Diana Jones Fired Standing for our National Anthem

I love football.  I love American football specifically.  The Spanish word for soccer “futbol” is used so often that when talking to an American a foreigner has to differentiate the two by saying “AMERICAN football.”  The rest of the world does not care at all about our American Football.  We do though.  Some of us worship football.  My Dad sure did.  On one special Sunday some big playoff games were on.  My mother had us going to mass every Sunday, "religiously".  Now that I was ten though my Dad explained to my mother that the boy was “old enough to make his own decision.”  My Dad is smart.  I felt really empowered.  With my Mom standing there scowling at me, shaking her head in the “you better not” direction I was not entirely sure what I should do.  My father seemed to have everything under control.  “Now Art, do you want to stay home with your Dad, eat hamburgers, chips, drink some cokes on ice and watch football? Or do you want to go to church?”  Taking all factors that my young mind could take into account, I decided to accept my Dad's seemingly reasonable offer.  While my Mom considered me a lost soul, my father now had a blank playbook to fill with endless plays, formations, runs, passes, kicks:  American Football.  That first day I sat down to watch football with my Dad we were stationed at Tyndall AFB where he was a flight instructor.  My Dad is a jet fighter pilot.  He is also a war veteran.  His oldest grandson, my nephew came out here to LA about three years ago.  Last year he moved in with a couple guys to cheapen the rent.  One of the guys’ name is Rahim.  Rahim works with a woman named Diana Jones.  My nephew has a huge crush on Diana.  The reason I mention Diana is because all these guys are kneeling for the anthem in the NFL, they will not stand out of protest.  Diana would never, ever disrespect the flag like that.  In fact Diana Jones got fired standing up for the National Anthem.   



Let me start by saying I do not know Diana Jones personally.  She is, well was, a co-worker of one of my nephew’s house mates.  The roommate, Rahim, is one of those modern day Jackass styled Youtube “pranksters”.  He films dumb stunts he thinks up that no one else seems to find funny.  Rahim is a couple years younger than JD. My nephew JD is twenty five.  Rahim LOVES to film people getting victimized by his “pranks”.  Remember that cruel family that was torturing their kids on Youtube for views?  Rahim is basically them without the kids, so he has to turn his sadistic “pranks” on those that happen to be around him, “friends”, co-workers, my nephew.  Well, Diana  works with Rahim.  They both work for the same private contractor that gets all their jobs from CBS.  I was going to the beach yesterday so I stop by my nephew’s to see if he wanted to go.  One of his roommates was there.  
“Rahim? What are you doing here?  I thought you would be at work.” I said.
“I got promoted.”  
“Promoted? I’m surprised you didn’t get fired.”  My nephew laughed.  
“Ha ha.  No, I didn’t get fired, but Diana did.  Ha ha.”  
“Diana?  Fuck you!  What happened?”  JD shouted. 
“Well JD,  it’s a shame I didn’t get the whole thing on video so you could see your lovely Diana crumble.  She was a bitch anyway JD.  She did it, not me.”  
I couldn’t tell if he was serious.  “You got her fired or what?  Don’t tell me it was one of your dumb pranks.”  
“It wasn’t a prank.  It was all her fault anyway.  She was being an arrogant self righteous bitch.  She was actually dumb enough to stand up for the Anthem, a song.  Hahahaha.”  
“What???  How’d she get fired standing up for the Anthem?” 
“You have to know Diana.  She is a hard line right wing bitch.  One of these nationalists for sure. She loves her country.  Her brother or uncle or somebody died in Iraq.  She gets triggered real easy.”  
Still confused, I ask “I don’t get it……What does that have to do with her getting fired?”  
“She got fired because she stood up for the National Anthem.”



