Superbowl Spleen

Let's see, how should I spend my Sunday? Should I keep reading Herwig Wolfram's magisterial History of the Goths? Should I perhaps go a-hunting online for some whimsical new videos of cats doing unexpected things? Or should I check to see if there are any noteworthy athletic spectacles on television?

There has been a dull din, growing louder over the past few weeks, that suggests to me that some big sports event is in the offing. Distant memories from childhood cause me to associate this din, in this particular season, with football. These associations, in turn, conjure up others still: of Ronald Reagan, of high-school meatheads in letter jackets telling me not to stand too close to their girlfriends, of ROTC, of PromiseKeepers, of words like 'buddy', of a model of American masculinity that quite literally spit me out as indigestible.

And now, here I am, back in the belly of the beast, steeling myself for yet another Superbowl. (The last Superbowl I can remember, in early 1994, I spent locked in a closet reading Anna Akhmatova as my parents hosted a wide-screen-TV Superbowl fiesta, complete with trays of bean dip made up with various ingredients to resemble a football field: sour cream for the yard lines, a goal post out of avocado, etc.)

Now all team sports may properly be described as sublimations of war, and to the extent that I've already confessed to 'getting' the Ernst Jünger-style aestheticization of battle, it is but a corollary confession to observe that I do find some such sublimations beautiful. But American football is not so much a sublimation of the martial as it is an outright advertisement for it. As far as I can tell this is how it's been for a very long time, which is precisely why it made such natural sense to fall back on the figure of the 'Gipper' when then-president Reagan made a characteristically hard-nosed move against the Soviets, or the Sandinistas, or air-traffic controllers.

And now today, from what I've gathered from brief glimpses while waiting in airport bars, the media event of a professional football game is entirely intermeshed with the promotion of US foreign policy (all this talk of honoring our troops, all these stupid ribbons, all this shitty conservative music at half-time that makes Bob Hope at the USO look like the Bad Brains), and with the preservation of the racial divide that defines American history (nothing quite helps to further reify the imaginary boundaries of race than the jovial displays of locker-room bonhomie between men of different skin tones, who never doubt that they belong to different natural categories and that their bonhomie succeeds only through the crossing of a real line).

I seriously do not understand how anyone who does not anchor himself to these ideological docks could nonetheless find something left over in the spectacle to get excited about. How, moreover, could anyone who is not American --or an immigrant trying overhard to become American-- possibly feel welcome at the spectacle? I do have friends who are not, politically speaking, yahoos, and even a few European friends, who adore American football. Until I hear an explanation, I will assume that they are all just trying to be idiosyncratic.

For my part, whenever I overhear or catch a glimpse of anything having to do with the NFL, I get a deep, preconceptual, instinctive sense that this is just not my world. I suspect that this is something that is not so different from the way sexual orientation works: sport might not be as important as kinship in the organization of a society, but it is pretty important. In both cases, when a person cannot play along with the way sport or kinship has been set up in a given society, that person risks marginalization. I am being quite serious when I say that I feel my marginalization very intensely on days of nationwide or worldwide athletic celebration. And as with sexual orientation, I feel like saying to anyone who would blithely insist that I need to lighten up and get with it: I can't. It's just not in me.

Of course, everyone will find him or herself unable to relate to at least some features of the modern world: many people hear off-the-cuff political analysis about, say, Suleiman's prospects in a post-Mubarak Egypt in the same way I hear the whooping and hollering about Ben Roethlisberger. That is, they don't hear it at all; they just switch it down to a sort of background humming.

I insist on writing semi-regularly about sports (my 'sports column', I like to joke) because I really do think this is important. Sports, as the t-shirt puts it, really is life for many in our society; and it is important to not allow this slogan to be elevated to, so to speak, a universal maxim with normative force. In this respect, I am quite serious when I emphasize the parallels to heteronormativity.

