Hey, Chicago, what'dya say? 'Go, Cubs, go'?

Here’s a trivia question: How did the current Cubs baseball stars, including Manager Joe Maddon, eagerly connect themselves on August 6 to the celebration of the psychedelic “free love” 1960s counterculture—everything from cocaine smuggling and ingesting LSD to orgies, brothels and murder?

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, “The Cubs dressed the part Sunday for their trip to San Francisco . . . Everybody wore motorcycle vests with their nicknames emblazoned on the left side as part of an ‘Easy Rider’ (movie) theme dreamt up by strength and conditioning coach Tim Buss.

“ ‘Anything you can do to unify the group is always a good thing,’ Manager Joe Maddon said. ‘It’s fun. And for the group that doesn’t understand it, that’s too bad that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a kid. It’s always too bad when you forget what it’s like to be a kid.’ ”

The same story, as per the sports pages of the Chicago Tribune:

 " 'I don't know that we've had enough fun this year, quite frankly,' Maddon said.  'And a lot of that comes with winning, obviously. That's just the natural residue of winning, that you have more fun. ... I just think this is good timing for right now.' The Easy Rider trip, which stemmed from the brain of strength coach Tim Buss, had players wearing black leather motorcycle vests in honor of the 1969 biker movie starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper."

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Reading this in the paper and then checking the internet to see images of the Cubs’ most recognized players dressed like Hell’s Angels, sporting full motorcycle gang-like attire, I was instantly reminded of how I saw pictures of the Cubs team last year where, as some sort of initiation aimed to "humiliate" rookie players, they dressed as girls with bikinis, frilly skirts, makeup, stockings, on and on.

I was also immediately reminded of how, in a much-anticipated live appearance on Saturday Night Live only a few days following their 2016 World Series win, star players Anthony Rizzo, Dexter Fowler and David Ross, wearing just shorts and a vest over their bare chests, aggressively “humped” this old lady with their private parts, then did what is called “twerking” on the woman. Rizzo, who suggestively rubbed himself just above his crotch, said, “It's your lucky night; we're about to pull a triple-header.” The skit is proudly made available for young and old to see on MLB.com, the official website for Major League Baseball.

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Here’s one more trivia question: In Bible scholar Alexander Hislop’s unparalleled classic from 1853, The Two Babylons, what does he say Nimrod, the leader responsible for building the Tower of Babel and initiating Baal worship, invented as a means of controlling the people?

As Jordan explains in an old study I have on cassette tape, “Hislop says Nimrod developed arena sports. He pointed out, ‘You have the great arena sports to get the people’s minds off of God and to control them and homogenize them.’ The sports give them the semblance and feeling of independent thinking because they can choose who they root for. That’s part of the contest and the excitement, but you’ve got them controlled by the contest, too.”

(to be continued tomorrow)