In its first season, the 70s
television comedy Chico and the Man—the
first, and from what I can tell, the only network sitcom set in a Hispanic
neighborhood—was surprisingly the third highest rated show. What explained
this? Were white American viewers suddenly “tolerant” enough to see Hispanics
as fellow human beings? In its pilot
episode, you heard the curmudgeon garage owner—played by Jack Albertson (the
grandfather in the film Willy Wonka and
the Chocolate Factory)—say the following to Freddy Prinze’s Chico:
“Mexicans knew their place—in
Mexico.”
“If their car breaks down, they
just steal another one.”
“Get out of here and take your
flies with you.”
“Everybody knows you people are
lazy.”
“Don’t think, you haven’t got the
equipment.”
After Chico leaves, “the man”
starts spraying the air with insecticide.
I have recounted how I was once
working a temp job at a warehouse when I overheard a white man tell a group of
white and black employees ugly “jokes” about “Mexicans,” and I told him I
though the “jokes” were racist. He responded by saying nobody there thought he
was being racist, although I did note that no one was laughing with him either.
I told him only one person was required to believe that what he was saying was
racist, particularly the only person who looked “Mexican” there. After that he
acted afraid I might actually file a complaint, but he needn’t worry about
that; I was only viewed as a “troublemaker” who wasn’t a “real” American who
had any right to complain about what a “real” American said about “my people.” Not
long after that I was told my services were no longer needed.
Thus we can surmise that the
initial popularity of Chico was
largely due to the fact that there was an audience for the ugly stereotypes
about “Mexicans” as enunciated by the Albertson character. This was born out in
the subsequent seasons, when the show took a dive in the ratings when the overt
racism was toned down and then eliminated altogether after the 22-year-old Prinze’s
suicide during the taping of the third season and a kid was brought in to
replace him before the show was canceled after the fourth season. No similar show
set in a Hispanic milieu ever replaced it, although there was a one-season cable series
called American Family; but its white culture and feminist “sensibility” while
pretending prejudice against Hispanics doesn’t exist was a real turn-off. Only a one-disk, six-episode DVD of the Chico
has seen the light of day, and only three or four times over the past several
decades has it appeared in syndication.
That is how much television “values” the 18 percent of its viewership that is Hispanic, and is very likely a reflection of a culture of
prejudice against Hispanics in general in this country.
It also demonstrates that there
is nothing “new” about the ugly stereotyping of Hispanics, especially men—and
Donald Trump is hardly the worst abuser, although as president he comes pretty
close to it. And it doesn’t necessarily all come those espousing a white nationalist
agenda, because not all racists are white. You can find this on street corner
newsstands in Seattle in a Chinese propaganda newspaper called The Epoch Times. A recent issue had on
its front page a story in which it claims that illegal immigrants are
responsible for an “epidemic” of child sex crimes across the country, with a
whole half page filled with shots of brown-skinned people. It did not obtain
this information from any official law enforcement agency, but from a North
Carolina-based anti-immigrant hate group “specializing” in compiling real and
imagined crimes supposedly committed by illegal immigrants who are Hispanic,
although who qualifies as an “illegal” apparently encompasses anyone who
“looks” Hispanic, including the 47
million in this country who happen to be U.S. citizens.
I’m sure most people in Seattle
have no clue what The Epoch Times
really is, save that its headlines seem to indicate support for right-wing
causes and frequent negative profiling
of non-Asians. The paper is in fact the “official” mouthpiece of the Falun
Gong, allegedly a persecuted religious group in China. In fact the Falun Gong,
despite its claim to offer believers “clean” bodies and soul, is actually more
interested in “cleansing” society of the “unclean,” or at least keeping them as
far away as possible. In reality the Falun Gong is nothing more or less than a
racist and homophobic cult group (you’ll have to research this beyond its Wiki
page). It believes in segregating the races into an
apartheid-like state, bizarrely dividing these races not just into white, black
and “yellow”—but Egyptians, Persians and Indians, most of whom are technically classified
as at least a subset of Caucasian.
