Winners and losers

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

The best meme I’ve seen to describe Trump’s impeachment is one I first saw a couple of months ago when the House of Representatives voted to impeach him. It was a printer, labeled “House of Representatives,” printing out a piece of paper, labeled “articles of impeachment,” which then fell directly into a shredder labeled “U.S. Senate.”

It was always fairly inevitable how this drama was going to play out, and, judging by the recent polls, Trump’s popularity, if anything, got a bump from the proceedings.

And the Democrats aren’t helping their cause at all with things like the Iowa caucus debacle. As I write this, at 4:55 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 4—a full day after they were supposed to have figured out the results—they’re still not sure which candidate came out on top there. What a mess.

I was also pretty disappointed with the results of the Super Bowl. I watched the game with my mom, who’s a much more avid football fan than me, and she was decked out in a San Francisco 49ers shirt with the name “Kaepernick” emblazoned on the back. I didn’t even know she had it.

I like to root against teams with even a hint of racism in their name, so I enjoyed rooting against the Kansas City Chiefs, whose fans, like those of the Atlanta Braves and the Florida State Seminoles, like to do a chant they call the “tomahawk chop,” which, in addition to being racist, is an incredibly annoying earworm.

Still, something to think about: Some folks from local tribes will tell you that the name “49ers” is just as problematic. For Native people, the 1849 Gold Rush, which brought hundreds of thousands of people from the Eastern United States to Northern California and the Sierra Nevada, was a foreign invasion. It’s a humbling perspective to remember.

You know what I didn’t find problematic at all? The halftime performance by Shakira and Jennifer Lopez. That was fantastic.