By Justin Spiro
@DarkoStateNews
August 29, 2013
I have known three versions of DSR Founder Jeff Moss.
Jeff Moss 1.0 was an avid sports fan and media critic with a defined purpose. His goal was to expose the local media for their countless flaws and demand a higher level of discourse. A website called The Detroit Sports Rag was created to serve as the platform. Moss 1.0 came up with creative methods to needle the “talent” in town, including weekly mock awards and The DSR Line.
Jeff Moss 2.0 was defeated and going through a mid-life crisis, abandoning his own website for months at a time. When he was around, Moss 2.0 would candidly discuss his personal problems, including a failed relationship (since happily rekindled) and issues with self-diagnosed manic depression.
Jeff Moss 3.0 is the man we know today. Moss 3.0 has all the fire of Moss 1.0 without the sense of purpose. Moss as we know him today has accepted his inability to dramatically alter the landscape of the Detroit sports media. It is not a failure so much as it is the realization of an endeavor’s impossibility.
Moss has learned something I have long believed. Something that is bad should be called bad whether or not that something can ever change. Should we completely ignore a devout, card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan as he spews hate speech? Or would it behoove us to at least acknowledge amongst ourselves that the KKK supporter is rife with ignorance and irrational fear?
As a young kid, I remember walking with my father through Old Town in Kissimmee, Florida. We came across a middle-aged man, heavily intoxicated and mad at the world. He had a wife and young daughter in tow, each of them staying a few feet back as the man swayed back and forth in his stride. The man was chastising his wife for her purchase of a souvenir t-shirt, a gift for their little girl. He proceeded to violently snatch the gift bag from his young daughter’s hands and slammed it into the nearest garbage can.
I will never forget my father saying, “A real man does not behave that way. A real man treats women with respect and loves his family.”
Did my father’s words to me embark any change in that angry man’s life? Would it have made any positive difference had my father confronted the inebriated man directly regarding his conduct? Did the lack of impact on the drunken man’s flaws render the lesson meaningless?
If you have the opportunity to promote positive change in a flawed person or concept, that is certainly ideal. Still, there is value in simply identifying something bad and telling the person next to you about it. Generations of abolitionists lived and died in this country before slavery ended. Change is ideal, but heightened awareness is extremely valuable both inherently and in its role as the first step toward change.
Now, is Jeff Moss’s platform going to be confused with the idealism of 19th century abolitionists? Probably not. As great as we all think we are over here, there are no illusions of grandeur regarding our role. I don’t think people will one day flock to visit The Moss Monument, unless they build one at a horse track to honor the degenerate blogger who kept their lights on.
The lesson varies in degree, but never in its principle. It would take a fool to liken The Raid on Harpers Ferry to The Raid on Foster’s Smokehouse in terms of importance, but in a sense, Jeff Moss is our John Brown. A highly polarizing radical no one is comfortable around, yet we remain drawn to.
Has Moss pushed some of the wrong buttons and gone places he should not have? Absolutely. But if the top dog at Foster’s Smokehouse is attempting to strangle non-violent complainants, I am happy that story is being told. If a new sports station like 105.1 employs a man I personally know to be a hateful racist, I am happy to share those stories so that advertisers may allocate resources elsewhere.
And for the record, I am as happy as any that the Foster article barrage has ended.
No one here is a moralist. But we are not liars either. If we tell the truth about you to the world and you view it as an attack, your focus should be inward. Your reality is the indictment, not our recording of it. Call a fat person fat and you crush them. Call a skinny person fat and everyone laughs at the joke.
If the media has a clear conscience regarding their body of work and personal conduct, the barbs of the DSR should ring hollow.
Threatened lawsuits, assaults in public parks, and constant public condemnation make me think the media doth protest too much.
Moss 3.0 knows he probably cannot change the landscape. But he also knows there is value in acknowledging how flawed that landscape has become.
I am happy he is back.