But it gets worse: Falun Gong believes
that interracial relationships between any of these “races” are against “nature”
and produce impure, “mongrel” offspring, and that these offspring should be regarded
as “outcasts” to be driven into the wilderness to prevent further mongrelism into
a subspecies not entirely human (I’m not making this up). The Falun Gong also believe that different
races go to different “heavens” to prevent their “mixing” even in the
afterlife; but for mixed race “outcasts,”
there is not even a designated “heaven” for them. Note that there is no “brown”
race in Falun Gong terminology; Falun Gong feels perfectly free to apply to Hispanics
the worst traits available, since they
are inherently of “mixed race,” and thus “outcasts.” This is all useful to
remember whenever you see on an Epoch
Times cover yet another anti-Hispanic immigrant hit piece.
But you don’t have to be from
the lunatic fringe to self-servingly engage in passing ugly stereotypes as
“truth.” Two white feminist “researchers” were the source of Trump’s 2016 campaign-opening
claim that all Hispanic men are “rapists,” based on no official crime data but
on the usual “survey” with questions that invited a certain outcome that was
useful to both the agenda of gender victim advocates and for female illegal migrants
seeking entry into the country, in the belief that providing the answers the
“researchers” wanted to hear would give them better chance for legal entry into
the country.
But let’s be honest here—the
hypocrisy of this is nonstop. Trump has been endlessly accused by various women
of sexual transgressions, but that wasn’t enough to keep 53 percent of white
women from getting him elected, or persuade any of the alleged victims to
actually lodge criminal complaints against him.
E. Jean Carroll—who has made a career demonizing men in her “advice”
column and is the author of What Do We
Need Men For (which of course never mentions things like the comfort of the
structures she lives and works in, and the technology she uses to spew her
misandry through)—appeared on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
to talk about her sexual assault charge against Trump. No, she wouldn’t be
pursuing charges against him just like all the other women who have accused him
have not, but Carroll “justifies” her cowardliness (and thus questionable credibility)
by fanning the flames of ugly racist stereotype: “I would find it disrespectful
to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock
down there without any protection.”
Forget that there is no actual evidence that this going on. Who by default is doing all this “raping”? Well of course Hispanic males, who are thus stereotyped as sexual predators. Last November I recounted how I stumbled across a court case file in an office of the Seattle branch of the state Attorney General's "Special Victims" department, which revealed the state's continuing effort to keep imprisoned an innocent man. One Luis Garcia was charged with rape solely on the testimony of an accuser who later admitted that she never had any contact with Garcia of a sexual nature, which prosecutors were fully aware of; she apparently at the time had second thoughts about accusing her own boyfriend, and in order not to be accused of lying she found another victim to accuse. A judge vacated the case against Garcia after he had already served three years in prison, when Garcia's attorney at the time advised him to plead guilty to a lesser charge. The judge agreed with Garcia's new attorney that the state had violated his civil and due process rights by skirting the statute of limitations by "inventing" a fictitious commission date in which to try him at all. The state still insisted on retrying him until his attorney simply filed a motion for dismissal of all charges, upon which the state was forced to ask for the same, since they had no case at all against Garcia..
Forget that there is no actual evidence that this going on. Who by default is doing all this “raping”? Well of course Hispanic males, who are thus stereotyped as sexual predators. Last November I recounted how I stumbled across a court case file in an office of the Seattle branch of the state Attorney General's "Special Victims" department, which revealed the state's continuing effort to keep imprisoned an innocent man. One Luis Garcia was charged with rape solely on the testimony of an accuser who later admitted that she never had any contact with Garcia of a sexual nature, which prosecutors were fully aware of; she apparently at the time had second thoughts about accusing her own boyfriend, and in order not to be accused of lying she found another victim to accuse. A judge vacated the case against Garcia after he had already served three years in prison, when Garcia's attorney at the time advised him to plead guilty to a lesser charge. The judge agreed with Garcia's new attorney that the state had violated his civil and due process rights by skirting the statute of limitations by "inventing" a fictitious commission date in which to try him at all. The state still insisted on retrying him until his attorney simply filed a motion for dismissal of all charges, upon which the state was forced to ask for the same, since they had no case at all against Garcia..
Assumptions are easy to make;
the media has made much of sexual assaults and “disappearances” of Native
American women, and the media allows the assumption that the perpetrators are
all Native American men. Yet independent crime studies on Native American shows
that Native American men also have significant incidences of being victims of
domestic violence and “disappearances.”
