Fighting Over Cock Fighting

PUERTO RICO, like the rest of the western hemisphere, was conquered and brutalized by Europeans, in this case the Spaniards, in the sixteenth century. Their purpose was to get rich, and as a secondary goal to force Spanish culture down the throats of the stone age natives, again, as per European usual. This effort centered around two powerful institutions: Catholicism, and cock fighting, in no particular order. The effort was glowingly successful, and both become deeply embedded in Puerto Rican society and culture over the centuries. In 1898 the United States, hungry for land, wealth, and world power, fabricated a complaint against Spain, started a war, won, and forced Spain to give the U.S. Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and what not. The Americans killed over a million people, a million Philippinos alone, but got the job done, got control of the resources each tiny country had to offer, the Dole Pineapple company ruling supreme in the pacific. the usual corporate American foreign policy. Although cock fighting was legal and popular throughout the U.S., the U.S. outlawed it in Puerto Rico, perhaps horrified at its popularity and wanting to improve America's image, and predictably, the brutal fighting simply went into hiding. It was legalized again in 1933, as political circumstances allowed. In recent years its popularity has been resurgent, until once again, the sport was outlawed, about ten years ago. The argument which took place before and after Congress voted to outlawed cock fighting in all its overseas possessions, as it had longs since done in the fabulous nifty fifty, was, in a word, maniacal, heated, insane. People, dudes, were threatening to fight to the death for their birds, for their sacred, inalienable right to keep and fight and kill with them. Cock fighting was a sacred cultural tradition, they argued, a basic part of Puerto Rican culture and economy, like a religion, and, in any event, the roosters were cared for tenderly and lovingly, they loved their human masters, and their human masters loved them. A vicious sport, nothing but blood and death, and a fine cultural tradition, beyond reproach. Like I said, the arguments got crazy. Very much like rump supporters: inventing increasingly cray arguments to defend the increasingly indefensible. Trump only walked into the miss universe dressing room to spread the lord's gospel; cock fighting is sacred, beautiful, and a tribute to human kind and the glory of the lord and western culture. The good news is that the civilized world is doing just fine without cock fighting, and soon, lord willing, it will do even better without Donald J. Trump and his supporters, who will, we can hope, have moved on to better hobbies.