Finally, the entire argument boils down to: You hate us cause you ain’t us.
No Pats Nation, I’m sorry. I do not hate you because I ain’t you. I just prefer living in a world where the normal canons of observation and inference still abide. However, I do hate you. And here is why.
In an age of nuclear umbrellas, the majority of men do not fight wars. In the age of deindustrialization (and off-shoring, and soon enough, advanced robotics), American men, at least, do less and less heavy lifting. As brawn phases out of everyday life, it becomes ritualized, vicarious. Of course football has its celebrated chess-like aspects, but the game’s primal appeal is in the physical domination of some men by some other men.
In recent years, watching NFL games has gone from being a thinking person’s harmless diversion to a kind of embarrassment, and that embarrassment is only getting worse. The game is brutal, possibly lethal, to combatants. However, as this fact becomes clearer, the sport only becomes more popular. Where is the breaking point, separating a relatively anodyne bloodlust from a total lack of self-respect?
Who knows, but here is one theory: As brawn has exited everyday life, it’s been replaced by a new, and to my mind, sinister form of machismo. You could say the archetypal figures in this New Economy of machismo are: The
crybaby mogul, who throws a fit whenever he doesn’t get his way (and sometimes when he does); the
upper management guru who is hailed as a genius though he is simply a cunning rule-breaker; the
superstar whose smirk is in proportion only to how dependent his performance is on the machinations of the mogul and the guru. Over all this presides the
figurehead droning on about “integrity.”