Research has also shown that—particularly in areas where reservations
are located in or near commercial mining operations—most of the perpetrators of
sexual assault are in fact non-Native American men. As I pointed out before,
there is in fact no evidence that Carroll’s “round the clock” raping is going
on, and this is another case where white female gender activists use racist
stereotype to “advance” their cause. Remember comedian Amy Schumer’s “joke”
about Hispanic men and preferring her sex to be “consensual.” Schumer’s defense
was that she is a white feminist who
thus can’t be guilty of racism and besides, other people think her
racist “jokes” are funny; but that is like Trump claiming that his attacks
against four minority women lawmakers are not racist because many people
“agree” with his racist tropes. The
movie Schumer appeared in following defense of herself, Snatched, was attacked by many reviewers as an exercise in ugly
anti-Hispanic stereotyping. It
hasn’t stopped there: Jennifer Garner “starred” in a box office flop called Peppermint, in which a white
female—after the usual contrived heinous crime of her young daughter becoming
collateral damage by Hispanic drug dealers—comes back years later as yet
another white female exacting superhuman vengeance; reviewers regarded the film
as “ignorant” and racist in its one-dimensional portrayal of Hispanics. We’ve
gone a long way from John Cassavetes’ Gloria,
starring his wife Gena Rowlands, who portrayed a “superhero” who didn’t have fake powers or an arsenal of weaponry at
her disposal to protect a 6-yesr-old Puerto Rican kid from mob killers.
It hasn’t helped that this
country has gone in reverse in regard to how Hispanics are portrayed in popular
media—from laidback sloths spending their time taking “fiestas,” to “spitfires”
to briefly in the 1950s entering the social conscience as victims of prejudice
(Man From Del Rio, Giant, Trial and 12 Angry Men)
and fighters for justice (“Zorro” and “The Cisco Kid” on television) before
being reduced to gardeners and maids and then to sex fiends and violent drug
criminals. Despite the fact that the 70s was known for its socially-conscious
television programing, it was not so when it came to Hispanics, as Chico and the Man was as noted the only
primetime series’ that even pretended to
portray Hispanic “culture.” One of the few American films that bothered to
examine the plight of migrants was an independent production made a shoe-string
budget in 1983 called El Norte, about
a brother and sister fleeing violence in Guatemala, only to find that America
wasn’t the paradise that was portrayed in home and garden magazines; Roger
Ebert likened the film to a modern day Grapes
of Wrath. But all too frequently they have been portrayed in the media more
like feral animals than human beings. Hollywood has done next to nothing to
educate the public on the Hispanic experience in this country; a recent study
found that only 3 percent of speaking roles in the 100 top grossing films over
a period of time featured Hispanic actors, and although several Euro-elite Mexican
directors (such as Guillermo del Toro, who looks more Irish than Mexican) have
found success in the U.S., they have done nothing to advance the Hispanic
presence in film, preferring to work with white actors. And anyone familiar with Spanish language television can't help but to observe how everyone looks so European.
The news media should pick up the
slack on educating the public, but not only has it allowed the Hispanic community to continue to be "mysterious" or "strange" to non-Hispanics, it has only belatedly discovered that there
is a “problem.” I respect MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, but when he expressed
“surprise” that it has taken people so long to realize that Trump really is a
racist, he was visibly miffed for a moment when a Hispanic guest had to remind
him that the reason for this was largely because those—especially Hispanics, who represent 18 percent of the
population not including the
undocumented—being targeted have been rendered voiceless by the mainstream
media in the face of years of racist attacks against them. Another factor is that
both blacks and whites have perpetuated the myth that Hispanics are an “ethnicity”
and not a “race,” thus they cannot be the victims of racism. Ignored is the
fact that most Hispanics are mixed race (like, say, Barack Obama), and the
indigenous peoples most are “mixed” with are clearly not of the “white” race.
The very small percentage of “pure” Euro-elite Hispanics are also guilty of
perpetuating the myth because of their own racism, not wanting to be “lumped in”
with those “inferior” indigenous and African races. And let's go further than that: by the same "logic," isn't the term "American" an "ethnicity"?
