Ray Rice Cut By Ravens

Let’s be clear: If the NFL were not primarily a profit-making cartel utterly entranced by its own sales pitch as a morally righteous and fundamentally American institution, the second Ray Rice video would have changed nothing. As Goodell said Tuesday, there really would be “nothing pertinent” in it. There is nothing on the second video of Janay Palmer that anyone on the planet could not have inferred from a description this straightforward: “Ray Rice knocked out his girlfriend in an elevator.” Nothing in the new video merited more punishment than what would have been disclosed in the previous investigation, had it been conducted as responsibly as the NFL and its mouthpieces were so eager to claim it was.

What there is now is the absence of doubt, and that’s hugely important in an environment in which one side of the American political dialogue has spent 40 years demonizing the media as bought-and-paid-for agents for a certain kind of politics who will distort, evade and outright lie about objective reality to destroy traditional America. Because the same culture of manhood that wants to never be victimized by change or discomfort – “stick to sports, and have sports stick to what they are, forevermore” – can spin endless rationalizations for why the self-evident is doubtful.

There is a part of that primarily white-dude “traditionalist” culture that has gotten so good at inventing all “the facts” that make up the convenient, self-pardoning, exculpatory part of “we have to suspend judgment until we get all the facts” that you have to endlessly loop a video of woman getting hit in the fucking face before most people will finally stop inventing a reason for why it’s her fault anyway.