Sunday, May 04, 2008

Eight Belles Dead, Fuck the Kentucky Derby

Whether they are traditional "blood sports", like cockfighting, dogfighting and bull fighting, gentleman's pursuits like fox hunting or the "Sport of Kings", animal sports all involve pushing dumb beasts past their point of endurance, to see how much punishment and abuse they can take before they break. Watching them die, bloody and broken, is the main attraction of animal sports. The men who sponsor these pursuits have no guts and no balls. You get a kick out of that kind of stuff, fine. Get a job in a slaughterhouse, spend your days on the killing floor.

Human sports are not much better. They've even managed to turn baseball into a gladiatorial spectacle. Many of our most celebrated "Sportsmen", come from third World hell holes or drug and crime infested ghettos. They see sports as a way out of an untenable life and are little better than slaves to the teams that employ them. They take steroids to enhance their abilities, drugs to quiet the pain of the damage they do to themselves and surgery to repair the damage, so they can do yet more. We watch their lives and deaths play out on the field with even more detachment than when we watch the death and suffering of dumb beasts.

At least in the corrida, when the picadors torture, cripple and enrage the bull and the matador plunges the espada into its back, impaling its beating heart, we aren't lying to ourselves about what we are there to see.

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