It was Flyers President Paul Holmgren who coined the mascot’s name, noting how often the word “grit” is associated with Philadelphia. “For the record I wasn’t the one to suggest the name Gritty!”
tweetedAngela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist and author of “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.”
Gritty skates during a game at the Wells Fargo Center on Sept. 27.
Gritty skates during a game at the Wells Fargo Center on Sept. 27. Photo: Philadelphia Flyers
Grit is also a hybrid of dirt, crumbs and grease, and Philadelphia is gritty in both senses of the word. Violence is a regular feature of labor disputes, and corruption pervades city politics. Sources have sincerely warned me that “snitches get stitches” and referred to a mistress as a “goomah.”
In 2016 the mayor’s office had to issue a notice that residents could not use dumpsters as swimming pools. The same year, “binary bandits” terrorized Philadelphia, stealing 1s and 0s from the address numbers of homes. To prevent Eagles fans from climbing light posts, police covered the posts in Crisco before the conference championship. When the team made it to the Super Bowl, cops switched to hydraulic fluid.
Philadelphians have embraced Gritty. Several residents already have tattoos of his likeness. Bakeries and restaurants sell Gritty cupcakes and sandwiches. Gritty even made an appearance at a community event for children 5 to 7. None of them cried, Flyer spokesman Joe Heller boasted.
But this is 2018, and Gritty has inevitably become politicized. Two days after the mascot’s debut, the socialist magazine Jacobin tweeted that “Gritty is a worker.” The same leftists who want statues of Thomas Jefferson removed are now petitioning for Gritty to replace Mayor Frank Rizzo on a downtown mural.
And when President Trump visited Philadelphia last Tuesday, antifa and other far-left groups showed up to protest. Many carried Gritty posters and chanted “Gritty hates Trump.” Radical Philly writer George Ciccariello-Maher tweeted a picture of Gritty along with the slogan “when our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.” He explained the tweet to me: “It’s a tongue-in-cheek quote from Marx, one of the many semihumorous appropriations of Gritty.”
Appropriation, indeed. Gritty belongs to Philadelphia, not to far-left activists. Still, in an era when everything from
Nike and the NFL to your local restaurant is a political battlefield, this development is as predictable as it is sad. Not only can’t we have nice things, we can’t even have silly, creepy things.
fftopic:I wonder if you could make it a game to come up with a random thing and then find a way to make it identitarian.