Last time I checked Rahim’s youtube channel, his top view count on any one video was 349.  That video was posted four years ago.  The pranks he pulls are just not funny.  He thinks it’s funny to punch sleeping people in the balls, or throw syrup on them when they get out of the shower.  He just does dumb not funny stuff that is basically filmed abuse.  One night Rahim brought home his work mate Diana to finish a project they had a deadline on.  My nephew thought Diana was really hot.  After that Rahim would hold it over my nephews head how much Rahim got to see of Diana at work telling him all about Diana as often as he could.  He would talk about the short skirts she was wearing, her “rack," how she bent over to pick stuff up that he purposefully dropped for her, how he got her to rub herself against him by telling her to check the stuck keys on his keyboard while he would sit there unmoving making her lean across him having her press her breasts against him to check the thing "just one more time."  My poor nephew’s dick had hold of his ears, he could not stop listening to anything Diana related.  I saw her a couple times at the house when I stopped over to get JD.  She was probably 26.  She reminded me of John McCain’s daughter, or Tomi Lahren, a real Fox anchor type.   She was very pretty externally, but politically a real, real uptight republican right wing conservative.  I guess since my nephew was a little more of the free spirited skater type, he liked her staunchness.  Her unwillingness to let her skirt wrinkle seemed appealing.  Rahim openly despised her.  He kept his digs light during work, never really going too far to express the actual vitriol he possessed for the poor girl in her working environment.  He often opened doors for her, showing her outward respect.  When he got home the snakes were loosed.  “Yeah, but she voted for Trump, so she is a dumb racist bitch.”  Or “Diana doesn’t know shit.  The girl has not done a thing to get where she is except suck some dicks.”  Or  “First off she is a woman, so that is her main problem.  She's crazy.  She’s a fucking republican.  She believes in God.  How dumb can a person get?”



Television was invented many many years after football was, however football was made for TV.   When my father started watching televised games with me, he never watched just one game, he watched EVERY game.  The time my father introduced me to football in was not the digital age, it was not the internet age, this was pre-cable folks.  There were 3 channels.  When the NFL went to cable my dad was in football fan ecstasy.  He would flip through all the games between each play.  Play, tackle, flip channel.  Play, tackle, flip channel.  Play, tackle, flip channel.  He had a rotating self perpetuating primitive tech wheel of football games live in his living room every Sunday.  It took me about 4 seasons of watching just to kind of get all the plays, calls, basic structure of the game down.  My dad never rooted for one team.  He was what I call a “football purist.”  He loved the game.  “Jim Brown is the greatest running back in the game, ever.  Art, these guys playing today would get crushed by a man like Jim Brown.  Defenses these days are fast, but the weak tackling that’s been happening in the NFL over the past decade, I don’t mean those hard replay hits, I mean the WEAK tackling overall, Jim Brown would run right over them!  It would take an all out swarm defense of four to five of these modern day NFL guys to bring Jim Brown down.”  I personally never saw Jim Brown play, I am too young, but I did see many greats play the game, I still do.  I never stopped watching The Televised Church of American Football that my father introduced me to.  Today I stream games online.  Rahim doesn’t watch football online, he posts his dumb prank videos.  His biggest prank ever, his Super Bowl, the prank he pulled on Diana though, that one didn’t get filmed.  It did however get Diana Jones fired.  



“She was an uptight bitch” Rahim said.  
“Why because she didn’t agree with you?  Please kid.”  
“JD knows.  He saw her.  She was the kind of girl that wants to stay home bake cookies and have kids, you know, breed.  We don’t need that, no one needs that.  JD is friends with her on facebook.  He knows.”  Rahim said. 
“All right JD. Let’s hear it.”  
“No, she was cool, I mean, nice.  She posted things she liked on Facebook, we are friends on there.  She just posted stuff about Donald Trump being her president.  She wants to let people talk, say what they want.  She posted a lot about the first amendment, free speech, female equality, just basic stuff.  I mostly looked at her pics.”  
Before he could get too into it Rahim interrupted him.  “JD, I know what she posted, I stalked her on Facebook with a sock.  She is so dumb.  I saw all her dumb posts JD.  She is a fascist.  A Trump loving racist bitch.  I am glad she got fired.  I wasn’t trying to get her fired, but since she is fired, then I guess she deserved it.”  
“What did you do Rahim?  Oh god, I can only imagine.  You pulled a prank at work?  That’s work Rahim.  That’s people’s livelihood, their rent money.”  I told him emphatically. 
“It’s not my fault she stood up for the anthem.”  
“What are you talking about?  What happened?”  
Now, I was on my way to the beach, but, damn this was good.  If you knew how dumb this Rahim kid was…… let me put it this way, Rahim made a video of himself getting his taint pierced with a rusty needle by a bum they recruited outside 7-11……… I had to hear the sheer stupidity of what he perpetrated.  



