GranolaBox

It was 12:02 on Super Bowl morning and I was nervous and excited about my Patriots… the first team I’ve had an emotional investment in and watched all season potentially making history again with a completely perfect season. It was the same kind of nervous I get the night before an election, or the feeling that kids get the night before Christmas wondering whether they’re going to get a really cool toy or some well-meaning, well-intentioned but unexciting toy picked out by their parents.

I didn’t just get the unexciting toy, I got the chemistry set.

Friday is dress-down day at work, so I wore my Patriots jersey. I realized that a LOT of people are hating on the Patriots and it raised what I see as an interesting contradiction in americanlumpenproletariat thought. In sports people hate big powerful dynasties like the Patriots because they’re so brutally efficient and merciless.

I’m the same way with baseball. I’ve disliked the Yankees for many years simply because they’ve been the best team money could buy. They’re the stinking capitalist pig-dogs of Major League Baseball. Now they’re being replaced by Boston, the new stinking capitalist pig dogs.

But football is different. There’s salary caps and it’s more about brains and talent than sheer money. Not that sheer money doesn’t have a lot to do with it.

But while most people disdain the hegemonic bullies of the football and baseball worlds in a flurry of self-righteous populist indignation they fail to look in the national mirror and see our our country as the hegemonic bully of the REAL world. We’ve been running roughshod on weaker countries around the world ever since the day we first learned to run. The United States is all about being brutal and merciless.

The sad truth is here is that most Americans are more concerned about the game of football rather than the real life world in which people all over the world face the consequences of our brutality and mercilessness every day, and hate us for it.

Isn’t it ironic that people hate the Patriots, but support what my football team does in the real life in the name of Patriotism? Or that the government’s attempt to squash our civil rights is called the PATRIOT Act?

Football season is over, but real life goes on.

Filed under: Politics on February 9th, 2008