As you settle down tonight with your beer and nachos to take in a historic World Series Game One, spare a thought for those suffering from America’s number one killer of innocent enjoyment: progressivism.
Progressivism is a degenerative disease marked by an uncontrollable impulse to social justice sanctimony coupled with a deep moral confusion. Patients are unable to distinguish between serious crimes and dopey liberal preoccupations.
Take the tragic case of Mashable’s Sam Laird, who warns baseball fans that the World Series between the Cubs and the Indians “illuminates the darker side of modern sports fandom, in which following one’s favorite teams increasingly requires moral reckoning and rationalization.” 
Wow. Serious stuff. And he has a point about the Cubs’ side of the ledger: Chicago’s elite closer Aroldis Chapman earlier this season served a “30-game suspension for violating MLB’s domestic violence policy. He allegedly choked his girlfriend then fired off several shots from a handgun inside his garage following an argument last October.”
No doubt about it: Chapman’s a bad guy. If you can’t root for the Cubs because of him, well, good for you. You could opt for the more post-modern and (yes) progressive form of penance. Laird points to one Caitlin Swieca, who informed the world via Twitter that she’s “going to donate $10 to a Chicago domestic violence org every time Chapman gets a save.” And really, what good is virtue if you can’t advertise it.
So much for the North-siders. The Indians’ sin? A mascot. Chief Wahoo, “a cartoon caricature with red skin, a sheepish grin an oversized nose — is criticized by many as being particularly offensive.”
No doubt about it: Wahoo’s a bad guy. If you can’t root for the Indians because of him, well, you need professional help. But to liberal journalists (and just about nobody else), sports mascots are a new civil rights battlefield. Just ask the bloodied windmill-tilters at The Washington Post, who after years finally threw up their hands in disgust at their inability to get American Indians to be offended by the Redskins.
Laird cites Douglas Cardinal, “an indigenous Canadian activist who has protested Chief Wahoo,” telling the New York Times, “It is racist — that is all there is to it.” Cardinal “had been thinking about the problems we have as a community with the issue of suicide, and I think there is a direct correlation between these kinds of depictions of our people as inferior and as caricatures to be mocked.”
Yep. Chief Wahoo is driving Indians to suicide. And the Notre Dame leprechaun is decimating Irish American communities. And the Orlando Magic has given us Miley Cyrus and Lindsay Lohan.
Incidentally, some people are channeling their Chief Wahoo anxiety into more productive channels, “fashion-minded protests in the form of shirts labeled ‘Caucasians’ in script like that the Indians franchise uses — but featuring a cartoon of a white man in a Lacoste polo shirt with money on his mind.”
I’d wear that. And a Chief Wahoo hat. While I watch Chapman close Game One.
