On Bended Knee, Especially in Victoria

Who will be the last man kneeling?

The quaint modern custom of “taking a knee” was pioneered by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016 as a way of protesting against the treatment of black people in the US. Interestingly, Kaepernick’s first form of protest during the pre-game playing of the US national anthem was to sit down rather than stand.The knee-taking came along a few games later, presumably because Kaepernick foresaw that his action would become known as “taking an arse”. So kneeling it would be.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour,” Kaepernick, who was at that point on an oppressive $160 million contract, told a reporter in 2016. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.”

Hundreds of similarly oppressed millionaire black NFL players soon began following Kaepernick’s example, although after the 2016 season that first heroic kneeler was no longer among them. Kaepernick was cut from the 49ers, who evidently believed him to be smaller than the game, and has not been picked up by any other team.

His most prominent moment since his playing days was an appearance in a Nike ad three years ago which featured the line: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” Amusingly, Kaepernick’s sacrifice of “everything” involved a multi-million-dollar Nike contract.

The former 49er may be gone, but his kneeling lives on. Basketballers took up the hobby, as did college athletes and a woke Olympic fencer named Race Imboden, a white guy who provided a barrage of reasons for his gesture: “Racism, gun control, mistreatment of immigrants, and a president who spreads hate are at the top of a long list.” That’s quite a grievance catalogue from someone who makes his living poking a bit of wire at people.

By last year, multiple Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton—one of the richest athletes on earth—had also adopted pre-race kneeling. He additionally demanded that his Mercedes-Benz racing cars be painted black as a sign of support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

(Hamilton may not be aware that a black Mercedes was the vehicle of choice for a notorious mid-twentieth-century leader of Jewish Lives Don’t Matter. F1 drivers tend not to be great military historians.)

Kneeling was the pre-game entertainment at crowd-free AFL matches in June last year. Then it spread to cricket. All players took a knee prior to three Test matches between England and the West Indies. In Australia, the Big Bash League introduced the Big Kneel before games.

Just a few months ago, it seemed very likely that taking a knee would become a permanent feature of all major sports events—sort of an international version of our irritating welcome to country ceremonies (devised, of course, by Ernie Dingo in 1976, when the comedian was just twenty years old).

Then something happened. Well, quite a few things happened, in fact: the broader public became aware that Black Lives Matter martyr George Floyd wasn’t exactly an angel, BLM riots destroyed many black-owned businesses and BLM leaders were revealed to be motivated more by Marxism than by racial injustice.

Also, crucially, the US election ended with Donald Trump’s defeat. This removed the political purpose behind displays of conspicuous contrition.

Belatedly, a few sports stars began declining to take a knee. Instead, they took a stand. In the Big Bash League, Melbourne Stars wicketkeeper Ben Dunk did not join other players who knelt. He was joined by a number of other cricketers.

Now the momentum is with the vertical. In early February, all but four of Scotland’s rugby union team stood rather than kneeled during one minute’s silence ahead of their Six Nations tournament win over England. Several England players stood as well. So did all the match officials.

This upset UK Sky Sports news editor Anthony Joseph. “#AsOne is the message from Scottish Rugby. But the players don’t seem to be ‘as one’ in their stance against racism,” Joseph complained online. “It’s less about ‘they should kneel’ and more about ‘why wouldn’t they?’ What do they feel so strongly about to not be part of an anti-racism gesture?”

It may be that they don’t perceive it as an anti-racism gesture. That was certainly the view of non-kneeling England player Billy Vunipola, who is Australian-born of Tongan background. “What I saw in terms of that movement was not aligned with what I believe in,” Vunipola said of BLM last year. “They were burning churches and Bibles. I can’t support that.”

Some believe that the decision by English and Scottish players not to kneel before that match was simply due to there being no plans for kneeling. None of the players or officials spoke of it. But the issue was widely known and spoken of prior to a subsequent Six Nations match between Ireland and Wales.

Not a single player took a knee. Not. One. Player.

Impressively, this did not cause any kind of social media meltdown. If anything, opinion seemed to run in favour of the standers. “Maybe sanity is starting to return,” one Twitter poster, who goes by the handle “Erasmus”, wrote. “Maybe players are actually looking into what BLM actually stands for. Clearly the administrators haven’t—especially here in Australia—but this is a good start.”

It certainly is. Perhaps taking a knee will in future be seen as simply a performative quirk peculiar to our era, as disco was to the 1970s. Those of us who make it to mid-century may occasionally take a knee for nostalgia’s sake, or to draw a laugh from our fellow residents at the home.

And then we’ll need someone to help us up. Taking a knee is a young person’s caper, which is another reason to wish it gone. 

TAKE Victoria out of the equation—what a delightful thought—and Australia at this time of writing has lost eighty-nine people to the coronavirus from a population of 20 million or so.

That’s a death rate of just 0.44 per 100,000 Australians. As a point of comparison, our non-Victorian coronavirus mortality rate is almost exactly equal to the rate of worker fatalities in the UK. Regrettable, obviously, but by no means epidemic.

Other points of comparison: the worst-run (that is to say, Democrat-governed) states in the US have coronavirus counts per 100,000 people that are in triple figures. New Jersey, the worst of the lot, is at 251. New York is on 233. Massachusetts is also unimaginably high, at least from an Australian perspective: 221 deaths per 100,000.

By any reckoning, Australia has basically won the COVID-19 battle. Yet we’re still, with the noble exception of New South Wales, shutting down borders and closing down cities in response to solitary coronavirus infections. Rather than fighting the next war, which will be against economic ruin, we remain engaged in a previous conflict.

And our states—again, New South Wales excepted—keep using the same financially destructive blunt-force tactics. They compound their Covid-coping incompetence with coronavirus cowardice.

Victorian Premier Dan Andrews turned up on television as I was writing this to announce a five-day economic hammer blow; they’ve got thirteen-odd people who’ve tested positive in Melbourne, so Australia’s creepiest leader has closed the entire state.

Suppose you were planning a wedding in Mildura. Perhaps you were looking forward to a family barbecue in Horsham. Or maybe you simply wanted to travel more than five kilometres from your Ouyen home, which for some farming properties out that way may be the length of the driveway.

No dice to all the above, otherwise you’ll be fined. All because barely a dozen people many hundreds of kilometres away returned positive coronavirus test results.

The worst thing about this—you know, apart from beautiful regional towns being absolutely smashed for no good reason at all—is that Andrews is obviously reviving his daily press conference routine. Poor Victorians. Not even the tragic souls who voted for Andrews deserve this. Nobody does.

Those press conferences may still be under way by the time you are reading this column. If they are, I advise one way of maintaining sanity during Dan’s daily deluge. Just pinpoint the latest focus-group-tested phrase to enter Andrews’s vocabulary.

The most recent is “precious thing”, as in: “We cannot risk the precious thing we have all built in Victoria.” Andrews used that Godawful description three times in less than an hour. Some of his more devoted online fans began repeating it to each other approvingly, like a call-and-response during prayer.

Oh, and he’s calling this latest lockdown a “circuit breaker”. Circuit is a strange synonym for business, but who are we to question Dictator Dan?

There will no doubt be other lockdowns and border closures following this one. A single sneeze in Brisbane can slam a border shut faster than a US Democrat closing the books on a bent election. West Australians close their capital if someone yells “Covid!” in a theatre.

And our reward for this is we all get to be broke.