It is one of the rules of podcasting: if you can avoid it, which you generally can, you should avoid the "A Truly Sad Week In America, Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables" trap. This trap's extremely pithy name was inspired by a June 2020 episode of Bill Simmons' podcast entitled "A Truly Sad Week In America, Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables With Ryen Russillo," the title of which aptly (and, again, pithily) sums up the challenge of attempting to talk about something extremely serious (in this case, it was George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis police) while also talking about The 2005 NBA Redraftables. It's a hazard for podcasts that want to be serious sometimes and silly at other times, and while it's not an argument for being all one or all the other, it is a reminder of how jarring it can be to try to be both. All that said, I have some news:
We did it. We did the Truly Sad Day In America Plus The 2005 NBA Redraftables thing, and I believe we were right to do it. It helped that this week's guest, Arif Hasan of the Wide Left newsletter, is both one of the best people to talk to about the disgraceful ongoing ICE offensive in his home city of Minneapolis and one of the best people to talk to about this week's NFL Playoff slate. But also there was really no other way to do it. While there is plenty of silly stuff in the episode—the first line in my notes is "Drew's Berlin mayonnaise misadventure"—there is too much bad stuff going on not to talk about it, and too much interesting football happening not to talk about that. As a result, the episode broke down into two notably clean halves: the first being about what it is like when ICE invades your city, and the second involving a lot of stuff about the Buffalo Bills.
Arif has written well at his newsletter about what it's like in Minneapolis right now, and how this moment arrived, and he spoke eloquently about it here—the unique and distinctively ICE balance of malice, aggression, and incompetence, the changes that the presence of masked and armed state agents can force upon people living under it, the challenge of walking around with sentences like "they teargassed the high school" rattling around in your head. He talked, too, about what Minnesotans, and Americans, have learned about how law enforcement and politicians understand their relationship to the rest of us, and about how his experience as a Muslim American after September 11 have informed his experience of this moment. It turns out that no amount of experiencing shitty administrative racism as a high school debater prepares a person for all this.
And then, after the break, we found ourselves picking this weekend's NFL playoff games. Of course there was a disjunction, there, but I found myself grateful to be thinking about what the Broncos' deal is, or whether the Patriots are actually good, or the astonishing contrast between the majestic Texans defense and the hideous Texans offense. The long-running question of whether the Buffalo Bills are actually good or not elicited a compelling comparison to the 2006 Colts from Drew, and we worked together to process our Sam Darnold angst and speculate irresponsibly about the injury wave swamping the 49ers. That this section ended with Drew copping to yelling "run the damn ball" at his television for hours last weekend felt both exactly right, and like a mercy. Of all the things to yell about in this moment, it felt reassuring to make our way back to something dumb and familiar. Also, at the end, Drew admitted that he does not like it when people compare him to Boomer Esiason. So stop doing that. Say he looks like Joe Burrow's Looper or don't compare him to anyone at all.
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