“The home of the brave and the land of the free / Where the less you know the better off you’ll be.” — W. Zevon
Gary Hahn has been the play-by-play announcer for North Carolina State football and basketball programs since 1990. His is one of the best voices in sports radio, and he has been a professional at it since his college days.
On December 30, while announcing other scores during NCSU’s participation in the Duke Mayo Bowl in Charlotte, Hahn made an egregious error that many, including myself, likely would not have considered an error at all. What he said was:
“Amongst all the illegal aliens down in El Paso, it’s UCLA 14, Pittsburgh 6.”
That’s it. Hahn used a term that, until very recently, had been in common–and official–use. Somehow, that changed overnight when someone, somewhere decided for some reason that it was impolite to refer to illegal aliens as “illegal aliens.” That decision was not voted upon, not enshrined in law, and not wanted except by a few, but it was that few who arbitrarily decided that somehow calling a spade a spade was hurtful to the spade.
Persons not citizens of the U.S. are aliens. If those people cross into the U.S. illegally, they are illegal aliens. They aren’t just “undocumented,” and they are not, by statute, immigrants. They are illegal aliens, pure and simple. Calling them “undocumented immigrants” is like calling a burglar a “keyless house guest.”
So Gary Hahn committed a faux pas that no one knew was one, but that’s not the only reason he was cancelled.
Gary Hahn was actually cancelled because he knew too much.
What he knew was what anyone who’s paid any attention to this space for at least the past year, knows. El Paso is in crisis. It’s own (Democrat) government has declared a state of emergency. Thousands of, yes, illegal aliens, are pouring across the border daily. Some are criminals. Since late August, more than 80,000 have been released onto El Paso’s city streets. Many are now camping on those streets. Others have overwhelmed the airport. As many public buildings as possible have been converted into shelters, yet all are filled immediately. In fact, the conversion of the city’s Convention Center to shelter space, forcing the cancellation of the Sun Bowl’s traditional “Fan Fest” event, was precisely the sports-related angle Hahn was referring to.
Perusing the anti-Hahn comments on Twitter, I get the impression that most of the Hahn Haters have no idea of what’s occurring in El Paso–and that they’re perfectly happy remaining ignorant. They seem to believe that somehow Hahn was equating the historic El Paso that they themselves know only from a distance with “Illegal Aliens,” as though none of the previous year’s crisis had occurred at all. What they miss is that many long-time citizens of El Paso, Latino and Anglo alike, are fed up with and frightened by the massive numbers arriving. And, note that not all of the newcomers are pitiful mothers with hungry babies. Many are robust, military-aged men, and they are coming from all over the world: Russia, Pakistan, the Middle East, you name it.
What Hahn did was remind, off-handedly and in the mildest terms, a few brain-dead sports fans that a full-blown existential crisis is happening on their country’s southern border, a crisis with which the administration and the media don’t want them to concern themselves.
But, in case you haven’t noticed, distraction is what sports are for these days, isn’t it? Panem et circusensus. Bread and circuses. Pay no attention to reality; there’s a game on. And maybe there’s someone out there whom we’ve never met whose life we can try to ruin. That’d be fun.
For more, see 247sports.