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Who knows, but here is one theory: As brawn has exited everyday life, it’s been replaced by a new, and to my mind, sinister form of machismo.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.”
People turn on the NFL as a relief from this economy of sinister machismo, whose worst effect is, after all, turning truth into the handmaiden of power. They turn it on to see something unmistakably true—to see old-fashioned brutality, lightly veneered with tactical cleverness. If in seeking escape they only find more of what they’re escaping from—more field-tilting, more corporate jingoism, more doublespeak—they will, improbable as it may seem now, abandon the NFL.
Ever since the first mother counseled it was so, it has been comforting to believe people hate us only out of envy. I’ll conclude by repurposing an old quote from Edmund Burke, who about patriotism once wrote: “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” One might say about Patriotism: Some things are hated simply because they are hateful.
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