Guardians.
It's just so, so Cleveland.
In case you don't know and you're wandering around like you've been hit over the head, Cleveland's major league baseball team will soon be named after iconic statues created for an old bridge so they could become Guardians of.....Traffic.
To quote the great Dave Barry: I am not making this up. Maybe Cleveland isn't the only place that could come up with something this half-baked. Maybe someone other than Cleveland's proud, long-standing baseball franchise could have percolated a name that distinctly sounds as if it belongs in Class A somewhere in rural Alabama. Who knows?
Not that it's an altogether bad thing. At least Cleveland will soon be rid of "Indians," with the gleeful logo that's always suggested that the Natives have had such a great time of it since the white folks took over. Yes, they did the right thing by trashing that.
It's kind of like the Washington Football Team's management finally getting it through their thick skulls about the possibility that "Redskins" just might be the most racist thing by which you could name or represent anything--and that no amount of money spent attempting to downplay or ameliorate or diminish or even justify the name will remove the awful stain, except to rename the franchise altogether.
Notice that it's taking its good-natured time, as decision-makers in Washington usually do, before their big decision. Let's hope its new name beats Cleveland's. Let's hope it can establish a better, less offensive tradition.
Let's get this straight, too--prolonged, racially imbedded nonsense is not "tradition," something to cling to with great memories. It is stupidity, deepened daily.
One of the great indicators that Cleveland has done the right thing is that ex- has said that it hasn't. He's said that the Indians are actually insulted by it. Now, nothing is absolutely unanimous in public discourse, ever, and Robert Kennedy (how I hate putting him in the same paragraph) once said that twenty percent of anybody will be against anything (paraphrasing), but assuming the impossible and believing dreamily he'd have the energy, I'd want ex- to find a hundred Natives who think that renaming Cleveland's team is a bad idea. Or that anyone will ever really miss it, regardless of how clunky the substitute name is.
There's going to be only one, controlling variable concerning the advisability of such a name change: Whether or not the franchise will lose much money on it. We'd always like to think conscience overcomes profits. We know it rarely does. But the product continues as do the games.
Milwaukee has had a Native label as well. Its team was once named the Braves. Nobody ever put pressure on that franchise to make a name change. But that was another, un-woke time.
Now they're in Atlanta and they've been there 45 years. Calling something a "Brave" isn't meant to be pejorative. But if the Natives think so, will we be turning a deaf ear to them yet again?
Milwaukee isn't quite off the hook, though. Marquette University, located there (from which I have a master's degree), used to have their teams called the "Warriors," and that name died hard. Now the sports teams are called the Golden Eagles. Some greybeards are, of course, still mournful, but those days of relevance faded long ago.
The name got cleared up, but not the logo. That still features, supposedly, Father Marquette standing up in a canoe (just about as dumb as Washington Crossing the Delaware; sit down, you idiot), pointing to some direction that a Native is supposed to be steering him, paddle in hand like the help usually had.
As if the reverend knows where he's going, or wants to find new stuff, he who's checking out the property for the very first time. Doesn't that kind of have it criss-crossed? Who's supposed to be doing the pointing? Isn't that suggestive of a kind of master-obedient servant relationship, one our history is kind of used to? "Oh, I know where I'm going. Let's do this."
Can't you see the Native's eyes rolling? Sure, Padre, anything you say. His is an adventure of great discovery; the Native's is another place to go fishing.
Sounds absurd, I know. Calling some team the Guardians isn't quite so bad, considering the alternative. We bump along forward, awkwardly, with good intentions.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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