Hello. This is the second and final installment of my hard-hitting report from my weekend in Pittsburgh, where I went to check in on the US Civil War following the death of Charlie Kirk. When we left things last time, Iâd been talking about my experience at the Steelers game. It had gotten off to a rough start for me after seeing a couple of players wearing sacrilegious squad numbers, so I was lamenting the decline of our sport and our country in general. Iâve linked that post here in case you wanted to refresh your memory.
Anyway, a nice nurse patched me up after my tantrum and led me back out to my seat, urging me to give the day another chance. There was a surprise coming, she said, that would restore my faith in our great nation. And boy was she was right.
It wasnât long before we heard a faint rumble, coming from above. It slowly grew thicker and heavier in the sky, eventually becoming so deafening that it drowned out the crowd. And then they appeared: the choppers. Half a dozen of them doing a flyover. Not like the Huey gunships from back in âNam (unfortunately), just those long twin-rotored ones they use to rescue people at sea. Still, pretty cool. Once theyâd passed and the din had receded, the announcer explained that this was to honor a couple of veterans. The jumbotron then cut to a handful of guys in full desert camo fatigues sitting down in the front row (I assume these were the veterans, but in PA you never really know). The crowd went wild, whirling their Terrible Towels⢠overhead with great gusto.
The frenzy died down when the stadium announcer came back over the PA. As it turned out, the marines down in front were only the appetizer. The pièce de rĂŠsistance was actually the 100-year-old veteran whoâd just been wheeled out into the south end zone during the commotion. He was presented with the purple heart award, which you get if you were injured in wartime. (I think it has to be combat relatedâit canât be that you cut yourself shaving while sitting in your trench in the Ardennes, or something.) I donât know which war he was involved in, but it wasnât anything recent, that was for sure. It could have been anything from âKoreaâ all the way back to âCivilâ. As youâd imagine, this sent the crowd into a frothing hysteria. Everyone rose to their feet as if on cue. (Everyone except the crippled centenarian, obviously. Now that would have been cool.) As a guy a couple of rows in front of me stood up, I got a chance to read the text on the back of his shirt:
It is not clear if he actually was a veteran (again, in PA, when it comes to the sort of folks who wear this sort of merch, or military-issue camo/boots, their military/police involvement is by no means guaranteed). Itâs also unclear whether he knew in advance that there would be veterans honored at the game. I think thereâs a high chance he was going to wear that shirt regardless, game or no game, ceremony or no ceremony. But one doesnât ask those sorts of questionsâand certainly not within a few days of 9/11âunless one wants to be outed as an enemy sympathizer.1 Anyway, a U-S-A chant started rippling through the stadium. And not an awkward, embarrassing, Elon Musk-esque one, either:
No, sir. A proper one. A Miller Lite drinkinâ, apple pie guzzlinâ, backroad-drivinâ, U-S-A chant. The terrible towels were now so frenzied, so numerous, that a yellow blur had appeared over the crowd. A veritable fleet, then, 65-thousand-strong, of gilt-bladed choppers spinning up, preparing to ride out; metaphorical blank checks signed and sealed. An Apocalypse Now-esque air cavalry, if you will: low altitude, tight formation, Flight of the Valkyries blasting, as we swarm down upon the enemy, payloads of napalm or Agent Orange or whatever at the ready. A stirring scene, to be sure.
One young man had to be calmed down by a steward; heâd sprinted down from a few sections further back to hang over the railing, desperate to be as close as he could to the field. I managed to catch a few seconds of it before things really hotted up:
Sadly, the game eventually had to resume; I used this as a chance to run to the bathroom. Down in the concourse, I saw a young man being stretchered out towards a service elevator by a quartet of paramedics. An aide ran alongside holding an ice pack to the manâs forehead and making sure the oxygen mask strapped to his face was working properly.
I think the Steelers gameday organizing team will have learned from this; you just have to be so mindful of crowd welfare when itâs hot weather. There should have been a warning beforehand so that people had a chance to go get some cold water or take a few minutes of shade before being whipped into a jingoistic frenzy.
I feel I should take a second to clarify here, since it may seem confusing that the flyover/ceremony/half-mast flag stuff somehow cheered me up, considering my visceral contempt for politics being shoved down my throat when Iâm trying to watch my team play (as discussed last time). You (well-meaning but ultimately uninformed) might try to point out that âwars are inherently politicalâ; that âpolitics and sport are inextricably linkedâ. But hereâs the thing. Whether or not youâre right about that (unlikely), youâd be missing the deeper point: we have a moral imperative to support our troops/veterans/tiktok/youtube influencers, because theyâre our husbands, sons, grandpas. Because theyâre Americans. At the end of the day, theyâre just regular, freedom-loving folks trying to put bread on the table, just like you and me. Some issues shouldâand mustâtranscend our tribal âred team/blue teamâ bickering.
