to go on offense.

Taking Away Jets Fans’ Only Excuse For Even Talking About The Super Bowl

The two most important games in professional football history, without a doubt really, are the 1958 NFL Championship and Super Bowl III.  The former essentially cemented the game as a mass marketable television product, and the second made the AFL-NFL merger start to look more like a union of equal entities rather than "a 26-team league with ten 'last-place' teams".  

While also inarguable that the ’58 game was better on its merits, it remains arguable as to which one actually had more impact after the fact.   After trying and discarding several loose cultural and historical analogs to illustrate the point—Red Sea vs Revelation, Magna Carta vs Westphalia, Revolutionary vs Civil War, 13th vs 19th Amendment—I finally settled on a much simpler one:  

’58 is Pro Football’s Bar Mitzvah.  SB III is Pro Football getting engaged.  [Mazel Tov.  It's a ball.]

[Inspired on the one hand by my impending nuptials and my poor beloved’s already having resigned herself to long-suffering football widowhood, and on the other by my years in Yeshiva having prepared me for the inevitable suffering involved in rooting for the Jets.]

However, after another season of enduring the apparently endless record-setting domination of Tom Brady [which followed waiting for Dan Marino to retire, sandwiched around Jim Kelly’s unrepeatable run of Super Bowl appearances], one would wonder what keeps Jet fans like me watching Super Bowls. 

A lot of it has to do with SB III, and the extra pangs of nostalgia on those occasions where Joe Namath trots out onto the field to toss the coin, present the trophy, or another honor.  We are continually reminded of the franchise’s one moment of fleeting glory as well as its perpetual, if distant, relevance.  And that’s precisely the problem.

While there have been several “curse” labels attached to the team because of Super Bowl III—Joe Namath selling his soul to the Devil; the Jets’ partners forcing out Sonny Werblin—neither of those are as trenchant or identifiable as, say, Babe Ruth, or the Billy Goat, or Bobby Layne.  [With all respect due Sidney Zion, Werblin was cashiered before the 1968 season began.]

As a psych professor at Penn explained to me, the curse is the actual win itself.  The Jets can never top that moment again.  [In contrast, the Colts in theory could top ’58, as it occurred in the pre-Super Bowl era.]

Which brings me back to my Yeshiva HS education.  In one of his asides during a senior year Jewish Philosophy class, the rabbi opined that the only real Super Bowls were the first four, as the game was designed to match the top team from the AFL and NFL.  All the games from V on were/are “AFC-NFC Championship Games.”

I think the evidence supports turning that theory on its head: the game wasn’t even officially called the "Super Bowl" until V; III unofficially got the label, but if you ever see a broadcast of IV, note that the CBS graphic reads “AFL-NFL Championship Game.”  And V was the first one where the winner was awarded the Lombardi Trophy.  Which, in effect, renders the first four Super Bowls as a series of very important postseason exhibition games, but exhibition games nonetheless.  Which means—they don’t count as "Super Bowl wins".

“SBIII doesn’t count” may seem like the ultimate heresy to Jets fans, but if you look at what happened to the other two pre-merger SB winners in the long term, the theory might be more salient: the Packers [winners of I and II] made the playoffs twice between 1968 and 1993 [one of those appearances during the strike season of 1982] before Brett Favre made them a powerhouse again; the Chiefs also made the playoffs only twice in the next two decades after winning IV, and they haven’t been back to the game since.  In contrast, the Colts shook off their disastrous showing in III quickly enough to win V [and only made a mess of themselves after Robert Irsay bought the team in 1972].

For Jets fans, watching the game year after year—more painful when Brady keeps getting in, horrifically worse when Eli Manning and the Giants show up to knock him off—brings back the days of the Guarantee every time, keeping the franchise relevant, but only as a relic.

Jets fans must let go of III.