A bar that I am quite familiar with, Time OUT Sports Bar and Grill, has made the idiotic move of abandoning allegiances to the St. Louis Rams, and instead, aligning with the Kansas City Chiefs.
This is NOT The Onion, read on..
This bar is typical of many bars on the south side-insular, very white, and very segregated. In fact looking back on it, the entire city is.
Money quote-
Due to the bone headed "hands up, don't shoot" act by the number of Rams players on the Sunday game the Time Out Bar & Grill will no longer support the St Louis Rams, so we will no longer have Happy hours for the Rams games and all signs and pictures will be off the walls... We have to stand up to thugs who destroy our community and burn down local businesses, and boycott the other thugs/organizations who support them...
This is NOT The Onion.
Now a few things are at play here: 1, the Rams are headed to L.A. almost certainly, so this could be racial opportunism on the part of the owner to build a new loyalty to the remaining Missouri team.
2, Playing to a crowd, although this bar does allow black people, after 12 o' clock, you have to have a membership to get in. In my more naive days I thought this was about security.
The owner is clearly aiming to capitalize on how he feels the wind is blowing, but in the aggregate, STL in general is going to lose its reputation, its football team, and its respect. The authoritarian white mentality that is so pervasive there is likely borne out of a combination of private school elitism, and institutionally enforced racism/segregation.
It is by all appearances a backwards, underdeveloped, stuck in the past city, but that is not entirely fair or accurate. There is a strong strain of progressivism there, but there seems to be a blue collar beer culture that lends itself to division and xenophobia.
I look at the state of our country, the extremism, the literal cartoon characters now being sent to Congress, and realize that the old, and often hilarious SNL skits from the past are now a reality.
This is NOT The Onion.
But like an onion, it makes me want to cry.