Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell is right: America is not only a nation of wusses, but we’ve also been sashaying down the road to wuss-dom for quite some time. I almost wrote, “swishing down the road to wuss-dom,” but I changed my mind. Why have the PC cops kicking in my door tomorrow morning?
Rendell’s comments came after National Football League executives committed the ultimate act of what, for lack of a better word, I would call “wussitude.” The Philadelphia Eagles were scheduled to host the Minnesota Vikings in a game this past Sunday night.
NFL honchos decided to postpone the game to Tuesday night because of a…
blizzard? I was stunned. NFL games have been played in blizzards before. And in games where the wind chill was down to a frosty 60 below zero.
I distinctly remember sitting in my living room on Dec. 31, 1967 to watch the Green Bay Packers defeat the Dallas Cowboys in one of the greatest championship games ever played: the immortal, exquisite Ice Bowl.
The temperature at Green Bay’s Lambeau Field that day was 16 below zero. Weather conditions couldn’t have been a day at the beach for either the Packers or the Cowboys, but they manned up and played the darned game.
I’m sure Rendell remembers that game, which may have led him to make these comments on a local Philadelphia radio station,
after he called the postponement a “joke” and said that Vince Lombardi, who coached the Packers to that Ice Bowl victory, must have been “spinning in his grave.” “My biggest beef is that this is part of what’s happened in this country. We’ve become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.”
Rendell doesn’t even want to get me started on my rant about the math gap between American students and those of some other industrialized nations. This is about how we got started on the road to wussdom, and that began long before this past Tuesday night.
My pet theory is that America started heading down Wusshood Boulevard about the same time the genre of films known as Westerns started to decline in popularity. I can’t
prove that. I don’t have stats or anything, but that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. The state of my beloved Westerns aside, the nation really took that detour down Wussified Lane when some schools decided to ban dodge ball several years ago.
According to a 2001 Time magazine article, “in a growing number of school districts in states such as Texas, Virginia, Maine and Massachusetts, circles of kids dodging and throwing balls at one another have been banned from gym class. Opponents warn that dodge ball could be an incubator for later aggressive, even violent behavior.”
Those “opponents” could be charter members of a group whose official name should be “The Committee For The Wussification of America.” Dodge ball an “incubator for later aggressive, even violent behavior”?
If that were true, I’d be a serial killer by now. In the elementary school I attended while I was in the fifth and sixth grades, the boys played a game called “Greek dodge” at recess. We’d fire balls at top speed at our opponents’ family jewels, torsos and, yes, heads.
And, devotees of wuss nation would be dismayed to hear, we enjoyed every second of it.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
