blogger interrupted

Art Modell is already on the short list for the seventh circle of hell, where Dante describes that Satan chews on the damned for eternity.  It occurred to me yesterday, as I watched yet another Browns team play a game not resembling football, that Art Modell really is the beginning, middle, and without-end of the Browns incompetence.

The Browns legacy rests on two legends named Brown themselves, Paul Brown and Jim Brown, two giants of NFL history.  Both men changed the game of football.  Art Modell purchased the team in 1961, and after one championship season in 1964, pre-Super Bowl era, it has been all downhill from there, with the exception of some magical seasons.

Modell meddled with the Browns ceaselessly, to a point that he took the team out of Cleveland.  That is the sin for which Satan shall chew on him forever.  Yet, his legacy still clinging to the Browns like a bad case of warts, is on display every year in Cleveland, even after he had the team ripped from him and returned to its home.

The Browns today, and since their reinstatement in 1999, are a personification of the Dickensian culture that America suffers from as a whole.  Left after Modell’s reign is nothing more than a get rich quick, take what you can, leave the others to fend for themselves, morally bankrupt corporate culture in the Browns – the culture from which Modell himself emerged.  

To overuse an overused phrase, nothing about the Browns seems like family anymore.  Football is an American, and Cleveland obsession because it grew out of the midwest, at a time when the midwest was teeming with immigrants.  Big, burly, ethnic oafs who worked in the steel mill 6 or 7 days a week and on their one day off went to a muddy field in the mill’s shadow to take out their frustrations.  Football retains this identity to this day.  

Compare the Browns to our rivals, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and you’ll see the stark comparison.  The Rooney family has taken care of that team like a brood of a dozen children born to an Italian, or Irish, or Polish mother just off the boat in 1900.  The result is that it is competitive, intense, and playoff bound practically every year.  Good American values lead to great American football.  

The values which Art Modell imposed on the Browns are American allright, but not necessarily good.  They are the values of a corporate culture gone utterly mad, where human beings are not family but chattel, whose chief purpose is to provide your trophy room with hardware, and your bottom line with profit.  

That is the football which was on display from Browns stadium yesterday.  A team comprised of dime-a-dozen defensive backs, cast off defensive line re-treads on the cheap, a low-round draft pick throwing the ball, and a couple of stellar skill players like Kellen Winslow and Jamal Lewis who never give up on a play even while their leadership surrounds them with mediocrity.

The Browns are a metaphor for how I’ve been feeling lately.  Watching everything that matters to me as an American get perverted into something that it wasn’t before, and shouldn’t be now.  I can change my country this year so that dynamic can start to go away.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I can change the Browns.