And so I was thrilled to see this in action; to see the NFL using its platform for good; to sow unity, not division. Sport is a powerful unifying force; it allows us to transcend our petty disagreements and come together to mourn, to commemorate, to begin to heal, as a community and as a nation. It reminds us that we are more similar than we are different. That we are all on the same team at the end of the day. That we are all running the same race. The human race. (Or whatever.) It reminds us that, although we may disagree on certain things (like suffrage, or healthcare being a human right, etc.), these disputes are trivial at the end of the day, and shouldnât take precedence over the things that really matter. Je Suis Charlie, you suis Charlie, we all suis Charlie. And Charlie suis all of us.
As far as the on-field spectacle, the crowd didnât seem nearly as manic. They were definitely still engaged, of course, but not at the âfight or flightâ level, as they had been for the flyover/ceremony. (It would be physically impossible to maintain that for three hours, in fairness.) We ended up losing to the Seahawks, who moved the ball with worrying ease. (The mulleted guy behind me described our defense as âSwiss cheeseâ.)2 So this was a lowlight, I guess.
Another highlight, though: the general lack of animosityâat least compared to the Premier League. In the Premier League, here in the UK, fans of the two teams have to be separated. The visiting team gets a designated section or two somewhere in the stadium that even has a separate entrance/exit, and itâs guarded before and during the match by stewards. Even afterwards, if itâs a match between rivals, the (rowdy, potentially aggressive) away fans will sometimes be kept in the stadium for up to a couple of hours until the home fans have had a chance to clear out and get to safety.
At Heinz Field Acrisure Stadium, the Seahawks fans were just sitting among usâ they even had the audacity to wear their team jerseys! Nobody shoved them down and trampled them, glassed them, or cornered them in the bathroom. Nobody even jostled them on the way past, or heckled them. It was all very wholesome. Where was the hate speech? There was, at most, a bit of friendly back and forth, but overall there was a markedâand mildly disappointingâlack of that nice little undercurrent of hostility and bitterness that you get in England (âŚwhether youâre at a match or not). This undercurrent persists even among fans of the same team, by the way. Groups of scruffy young guys roll around wearing no discernible team gear and you get the strong sense that the match is just an excuse to do coke/get shitfaced and scream at various people to âfuck offâ and/or âget fuckedâ, etc.
Likewise, I was also struck by how diverse the crowd was. I guess it has just been a few years since Iâd been to a major sporting event in the US. In the UK, the match-going crowd (especially for teams from smaller, working-class towns) is predominantly white, and predominantly male. Itâs much more repressive and (Iâd assume) intimidating.
The question, I guess, is whether this friendliness costs you in terms of atmosphere. The balance between âfamily-friendlyâ and âferalâ is tough to find. You donât want things to be too sterile. Without the off-pitch bells and whistles (and helicopters) to keep them riled up, would the US crowd be able to push their team on for several hours? What would they do without the jumbotron? How would they know when a pivotal moment in the game had arrived?
After the final whistle, I stopped by the main club shop and at a few of the merch stands. But nothing stood out, so I kept my powder dry. And thank god I did. A block or two outside the stadium, I came upon a couple of enterprising fellows who had just the thing for me. I had just popped in my airpods to listen to some more Charlie Kirk highlights. He was right in the middle of preaching that, âItâs happening all the time in urban America, prowling blacks go around for fun to go target white people, thatâs a fact. Itâs happening more and more.â I nodded in agreement as I mouthed the words along with him, and, with my bottom lip starting to tremble, wiped a tear from my eyeânobody could sum up our countryâs issues like Charlie could.
Then I looked up. A full-blown miracle. The ever-prescient Charlie had been speaking to me from beyond the grave. (Just like heâd tried to warn me about the uber drivers!)
In this case, though, I have to admit that I was more than happy to be âtargetedâ. Whatâs wrong with a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit, especially if itâs to honor a True American Patriot?
As you can imagine, these shirts were selling like hot cakes. Youâd have to say that, in the dog-eat-dog world of the Free Market, these guys were veritable âsuper-predatorsâ!
The woman in the second photo was buying one for her husband (just out of shot), who had asked for an extra-large before she interjected: âYeah, right. He thinks heâs got enough muscle to fill out an XL. No chance. Give him a large.â The husband looked down sheepishly. Clearly this was not the first time heâd tried to get away with this sort of stunt. She forked over the 30 or 40 bucks, and they moved along.