The conversation was long, detailed, in depth.  The kid was SUPER proud of his asinine, beyond unfunny prank.  I should have recorded his confession then sent it to his boss.  I didn’t think about that until after I heard the whole story.  This is a basic version of what Rahim said in that long conversation we had about Diana:  “Diana had no problem goading me on Arthur.  She used a Trump mug to drink coffee from at work.  She has that Hannity guy as her computer screensaver.  She even had told me once that she would actually wear her Make America Great Again hat out in public if she didn’t think she would get beat up for doing it.  Last week on Monday she was talking shit about the guys in the NFL taking a knee during the anthem, she HATED that.  She said her brother, or someone died over in Iraq so these guys could earn millions of dollars while her brother or whoever could never walk the earth again.  
I asked her if she ‘ALWAYS stood for the National Anthem.’  
She had the nerve to say ‘yes, I stand for our national song EVERY time I hear it.’  
‘EVERY time?’  I asked again.  
Of course her being Diana she said ‘Yes absolutely, and there will not be a time where I will not.’  
‘Oh really?’  I laughed so hard.  
She seemed to get embarrassed, defensive.  ’What is so funny Rahim?’  
‘I will bet you that you do NOT stand up for the national anthem every time you hear it.’  
‘Yes I do.’  
‘Ok, so if I’m at a sporting event, a high school game, or just a room where you don’t stand up for the national anthem and I catch you sitting down, then you have to have sex with me.’
’What?’  
‘If I catch you NOT standing for any rendition of our national anthem, then you have to have sex with me.’
She laughed pretty hard.  I guess she thought she could out smart me. She agreed.  We shook on it.  
I told her, ‘Now you are woman of your word right?  I am going to get paid off when I win right?’  
‘Rahim, if I ever, I mean EVER remain seated, or do anything but stand during our National Anthem I will indeed have sex with you.  Ha Ha Ha Ha, and when I do stand up for the anthem, I will be thinking about all the sex you are NEVER getting.’  
‘OK, then do we have a bet?’
We shook hands on it, that was last week Arthur.  So the first time I tried to catch her was by changing my ringtone to the National Anthem.  It only went off once at work while she was around.  We happened to be in the elevator.  That ringtone bugged me so much I had to change it.  In my next attempt to trap her I sent her a link at work to a video that would open up playing the National Anthem.  I spammed her with the link from several emails.  She never opened the link.  I knew that to get her, I had to do something extreme.  I recorded the most obnoxious version of the anthem I could find.  Jennifer Hudson’s version at the 2009 Super Bowl seemed to stand out, so I put that version on my phone.  I synched the phone to my laptop so when I opened my laptop from sleep mode, it sent a signal to the phone, playing the full 3:10 of it.  We were having an all out employee meeting at 3pm yesterday.  I knew the boss would be late so I asked Diana one more time before the meeting while recording her on my phone;  
‘Smile Diana, I am recording you, now I have it on video.  You said if you don’t stand at ANY time for our National Anthem that you would have sex with me, right?’  
‘Yes, that is the bet Rahim.  That is correct.’  
At 3pm we are all gathered in the meeting room, the whole staff, all 6 of us.  The boss comes in late, apologizing kind of disoriented.  His coat was over his arm, he was trying to get it on the chair to sit down comfortably, he looked frustrated, so I opened my computer right away.  
The Jennifer Hudson recording started.  
Ladies and gentlemen please remain standing for the national anthem.  
At first the boss thought it was funny, like, ‘What is that Rahim?  You made me some intro music?’  
‘Oh, sorry, no, I didn’t mean for that to play, I’m sorry.’  
The recording kept playing.  The boss was looking a little agitated.  I got worried because the intro to the National Anthem on the tape I made was really long, Diana was staring at me shocked.  Her confused look really fired me on.  I was determined to make it all the way to where the Anthem actually started so she would lose the bet.  