We saw this deliberate denial of
anti-Hispanic racism in the Thornton, Colorado shooting when a white man—who
according to his Hispanic neighbors was often seen parading about with a rifle,
openly threatening them—went into a Walmart and shot to death three Hispanics.
Police merely called it a “random” shooting, and the story disappeared in the
mainstream media almost as soon as it was reported. Yet as the Southern Poverty
Law Center and a few others noted, the only thing “random” about this shooting
were the Hispanic victims chosen by the killer; otherwise it should have been
called what it was—a hate crime against Hispanics, just as the Orlando mass
shooting actually was.
No matter the evidence, the media
just plods along. USA Today just
published a story about the increase in mass shootings in the past 10 years;
nowhere does it mention that this increase coincided with the election of a
black president and only increased further with the election of an openly
racist white president. Let’s stop with the BS; Trump only “respects” Tiger Woods because he is a
far superior golfer than Trump can ever dream of being, and Woods made his
money on his own talent, not feasting with the Silver Spoon; if Woods was
openly critical of Trump’s policies, you know he would be on Trump’s racist
shit list quick enough. The so-called “Tea Party” emerged the day after Barack
Obama’s election and despite all the despicable, ignorant, paranoid views by
“common” people you heard at their rallies, the media simply refused to admit
the truth; in fact it was just another code name for a succession of white
nationalist groups since at least the
so-called “American” or Know Nothing Party in the mid-19th century.
Instead of the truth, we
recently heard of an enraged racist Louisiana police officer who posted that
Rep. Cortez-Acasio should be shot because she allegedly suggested that military
personnel are overpaid; it turns out that the she never said that. The fake
news story was published by a right-wing “satirical” publication, but it is
“interesting” how some people (that officer wasn’t the only one “fooled”) are
so easily persuaded to believe such things; one recent study revealed that
people who get their information from Fox News are the least educated on
current events, with those who follow NPR the most educated. But then again, ignorance of people or groups that accusers do not even bother to
know is a common trait in this country; in his book Columbine, author Dave
Cullen discovered that Eric Harris and Dylan Kiebold had a relatively active
social life with their own group of friends who happened to like playing video
games (there was no “trench coat mafia”), but because a few students thought they were “loners,”
“weirdos” and “outcasts” the mainstream media ran with this and everyone
assumed it was true—and by extension, anyone who is labeled a “loner,” “weird”
or an “outcast” is stereotyped as someone who is “dangerous.”
The disconnect between
stereotype and reality is especially ironic considering scenes of children as
young as mere infants being “stored” in deplorable concentration camp-like
conditions—you know, the kind that Democratic lawmakers Reps. Pressley, Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez
and Omar descried, which prompted Trump to begin his ongoing attack on them as “racist” and “un-American” and
who should “go back” to their own “crime-infested countries.” The stench of
hypocrisy emanates from people like his daughter Ivanka Trump, whose female
empowerment campaign has next to no credibility given that she was born into
privilege and self-entitlement and has the conceit not to recognize the fact;
on The View the self-involved nature of this “empowerment” was demonstrated when
she admitted that putting asylum-seeking children in cages sleeping on concrete
floors and with barely even the most
basic necessities to sustain life or health was of no interest to her, since
she is "not president of all
women's issues." She thinks she is the “president” of what, exactly? Let’s
pray that her constant whining about women not having sufficient “voice” in
world doesn’t mean she has any future plans outside a jail cell where she
likely belongs--both she and her husband are suspected of abusing their security clearances for personal business and financial gain.
The sad fact is that what is “new”
is old. It is astonishing how many people still insist that Trump is not a
racist despite a history of it that goes back even before the Trump
Organization was sued by the Nixon Justice Department for discrimination
against non-whites in its housing units. Trump’s German grandfather immigrated
to the U.S. to escape military service, and his father Fred Trump managed to
avoid military service in World War II; the latter, however, did march with the
KKK, and it stands to reason he sympathized with at least some Nazi racial
beliefs. In fact, folk singer Woody Guthrie, who briefly resided in the
Trump-run Beach Haven community housing project, penned the following in
response to the elder Trump’s racism:
I
suppose
Old
Man Trump knows
Just
how much
Racial
Hate
he
stirred up
In
the bloodpot of human hearts
When
he drawed
That
color line
Here
at his
Eighteen
hundred family project
And:
Beach Haven ain't my home!