I moved along, too, but now I regret not asking a few more questions. Did these salesmen print these shirts themselves? They did not seem to be doing this ironically/for fun. Did they know who Kirk was, or the things he stood for? Did these guys know that Kirkâs last words were âgang violenceâ? (For those who donât know/havenât seen the video, someone in the crowd asked him if he knew how many mass shootings there had been in the past year. Charlie whipped out the trump card, reminding us that black people kill each other all the time and the media conveniently ignores that to focus on the [white] school/church/mosque shooters.)
Youâd struggle to find a better encapsulationâad absurdumâof how the working class is utterly alienated from their labor. People are in such a precarious situation that they must, or at least become willing to, debase themselves in service of clients/customers/corporations who revile them. Whether driven there by desperation or socialization, the notion of wasting any time on moral scruples becomes unthinkable; itâs the ethos of âRepublicans buy shoes shirts, too.â âSecuring the bagâ takes precedence over things like self-respectâor we are made to believe that the two are one and the same.
Also, what âjusticeâ are they talking about here? He was only killed a couple of days agoâas yet there has been no miscarriage of justice on his behalf. (Maybe the shirts were printed before theyâd arrested the alleged killerâŚ?) And besides, penal-system justice is nice and all, but thatâs small potatoes. Charlie had already received justice, in the cosmic sense. He died doing what he loved, and what he was best at: being right. His thesis, after all, when it came to gun violence, was that âI think itâs worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.â
Itâs rare that these Logic and Reason-obsessed debate bros, âtrolley problemâ-fetishists, hard-line utilitarians, etc. are not completely insulated from any and all negative consequences of the ideas/arguments they so vehemently defend/claim to hold. This incident was the rare exception to that rule.
Unless gun laws are radically overhauled before the next mass shooting (which will probably have already happened by the time this post is out [EDITORâS NOTE: THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED)3, Chuck will once again be proven right: a âhandfulâ of deaths is an acceptable trade-off to keep the 2nd amendment around. And so Charlie got to go out like all of us would like to, Iâm sure: On Top. Itâs like Pete Sampras retiring after winning the US Open. Or Heath Ledger, cemented in our collective memory as the Joker in the Dark Knight. This, Iâm sure, will be no small consolation to his friends and family.
Another highlight: a few blocks from the stadium, I came upon the river trail, which runs from the city for a few miles east. Everyone was out enjoying the sun. People had pulled up their boats and were playing Jimmy Buffett and were handing out beers. I like it when a city does a good job of incorporating nature, specifically water. It is good for collective morale. Too much concrete and metal and gray is trouble.
Wanting to stretch my legs before my flight that evening, I wandered along for a couple of hours, and ended up taking it pretty much all the way back to the hotel.
It was time to head to the airport. I was home and dry. . . almost.
I called my uber and got matched with a fellow named Mahmoud. This time, I recognized it as a name right away (which makes me a good person). He was from Syria. I asked him a follow up question; âWhat brought you hereâ or similar. He smiled and shook his head and said âno English.â Alrighty then. (How do these guys make it this far?? Surely, rural America would be almost impossible to navigate without any grasp of the language. Impressive!) As we got moving, he reached for the center console and started rummaging around. I froze. This was it. He was about to slit my throat, as had been foretold by Charlie. He was at least going to castrate me as part of the âgreat replacementâ scheme.
But when his hand emerged, it held only his phone, which he offered me so that I could play some music from Spotify. I told him to just put on whatever he liked; something from his country. Thatâs how we spent the next forty minutes listening to George Wassouf, whom Iâd never heard of but is apparently big in the Middle East. (Heâs a Billy Joel/Tony Bennett sort of figure, from the looks of things.)
With this, my stint on the front lines was over. I was alive, barely. It was time to head back to, as Charlie described it, my âtotalitarian third world shitholeâ.
Iâm fairly sure that if any of these people saw a bearded/turbaned middle eastern guy wearing with the same shirt, except with âIslamâ substituted in for âUSAâ, I think heâd (rightly) be criticized for making it sound like a death cult. But thatâs neither here nor there.
I saw on the highlights show while waiting at the airport gate before my flight that evening that it was the tenth game in a row we had allowed 300+ yards (or something). I am no expert, but youâd have to say that if this does not get sorted out it does not bode well for our chances of trying to win a playoff game for the first time in 29 years.
Sure enough, when I googled this a couple of days ago to check, I saw that there had been a shooting a couple of hours earlierâand in Amish country, no less! Half an hour from Lancaster. A bunch of cops had been shot while trying to serve a warrant.