I went to a Caps game the other day, (C!A!P!S! CAPS! CAPS! CAPS!), and noticed that almost everyone seemed to be wearing a jersey with the name Ovechkin on it, referring to Alexander Ovechkin. If you do not know who Alexander Ovechkin is, you either a) live in a cave on Mars with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears while singing “John Henry Was a Steel Drivin’ Man” at the top of your lungs or b) you’ve never read the front page, Style, Sports, Metro, Business, Outlook or Weekend section of The Washington Post. Ovechkin is the new, sexy hockey hero from Russia used by the Caps to score goals and increase the number of fans coming to games, and has succeeded in both departments. However, with all the attention being focused on one player, it shuts out most of the other players from getting any attention and makes people care more about the player than the team.

This happens in other sports all the time, with roughly the same result: the player is good for awhile and everyone pretends to love the team and claim to be a diehard fan, but the minute the player screws up in any way, he’s abandoned like I was in a shopping mall at the age of five. These hideous people who clutch on to a team or player like a barnacle to a whale are what we in the business (the business of criticizing people by making sweeping generalizations to make up for our massive inferiority complexes) call “Bandwagoners.” The term comes from the phrase “jumping on the bandwagon” or supporting something when it starts to become trendy or is already popular for no other reason than to be part of a group. As I will prove in the following well-structured critical essay (aka, unintelligible rant) that uses the most logical kind of rhetoric, the kind of people who jump on any bandwagon are the same sort of people who will bring about the fall of human civilization.

When I was a young lad in my junior year, everyone was excited about the Boston Red Sox going to the World Series after Babe Ruth allegedly left a curse on them back in the late 1910s. If they won, it would be the biggest Cinderella story in America and everyone would have faith in the team/democracy/whatever. Just like in a storybook, or at least a stereotypical one where you know what happens just by reading the first word of the title, they came from three games behind the Yankees in the division championship series to win that and then perform a sweep in the World Series. At the time, I could swear I heard “Eye of the Tiger” being hummed by everyone who was wearing some Red Sox paraphernalia.

The fact that the Red Sox won wasn’t the problem; it was everything after their win that made it bad. The day after they won, tons of people came into school wearing gear  claiming that they were so glad that the “curse” was finally broken and that their favorite team had finally won after 86 years of disappointment. It’s times like those that make me wonder how such a primitive race of tailless monkeys has managed to take over this planet.

I wanted to backhand everyone who I knew to be bandwagoner every possible way that existed or might exist in the future. I wanted to say to them, “You never talked about the team when the season started, nor did you ever talk about them until they got into the playoffs and you learned for the first time about the curse and all those other myths and legends people use to sell junk, so why have you suddenly supported a team that will probably have to wait almost another century before winning the World Series again?”  It’s because bandwagoners are not like normal people. Ask almost anyone with some Red Sox paraphernalia (or whomever’s popular this year, I can’t keep track of this junk) to name the starting lineup for the team, and almost all of them will look at you like your face is horribly disfigured (unless it is, in which case ask them on the phone so that all they can do is sit there and sound stupid). As Agent Smith so accurately put it in The Matrix when he’s going on a long-winded discussion after capturing Morpheus, humans share common characteristics with a virus. He was absolutely right, except replace humans with bandwagoners and it makes more sense. These are wastrels who latch on to a popular team when they do well, then abandon them when they stop. D.C. is plagued with these kinds of people, and the Post doesn’t help by praising the team as if they’re gods when they win, then using their acid-tongued writers to humiliate them the minute they lose. For some reason, Congress hasn’t gotten around to this because they need to expand Arlington Cemetery, which has been in desperate need of some additions for awhile now. But I suspect they’ll get around to it when they need something important to work on.

The other examples of bandwagoners gone hog-wild are rappers wearing the jerseys of mostly no-name teams. When some rapper wears a jersey for the LA Clippers, the odds are around 10,000-1 that they can name a single player on the team. I never understood the obsession with wearing jerseys of terrible teams. Have you always supported them, or only when bad teams suddenly became popular because they were terrible? If you’re going to jump on a bandwagon, do it with a team that has a consistent history of winning (Yankees, Lakers, Cowboys to name a few). To succeed in life, you have to think economically, and if you’re betting a lot on someone, it’s better to bet on the team who is favored to win. You won’t make as much money (depending on the amount you’re betting), but you’re more likely to get something than the person betting on the long shot. This is the exception to being a filthy bandwagon-jumper. When there’s cash involved, I have no moral qualm with betting on whoever’s likely to win. That’s just a good economic decision. However, when it comes to supporting a team simply because they have become popular with no monetary reasons behind your newfound support, we start to have a problem, and when I say “we,” I mean I. I’ll admit that the desire to bandwagon is a strong one, but we must resist the powers of fat cats who want nothing more than money to buy more money, which I would totally do if I could. This country needs more free-thinkers, and what better way to become one than to stop supporting a team just because they’re finally getting their 15 minutes?

Bandwagoners exist in all areas of life, but they are most prominent in the wide, wide world of sports. Like filthy remoras on a side of a shark, bandwagoners latch on to a larger object and then feed on the nutrients. It’s an evil, but time-honored tradition that must be halted before some other stadium fills up with yuppies trying desperately to fit in, only to realize that they’ve wasted their money when the team starts to suck and they move on to the next hot team. By the power invested in me by Lasso Online and in accordance with the State of Virginia, I am announcing a war on bandwagoners. Unlike the war on drugs or terror, this war is winnable (knock on wood). D-Day will seem like a scuffle between two lazy kindergartners in comparison to what I am prepared to do to bandwagoners. Anyone planning a worldwide Armageddon will be horrified into a state of disbelief after they witness the beautiful and terrifying battle between good and evil that will be embarked upon, and I’d hate to be on the wrong side.