Adrian Peterson shouldn't play
— -- This Sunday, barring an unexpected bout with sanity, a multimillion-dollar, high-profile American company -- a company whose owners have lined their pockets with nearly half a billion dollars in taxpayer money -- will be represented publicly by a man whose son told police he stuffed leaves into the 4-year-old's mouth while indiscriminately whipping him with a stick. This man, whose son bore defensive wounds on his hands, police say, after trying to fend off his heavily muscled 217-pound father, may be allowed to be the public face of the Minnesota Vikings because his team can't convert a third-and-2 without him.
The decision is embarrassing and disgusting and about a million miles detached from reality. It's also a hundred other things that make you wonder, in this season of its public contempt, just how deep soullessness and cynicism runs through the NFL.
It's the Ray Rice video and the Greg Hardy 911 calls and now the photos of Adrian Peterson's little boy with the bloody slices running across his legs. And in each case, the league and its teams stacked tone-deaf ignorance atop bloated self-importance atop utter contempt for the public until it produced a skyscraper of a tire fire that makes a mockery of the mere notion of bad PR.
The ultimate indignity? As of now, Peterson is scheduled to play Sunday. He will run out of the tunnel in New Orleans and -- despite the pending charges, despite the photos, despite the texts in which he admits his lack of control -- he will fall right back into the center of the Vikings' game plan.
This wasn't a hard call. That's the most baffling thing about it. Suspend him with pay until the court has its say and come across looking like an organization run on the basic principles of humanity. If you're a Vikings decision-maker or owner -- desperate to win as a means of keeping your job or justifying the nearly half-billion the good folks of Minnesota and the Twin Cities handed over for your new stadium -- you can throw your hands up and blame it all on AD. Hey look -- a built-in excuse! You weren't going to win anyway, so roll with it.
Instead, they're continuing to allow the organization to be fronted by a man who has been accused of abuse by two of the women with whom he has fathered children -- although charges were filed in only one case. The organization is putting a man front and center who was so reckless he appears to have not realized where or how hard he was hitting a 4-year-old with a branch. One of the spots he inadvertently caught the boy was in the scrotum. "Got him in the nuts once I noticed," Peterson texted the boy's mother, like a man checking his car for dents.
Not even Peterson or his lawyer dispute it happened. The dispute lies in the space between two words: discipline and abuse. Nobody condemns discipline, only its absence. Too many parents worship their children and demand that you do, too. But those two words, and the cultural chasm that apparently exists in the middle, has sparked a national debate on how far is too far, mainly because a whole lot of people defending Peterson are eager to stand up and say, I was beaten as a child and I turned out just fine.
Adrian Peterson, of course, is one of those people.
Beatings are administered by people who know only what they've been shown, people who might truly believe it is the best way to mold a child. It's a legacy that's easy to pass down, difficult to break and a bear to control. Cris Carter was particularly eloquent and passionate in attempting to understand his mother's actions without defending them. (In my case, a belt was part of my father's parenting toolkit, but not mine.) In the case of Peterson's second child, the one whom photos indicate suffered an injury to the head, Peterson texted the mother, "he did it to his self." Another adult in the car, supported the statement. That's a justification with a long and storied history. This hurts me more than it hurts you, however, is among the greatest lies in history.
For the public, the crisis didn't turn real until news hit Monday that Radisson was suspending its sponsorship of the Vikings. Oooh, now it's serious. Budweiser's parent company issued a noncommittal but ominous news release stating its unhappiness with the way the NFL is handling just about everything that comes across its desk. We've become so inured to corporate dominance in our society that Nike pulling Peterson's jerseys from its Twin Cities stores was viewed as a far more important cultural shift than the essential lack of humanity that sparked those actions.
It's not only folks with a financial stake in looking good. Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton and Sen. Al Franken, people of public influence, are lining up to express their revulsion with the Vikings' decision to reinstate Peterson after essentially suspending him for the team's 30-7 loss to the Patriots. Dayton said Peterson's "actions, as described, are a public embarrassment to the Vikings organization and the state of Minnesota."
By the way, isn't it great how Vikings GM Rick Spielman -- and everyone else defending the indefensible -- feels compelled to say he's against child abuse when he announced that the Vikings, by reinstating Peterson, are against it in theory but in practice you're left to draw your own conclusions?
"We must defer to the legal system," Spielman said, hoping enough people would nod their heads at the obfuscation and fail to notice that the Vikings didn't defer when the situation involved a dime-a-dozen backup cornerback (A.J. Jefferson, suspended after a domestic violence charge that resulted in an acquittal) or a journeyman linebacker (Erin Henderson, cut after an offseason DUI arrest).
Undoubtedly reading from a script written for the invisible Wilf brothers, Spielman said of Peterson, "It has nothing to do with him as a football player." In times like these, it's best to check your dignity at the door. Maybe this is what the beginning of the end looks like: mindless fans wearing Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson jerseys marching into stadiums built with their own tax dollars for the benefit of billionaires. If he plays, Peterson will no doubt run hard, no doubt run well. Someone will ask him about adversity and someone else will ask him about distractions, and the cuts on a little boy's body will be reduced to nothing more than obstacles for his father to overcome.
Meanwhile, Roger Goodell remains quiet, a $44-million-a-year functionary immobilized. He's waiting for the winds to shift, as they inevitably do.
But if Goodell truly wants to make good on his robotic proclamation to protect the shield, he has a choice: He needs to either do something or get the hell out of the way, so that HIS beloved shield stands a chance of reclaiming its soul.
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