Barry Bonds, the perfect Hip Hop Metaphor
I sincerely can't explain it, maybe its exposing another one of my character flaws outside of my penchant for kicking women out of my residence the millisecond after I ejaculate - but if my memory serves me correctly, I have always openly rooted for the bad guy. My childhood was spent wondering why none of the residents of Sesame Street ever chin-checked Big Bird on general principle, hoping that Brutus would defeat Popeye at least one time - with a woman who makes Kate Moss look like she has a food addiction being the ultimate prize. Shit, I can't tell you how many times I desperately hoped that the Roadrunner would be too slick for his own good, accidentally blow himself up with one of Wile E. Coyote's dynamite sticks - with the closing scene consisting of the Coyote mercilessly dining on charred bird remains like it was Thanksgiving dinner at a soup kitchen. Every time I'd go to the movies with my parents I found myself hoping that the detestable villain would reign victorious over the clean-cut, do-gooder protagonist - even now I can't sit through one of the many popular crime drama's of the day without secretly hoping that the writer has a respectable pair of testicles and lets the perceived "bad guy" get off Scott free.(except for child molesters and the garden variety rapist that is) Even though I'm at the weathered age of 34 years, 3 months, and 10 days, and the sentiment that I'm about to subject you good people to makes my mother openly question my sanity while saying "You are such a motherfucking prick" - but I don't feel that all is right with the world unless I have a significant amount of individuals particularly loathing my small intestines. Outside of some mystical woman with criminally low amounts of self-esteem aligning my chakras with a spirited "sloppy yawn", nothing puts me at peace more than receiving an ice grill from some asshole I once punched while the both of us sit at a traffic light - me without a care in the world, primarily because I crave vehicular confrontations and my car doors are now bullet-proofed.
Over the years I have found myself rooting for the "perceived" bad guy in the sports world as well, I'm probably the only person in existence who feels that Mike Tyson could be Heavyweight Champion again if he took up Tai Chi and perhaps shock therapy - to even out his temperament. Even though he grew up just a couple of towns away from me, I've never been the biggest Allen Iverson fan in the world - but for some reason I always felt the need to defend the brother through his more turbulent times as if I was Johnny Cochran on steroids. I'm a dedicated Kobe Bryant fan who more times than not find people's hatred for him both misguided and regurgitated from the media's two year "swift-boating" of the man with 24 on the back of his jersey - in my world the media has pulled off two successful coups on peoples intelligence over the past 5 years, the selling of the Iraq War and injecting a hatred for Kobe Bryant that most people embarrassingly struggle to articulate. So I guess it shouldn't surprise anyone that I'm a huge Barry Bonds fan as well, its this writers humble opinion that Bonds is one of the greatest players to ever touch a wood treated bat - every time someone mentions how big he became over the course of his career, alludes to the book "Game of Shadows" or anything else suggesting steroid use, I always calmly point out that he has never failed a drug test and give them that instigating "What?! Bring-It!!" face.
But with Bonds, and to some extent this applies to the other athletes I mentioned as well - most of the time their actions were indefensible and not above reproach, but the level of media scrutiny surrounding those incidents always had that stale aftertaste of racism. Its like those BASF commercials, "We Don't make the golf-clubs, we make them more powerful!": Sure, there is a black cloud of steroid speculation that follows Barry around the same way that dirt-cloud followed around the "pigpen" character in those Peanuts cartoons - but watching the coverage, and most times the manufactured outrage from a vast array of sports pundits, you would have thought that the guy went on a killing spree inside of a convent. "We Don't make the black athlete, we make him more detestable"
One thing I've noticed over the last two years is how people who generally hate Barry Bonds for the color of his skin, were able to masterfully cloak their racial bias with legitimate arguments that even the most ardent Bonds supporter couldn't scoff at - rhetoric consisting of stuff like "the sanctity of the game" and Bonds' clear association with Balco and Greg Anderson. Granted, I'm sure that there are scores of people who exist that despise Barry Bonds for a multitude of reasons, none of which has anything to do with race - but its my opinion that those miscellaneous individuals are few and far between. Whenever I hear people like Keith Olbermann and Bob Costas dedicate segments of their respective shows to bashing Barry, I cringe, not because their arguments don't have any merit to them(because usually they do) - but because they are giving ammunition to the millions of people who site Strom Thurman as an idol, and play "Mississippi Burning" around Christmas time to feel more festive.
People do the same thing to Hip Hop, right-wing pundits who feverishly masturbate to Mein Kampf when they are not collecting black-face miniatures in their spare time - conveniently hiding behind the unmistakable violence in certain rap songs, not to mention the rampant misogyny, so they can claim that they are concerned about black youth while masterfully maintaining a concerned look on their collective faces. That goes for all of those ambulance chasing "black leaders" we have as well, not to mention the other out of touch black people of prominence who probably mirror the dais on Oprah's disastrous town-hall special on Hip Hop. Frustrated with the social ills that plague the black community, and because they are too intellectually lazy to break down the real culprits that ravage our people - they hang the blame on Hip Hip, conveniently quoting some simple monosyllabic rapper with a platinum encrusted smile who happens to average 48 "bitches" per song and has a rap sheet as long as Rihanna's forehead.
So yeah, in a weird way - Barry Bonds is the perfect Hip Hop metaphor.
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