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For the next few days, the phrase Baltimore
Ravens
will be common in American discourse, following
that team's victory in what the Wall Street Journal dubbed
the Welfare Bowl.
The Superbowl, that quintessential celebration of the American Way, does not represent the competitive markets and free enterprise that we would like the rest of the world to adopt.
As the Journal pointed out last Friday, these days
the real rivalry is not among teams competing for the
championship. It's between teams and the taxpayers who
subsidize them.
The taxpayers of the Metropolitan Stadium District in
Denver and environs certainly do their share, and for very
little recognition. The taxpayers put up $270 million,
Invesco comes up with $60 million, and the stadium will get
an awkward appellation like Invesco Stadium at Mile
High,
wherever Mile High
might be.
In an honorable world, team owners would build their own
stadiums and put whatever names they wanted on them. And
if some hardship welfare case really needed assistance,
those who provided the help would be recognized with
Taxpayer Stadium.
The more I ponder this name, the more I like it. If the Stadium District Board had adopted it, Colorado would have received acres of favorable publicity, since an honestly named stadium would be such a novelty in a world of corporate branding.
Every game broadcast from Taxpayer Stadium
would
have to include an explanation of how it got its name, and
the announcers would then have to point out all the
subsidies involved in the construction of NFL arenas.
Taxpayers who make $40,000 a year might start wondering why they're forced to assist in paying multi-million-dollar annual salaries, and urban politicians might respond by setting different priorities for spending public money.
And the questions might go all the way back to public universities that function as trade schools for the NFL, then even to high schools.
Come to think of it, an end to public subsidy and the
arrival of free enterprise here would represent a major
threat to the American Way of Life, and so it's probably
just as well that the Metropolitan Stadium Board never
considered
Taxpayer Stadium.
The Ravens play their home games in PSINet Stadium, which got $200 million from Maryland taxpayers, as part of the deal to lure the Cleveland Browns to Chesapeake Bay after Baltimore's old Colts moved to Indianapolis.
Sometimes these franchise shifts lead to curious nomenclature, as in the NBA after the New Orleans Jazz moved to Salt Lake City and became the Utah Jazz.
Jazz
makes me think of funky dim smoke-filled gin
joints at three in the morning. That is the exact opposite
of anything that I ever experienced in Utah.
But the Browns changed their name to Ravens after the move to Baltimore where they could collect more welfare. Why Ravens?
The Raven
is the title of Edgar A. Poe's most
famous poem, and Poe died in Baltimore in 1849 and is
buried there.
As a one-time English major, I was pleased at the literary reference, but I also wondered how much connection Poe really had to Baltimore.
For instance, John Henry Doc
Holliday spent only
a few months in Glenwood Springs, where he died in 1887 and
his tombstone remains a tourist attraction.
Poe was born in 1809 in Boston, and grew up in Richmond, except for five years that the Allans, his adoptive parents, spent in England.
His unremunerative career as a writer and editor took him up and down the eastern seaboard. His best years were probably spent in Richmond, where he edited the Southern Literary Messenger, and in Philadelphia, where he invented the modern detective story one hot afternoon.
But he was in and out of Baltimore, where his second volume of poems was published in 1829. He worked there again in 1831-33.
When he died in Baltimore in 1849, he was passing through on his way from Richmond to New York. He was found dead drunk at a polling place on an election day, which led to speculation that he had been plied with liquor and used as a repeater in fraudulent voting. But there's no way to know whether this is true.
All told, Poe spent about a fifth of his adult life in Baltimore, which gives that city as good a claim as any other on him.
But Baltimore has no claim on The Raven.
It was
written in late 1844 or early 1845 when Poe was living in,
of all places, New York City.
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