Multiple MVP award-winner and known Canadian Steve Nash helped the NBA's Phoenix Suns beat the San Antonio Spurs in a playoff game last night. To acknowledge the Suns' many hispanic fans and to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, the most blatantly anti-American holiday since St. Patrick's Day and Columbus Day combined, the Suns donned jerseys that read "Los Suns," the clearest sign of sports-related cultural surrender since the Anaheim Amigos took the floor in the old ABA.
Worse than the (admittedly home-court) drubbing Los Suns has dished out to the Spurs so far in the playoffs is the franchise's stance against Arizona's new immigration law:
"I think the law is very misguided. I think it is unfortunately to the detriment of our society and our civil liberties and I think it is very important for us to stand up for things we believe in," Nash said of the bill. "I think the law obviously can target opportunities for racial profiling. Things we don't want to see and don't need to see in 2010."
Amare Stoudemire and Alvin Gentry also expressed their support for the decision with more of a focus on supporting their neighbors. "It's going to be great to wear Los Suns to let the Latin community know we're behind them 100%," Stoudemire said.
There's no question that this public move will receive considerable backlash in this state and likely among many Suns fans and perhaps even sponsors.
The idea of wearing Los Suns jerseys reportedly came from the managing partner of the team, a filthy businessman who only sees the color green and who is every bit as filthy as Canadian superstars in a sport that has lost too many goddamn jobs already to furriners from the North, South, East, and West. Here's hoping that a real red-blooded team that is 100 percent American (love it, leave it, just don't eat it on a tortilla or put cilantro on it) takes home whatever idiotic trophy the NBA winner gets. In other words, go Celtics, an Irish-only squad bravely not afraid to traffic in crass ethnic stereotypes in an ultra-P.C. world. Indeed, such bravery is almost enough to make people think of the micks as white. And by people, yes, I mean white people, whose ranks I expect to join someday.
To recap: Arizona, whose new law remains stunningly popular with freedom-loving volk from Flagstaff to the Sudetenland, bravely stepped in where the feds had abdicated its constitutional function to pass a law aimed at combating a crime wave that doesn't exist and is attributed to a steadily decreasing number of home-invasion mariachi bands from Anthony Quinn's ancestral homeland. The brave and misunderstood and constitutionally reverent legislators in the Grand Canyon State didn't want to have to act but goddamn it the frontier ain't no place to wait on goddamn Washington to step up to the plate and start doing its jobs of busting dishwashers and cracking on landscapers. How else are we going to get the economy and government spending under control if we don't kick out low-wage workers and stimulatize things via hepped-out police spending? Why, if former Gov. Evan Meacham, who once defended himself against charges of racism by calmly explaining that he picks blacks for positions when they are the best applicants for "the cotton-picking job," weren't already dead, this all would have surely killed him.
The Arizona law, despite proposed modifications (now less overtly nausea-inducing than Chi-Chi's old fried ice cream dessert), is still an awful piece of junk, encouraging the less-than-kosher antics of the world's toughest pink underwear salesman and downright un-American to boot (I'll tell you what, I never felt so goshdarned American as when I was driving around 1970s Waterbury, Connecticut with my non-English-speaking wop grandfather who would shout at blacks in Italian that they should go back to Africa and get a job already).
None of this is to make light of the serious problems posed by immigration - which historically include a booming economy (perversely, immigrants swarm to areas with opportunity and forego dead zones such as the Rust Belt); the enrichment of a national culture that prides itself on its syncretism (pizza, chop suey, birthday pinatas made in China, kids with names like Siobhan, Dingus, and Caitlin); the slowly diminishing ha-ha-ha of ethnic jokes (when is the last time you got a really good Polish joke?), and the decline of affirmative-action-based organized crime (yes, the Asians are very good at this too, goddamn model minorities, isn't it enough that they now are so good at the SAT that they are discriminated against in college admissions?), and much more.
And none of this is to suggest that Los Suns deserve to win a national title. Or that the Memphis Tams didn't deserve to be brought into the NBA much more so than the current set of "Grizzlies" imported from the North Pole and now playing (if you can call it that) in that fabled Mississippi River town.