Beach Haven ain't my home!
I just cain't pay this rent!
My money's dpwn the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No,no,no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!
My money's dpwn the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No,no,no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!
It is absurd to believe that Fred
Trump’s racist attitudes didn’t “rub
off” on his son—just as it is absurd to believe that Trump’s racism isn’t
“rubbing off” on and giving comfort to his millions of racist supporters. Trump
may not display his racism openly to all blacks; after all, Tiger Woods is a
much better golfer than he is, and Woods has made his money off his superior
talent, not from having the good fortune of being born with the silver spoon
planted firmly in his mouth and “building” on—and sometimes breaking down,
given his many bankruptcies that he and his Fox News friends never mention—the
real estate empire his father bequeathed to him.
Naturally, some period would prefer that a problem would
simply “disappear,” such as in keeping people out. Thus “merit” has become just another code word to justify race-based
immigration policy, although just because you do data entry on a computer at
work doesn’t necessarily mean you have “tech” skills, because that would mean
that virtually everyone in this country regardless of educational attainment
has some level of “tech” skills. The Pew Foundation claims that by 2050 Asian
groups will outnumber Hispanics (and blacks, for that matter) as the largest
minority group in America. What does this mean? South Asians (Indians) are
increasing their stranglehold on the convenience store and motel ownership market and quite openly practice hiring discrimination in those businesses.
What’s next? Where I currently work there is major entertainment company that
has an electronic billboard where it advertises the anniversaries of current
employees; those who have worked 10 or more years all have Caucasian names, and
about 80 percent of those who have 5 or less years have Asian or Indian names.
Thus an immigration system based on an arbitrary definition of “merit” may find
white people who the Indian-owned company Infosys (like many “tech” companies
in this country) referred to as “stupid Americans”—the only “qualified” ones
are the ones who attended “elite” tech schools like MIT or Stanford, no one
else need apply—perhaps in time will be forced into “dirty” jobs because not enough of them
will be as “qualified” for the “tech” jobs as Asians and Indians. Hispanics are thus not the "enemy" of white hegemony.
Oh yes, there will be a price to
pay for “merit-based” immigration based on prejudicial attitudes--ironic given the racial, class and "caste" prejudices the "favored" immigrants bring to and many continue to practice in this supposedly "egalitarian" country. Some people
claim that the tech “shortage” is a manufactured problem, because many Indians simply
dislike working with Americans for cultural reasons (customer service personnel
in India reportedly dislike taking calls from Americans because they are always
“demanding” and “angry”), and won’t hire them, or in the name of “harmony”
their employers prefer to hire them.
Amazon has backed out of a lease agreement in an office building
currently under construction in Seattle; it is reportedly now subleasing the
property to Oracle—which like Google and Microsoft has an Indian CEO, and has
been under scrutiny for discriminating against non-Indians in its current
hiring process, with 98 percent of its H1-B hires from India. So when white
people realize too late that they’ve given away the store, all their “white
nationalism” will have bought them is trying to convince themselves that
“meritless” jobs have merit after all when they
have to do them. “Merit,” after all, is
in the eye of the beholder; I see no “merit” in the fact that 3 years after it
began, an Indian in-house construction
of a curry house and meeting hall in Kent still isn’t anywhere near finished,
while a much larger residential/commercial project a few blocks away is making
steady progress with its mostly Hispanic workforce—which, by the way, has
attracted enough interest from Kent police to “warrant” a few visits from its
toy drones. I was walking to a nearby laundromat when one of them took an
“interest” in me; when I pulled out my phone to record its presence, it zipped away
in the direction of the downtown police station.
I personally find few “friends”
in the fight against all this bigotry. There are no demographics "innocent" of bigotry. .Laine Lawless, a former “high priestess” of some lesbian pagan group
called the “Sisterhood of the Moon,"was, according to the Southern
Poverty Law Center in a report ten years ago, a full-time anti-Hispanic immigrant fanatic, and
collaborated with Arizona neo-Nazis, suggesting ways to harass anyone
who might be “suspected” of being illegal, such as
• Steal the money from any illegal walking into a bank or check cashing place.
