affect the masses on television. How have the Cleveland Indians been able to get away with such a culturally demeaning mascot without a significant public outcry? Our cultural absolutism along with our naivety places Native Americans on subhuman animalistic level and feeds our unconscious notion that the logo is harmless. The majority of Americans practice cultural absolutism. Cultural absolutism, the tendency of individuals to view their culture as superior, ingrained itself into the American way of life before Columbus landed. Americans have a worldwide reputation as arrogant, ignorant, simple-minded cowboys. And these stereotypes are completely justified by past examples of cultural butcheries. I, as an American, can recognize our tendency to dominate others in the service of spreading the "superior" way of life. Native American people, misunderstood to this day, have been simplified to this naked, feather toting, red-faced, stupidly barbaric sub-human creature. (Notice that I use Native Americans, as opposed to Indians as Cleveland's team so casually labels them. Calling Native Americans Indians is submitting to Columbus' blunder, and would make me even more ignorant than I am already.) They chant, dance and worship strange deities; somehow they are below Westerners on the evolutionary chain. We have no context to judge their culture except our own, which is absolutely the normal, righteous one. Sport teams are usually coined with names of savage, or fierce connotations, fierce animals conquered by white settlers. The Cleveland Logo represents this dominated wild animal. It exists for the same reason a gloating hunter puts some poor animal's head on the wall as a trophy. The Cleveland Indian asserts the American cowboy's cultural absolutism. One would expect the politically correct 90s to abolish such a disturbingly blatant case of institutionalized mainstream racism. Is tradition ground for allowing this Logo to receive sustained m...