As it is, parent-child relationships are destroyed over a lack of enthusiasm on junior's part for throwing the pigskin around; and people actually lose jobs because they are unable to shoot-the-shit about LeBron James or whatever with their coworkers (not to mention the inability to go shoot a round of golf or 'some hoops'). Yet no one is there to defend them.

This remains for the moment a pernicious yet sub rosa variety of coerced conformity.  If I weren't an utter recluse I would start an advocacy group.

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Comments

[Doug French]

Oh yeah??!!

[Elatia Harris]

MM-mm! SO good.

[The Worst of Perth]

Do they really go on about supporting the troops etc? Or was that a joke?
I do like the sound of the bean dip fotball art though.

[John S. Wilkins]

Sport is a way of maintaining a warrior class without the expense of actual war - the status of warriors and elite [male] competitive sportsmen remains high after they pass their prime, which is not true of any other form of status acquisition. It also, recently, is big business, which needs no other explanation, although why it is relies upon the former aspect.

I grew up in Melbourne Australia, the home of Aussie Rules Football. I feel much the same about it as you do your kind. Except a small amount of pride that ours actually use their feet on the ball.

[Kai Matthews]

As I often do on this day, weather permitting, I plan to take a nice solitary walk, the streets being emptier than usual.

Here in Princeton, I grew up with the collegiate version of this martiality; Palmer Stadium was its cement shrine. The feeling for me, in my later childhood especially, was much the same as that of observing my elders in church: wow, they really believe in this. The gemütlichkeit of hot chocolates & stadium blankets on a cold fall day had a undertone of suffocation...

These days I'm mostly reminded of my status as a cultural auslander in this particular aspect when clues to the NY Times crossword have NFL players' names as answers - as if those conversant with Stravinsky's works, NY city politicians and 17th century poets will of course be equally well-versed in current sports minutiae. Piecing together said names via cross clues has a vaguely archeological feel.

George Carlin's bit about the difference between baseball and football ("Baseball is a 19th century pastoral game; football is a 20th century technological struggle"; "Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life; football begins in the fall, when everything is dying", etc. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om_yq4L3M_I ), complete with a thorough recitation of its militarism, remains for me the best analysis.

[Justin]

I alright, I admit it, the bean dip was pretty great.

[The Worst of Perth]

And if you'd come out of that closet, you could have used the old joke "Bean dip? I don't care what it's been, what is it now?"

[Picador]

I moved to Toronto from the States three years ago. When I arrived at the office this morning, a colleague asked me in the elevator whether I'd seen "the game". For the first time in my life, I could honestly tell him that I had no idea what he was talking about.

Having attended one (public) high school where the captain of the basketball team and his girlfriend were executed by a gang from the other school after winning a game, and a second (private) high school where the football team filled their weekends with orgies of rape, violent assault, and vandalism, I have to say that that moment of ignorance on the elevator felt terrific.

[T.J. Eckleburg]

"I seriously do not understand how anyone who does not anchor himself to these ideological docks could nonetheless find something left over in the spectacle to get excited about."

Really? Its either ideology or conformity for the sake or propagating heteronormativity? Millions of people watch and enjoy football and the superbowl and ALL of them fit into one or the other hypothesis?
Thousands of gambling addicts are insulted.

You will not be marginalized for not watching the superbowl or any other sporting event unless you choose to marginalize yourself by making sweeping negative assumptions about those that choose to watch the superbowl.

But hey, some people enjoy football and some people enjoy invented persecution. Whatever blows your hair back...

[Mizzy]

This is possibly the most pretentious thing i have read in a long time.

[Fred K]

A model of an idea quite literally spat you out? Maybe that explains your snobby cantankerousness.

[Gary]

I would suggest you read Jon Krakauer's "Where Men Win Glory." In telling Pat Tillman's story, Krakauer takes you inside professional football in a way that makes watching a pro game a different experience, at least for me.

By the way, yesterday's Super Bowl was a terrific game: clean, competitive, and entertaining.

[klaus]

I believe you need to add more false initials in your name - it is still too generic.

Best regards,
Klaus Gregorsson,
the best columnist in the world