My boss told me ‘Turn that off Rahim’.  
I pretended that I couldn’t turn it off.  I fumbled with it. Ladies and Gentlemen Jennifer Hudson, more intro music, now the boss was getting really mad.  ‘Rahim, turn that music off, now!’  
‘I am trying sir.  I will just take it out and come back when it is done playing.’
’No Rahim we need you in here.’  
That is when I heard Jennifer hit her first note.  O say can you see  I looked at Diana, panic, panic, PANIC!  She stood straight up, like someone had her on a string.  She launched upward like puppet, yanked from the top of her spine immediately putting her in a rigid standing locked position.  She was actually standing erect for The National Anthem right there in the meeting room in front of everybody.  My boss looked at her.  ‘Diana, sit down. What is wrong with you?’  
She tried to speak.  He cut her off.  ’Diana, I am your boss, you are here on my time.  I am paying you to be here.  If I want my meeting to take place with my employees sitting down, I will have my meeting that way.  Now sit down.’  
I almost pissed my pants trying not to laugh.  I totally fumbled around some more, stalling.  I rigged the recording to get louder as it went on.  So gallantly streaming  Diana was still standing.  She dare not sit down, or she would lose our bet.  She knew that.  She tried to explain herself.  
‘I am showing respect………’  He cut her off again.  ’Diana, you are standing up in my office, in my meeting.  I am telling you directly as the man that signs your check, Diana sit down.’
I laughed.  That made the boss madder, but when his anger triggered he started aiming it at her, not me.  
‘Diana if you don’t sit down, you will be fired!’  
‘Sir when the song…..’    
‘The song has nothing to do with it Diana!  This is a business!  This is a money making business.  I pay everyone here to do their job.  Your job is to do what I think is best for my business.  I think it is best that you sit down for this meeting Diana, NOW!’  
I had my computer was standing up. “No, sit down Rahim.’  I sat down.  ‘Diana, see what Rahim did.  He is right.  Now you sit down.’  
‘Sir I can’t.’  
‘Diana, I will fire you.  You are here for this business.  I run this business Diana.  I make the decisions here.’  That our flag was still there  ’Ok Diana, you’re fired.’  
Diana still stood at attention.  The land of the free  ‘Diana, you are fired.  Get out.’  
She stood dutifully until the song ended.  She then gathered her stuff from the table, glaring at me the whole time while doing it.  As she was walking out I apologized to the boss for playing the song.  He said ’It’s not your fault Rahim.  She made her choice, you had nothing to do with it.’  By the time the meeting let out Diana was gone.  Her desk was empty.  She immediately went crazy on Facebook, posting about discrimination, unfair business practice, inequality.  She said she is going to sue the company because she got fired doing the right thing.  She won’t win.  She got fired by her boss for not doing what he thought was best for his company.  I don’t blame him.  She was a racist Trump loving bitch.  She deserved to be fired.”  
“Wow Rahim.  You really are a piece of shit aren’t you?”  My nephew didn’t seem too happy.    



I called my Dad today.  He has been taking another one of his grand sons golfing a lot.  I asked him about the NFL situation, but more specifically if he stands for the national anthem when he is at a game.  “Art, I got saluted so many times, and saluted so many people that I don’t stand up for the anthem at any sporting event.  At your nephew’s basketball game the other night I was the only one sitting down.  I got some looks, but your mom always stands by my side one hand on her heart, her other hand on my shoulder so I'm not sitting there all alone while the anthem is playing.  I went to war for this country, so I did my part for whatever it was worth.  I am a spectator Arthur, those guys are getting paid to play the game of football.  It is that simple.  They are employed by owners who pay them.  I am a spectator in the stands.  I can sit down if I want to, but when I was in the Air Force son, you can damn sure believe I stood up saluting our flag when it was raised, anytime, anywhere, anyhow.  I still do, every day in my heart.”  

Arthur C. Burnright…