• Make every illegal alien feel the heat of being a person without status. … I hear the rednecks in the South are beating up illegals as the textile mills have closed. Use your imagination.
• Discourage Spanish-speaking children from going to school. Be creative.
• Create an anonymous propaganda campaign warning that any further illegal immigrants will be shot, maimed or seriously messed-up upon crossing the border. This should be fairly easy to do, considering the hysteria of the Spanish language press, and how they view the Minutemen as racists & vigilantes.
White, black, male, female—it doesn’t matter; they all have their “grievances” against Hispanics. I was particularly offended when I was watching two black women on MSNBC talking about “aggrieved white men” being solely guilty of racist acts, yet time and time again racist behavior and verbal attacks by white women against Hispanics and blacks is caught on video—and, lest we forget, 53 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2016, and many of those voters remain committed to ignorance. But to be fair, black women are not particularly innocent either—climbing through McDonalds drive-through windows to attack employees, shoving an elderly man off a bus in Las Vegas after he admonished her for verbally assaulting other passengers, causing him to strike his head on the pavement and die hours later of brain injuries. Even “Latinas” who are more than willing to sell out any pride in their heritage by offering themselves to Anglo men like wet rags in the quest of phony social status perpetuate negative stereotypes that will impact their own sons.
• Steal the money from any illegal walking into a bank or check cashing place.
• Make every illegal alien feel the heat of being a person without status. … I hear the rednecks in the South are beating up illegals as the textile mills have closed. Use your imagination.
• Discourage Spanish-speaking children from going to school. Be creative.
• Create an anonymous propaganda campaign warning that any further illegal immigrants will be shot, maimed or seriously messed-up upon crossing the border. This should be fairly easy to do, considering the hysteria of the Spanish language press, and how they view the Minutemen as racists & vigilantes.
White, black, male, female—it doesn’t matter; they all have their “grievances” against Hispanics. I was particularly offended when I was watching two black women on MSNBC talking about “aggrieved white men” being solely guilty of racist acts, yet time and time again racist behavior and verbal attacks by white women against Hispanics and blacks is caught on video—and, lest we forget, 53 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2016, and many of those voters remain committed to ignorance. But to be fair, black women are not particularly innocent either—climbing through McDonalds drive-through windows to attack employees, shoving an elderly man off a bus in Las Vegas after he admonished her for verbally assaulting other passengers, causing him to strike his head on the pavement and die hours later of brain injuries. Even “Latinas” who are more than willing to sell out any pride in their heritage by offering themselves to Anglo men like wet rags in the quest of phony social status perpetuate negative stereotypes that will impact their own sons.
The Greek philosopher and cynic
Diogenes famously walked the streets of Athens with a lantern in broad
daylight, searching for an “honest” man; it is not clear if he ever found such
a person. If he walked the streets today, would he have any more success? If he
found that person, would anyone take him seriously? The Chicago
Sun-Times editorial
board had this to say after another mass shooting, this time in Aurora, IL:
“We had intended to
write about Trump’s fake emergency today. That was our plan. We thought we
would make the obvious point that it’s hard to believe there’s an emergency
along the border when the president has been whining for his wall for two
years, has all his facts wrong and offhandedly acknowledged on Friday — after
declaring the emergency — that he “didn’t need” to do so. But now we have
another mass shooting. Not along the border, but in Aurora. The dishonesty of
our national conversation — the manufactured fear of immigrants when the real
and present danger is our own violent society and the stupidity of our gun laws
— could not be in starker relief.”
On the website ProPublica, Ginger
Thompson quoted a border agent tasked with guarding migrant children wondering
why an outsiders investigating the McAllen, TX detention center was “yelling”
to someone on her phone about the “crisis” she had just observed; the person on
the other side of the line didn’t care: “If they did, this wouldn’t be
happening.” Isn’t that the truth? After all, it wasn't that long ago that the nation was "outraged" by child separations on the border, and Trump signed that executive order ending it, right? Today, child separation is not only a going concern, but it has expanded and conditions in which they live have worsened. If children start dying in greater numbers than they are now, what will we start hearing? The same thing a female resident of Shenandoah, PA said of Luis Ramirez, an immigrant who died after several players from the high school football team repeatedly kicked him in the head? "If he wasn't here, it wouldn't have happened."
