Just Another Flaccid Johnson

RIP

Some headlines are cheap – meant to generate traffic and drum up short-lived interest in a noun otherwise incapable of differentiating itself from the pack.

A newly humble Chad Estebán Ochocinco knows not about such shallow displays of self-pimping, and so the legendary (in his own mind), soon-to-be-Ex-Bengal will reportedly drop his moniker fantástico in the interest of… well, landing the favor of one no-nonsense Hoodied Darth Lord.

This change of name, as you know, is a great loss, not just for the sports blogosphere and 8-year-old Mexican school children aspiring to be black, but for self-aggrandizers everywhere and, perhaps most troubling, America’s oft-vibrant sense of egotism.

It would be one thing if Ochocinco’s reversion to plain ol’ Chad Johnson stood an isolated one-off. The occurrence, however, dovetails with a confluence of similarly startling turns of unabashed meekness that together suggest one thing: the era of me-first Straight Cash Homies is coming to an end.

Just this week, gaseous liberal pundit Keith Olbermann ceded his cable talk throne, a slew of penny-pinching art house films crashed the Oscar noms, and not one virulent Tea Partier hollered “YOU LIE!” Tuesday night from the exceedingly passive aisles of Congress.

We’ve even exiled our loudest, orangest reality stars from the bright lights of the Jersey Shore.

Johnson, a man who just days ago challenged his coach to a steel cage match, unfortunately symbolizes a sweeping epidemic eating away at our collective cojones – one reframing civility as something other than the last refuge of the boring.

So I ask plainly: what the f*ck is going on?

Ronnie, perplexed

To what can we ultimately attribute this transcendent personality’s backslide into unassuming normality, and of greater import, how do we as a people counteract this baffling trend toward humility?

Addressing the first question is simply a matter of armchair psycho-analytics: the Artist Formerly Known As is quite clearly dabbling in the performance-enhancing art of reverse psychology. After three seasons of underwhelming statistical output and equally unimpressive end-zone celebrations, Johnson is obviously trying to recapture the hungry spirit of the visionary twenty-something who Irish jigged his way into the hearts of fellow narcissists and the film rooms of opposing defenses.

Johnson, in effect, is attempting to reposition himself as the underdog – essentially recreating all the major plot devices of Rocky IV, only this time, Apollo Creed is Esteban Ochocinco.

Still, where Chad Johnson was a football player, Ochocinco was an entertainer, and it’s but a sad commentary on our increasingly chutzpah-free culture that an individual blessed with such unhinged audacity has to scale back his dynamism in the name of “collective effort” or “team” or any other antiquated concept favoring the wheel over the cog.

Such tacit admissions of inferiority speak volumes to this country’s loss of mojo. We are dealing not with a fad, but a far-reaching scourge of hubris manifesting itself – in addition to the above cases – in our international pussyfooting (troop withdrawals), feeble Twitter apologies (speaking of Mojo…), and flagrant displays of non-partisanship (I’m sure they exist, but thankfully, I can’t think of any).

To rephrase the second, more pressing query, then, would be to ask how we go about fundamentally reviving a besieged sense of ethnocentrism. The unavoidable truth, of course, is that those with the answers are those, too, no longer themselves.

- Robbie