Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Super Bowled 2018



Watching footage from the scenes of mayhem on the streets of Philadelphia last night over football results, four things were reconfirmed for me:

(1) We as a society have our priorities firmly in the wrong place.

(2) Sport remains one of the few genuine outlets our society allows people to vent their grief at their failed dreams, diminishing prospects and existential dread while simultaneously living vicariously through millionaire athletes pitched in modern semi-gladiatorial style battles.

(3) Sport-based mayhem seems to indicate how perilous most people's relationship with the tenets of late capitalism really are and how easy it is to ignite the powder-keg of resentment that lies deep within our social fabric and crumbling civic institutions.

(4) When do we get to move on from the 'killing capitalism with kindness' phase to the 'killing capitalism with pointy objects' phase?

I have nothing against sport in and of itself (though I doubt I'll ever be able to give a good goddamn about American football - no offense intended to everyone who loves it). I just think the centrality of watching sport in most people's lives seems to be a replacement for other things that are lacking. Sport, at its best can and should be a great shared experience of awe at genuine and sublime physical art some humans are capable of, but the coded jingoism and Riefenstahl-derived Nazi-chic aesthetic that attends so much of the pageantry and presentation around televised sport clearly operates as a substitution for certain more important parts of our culture/ politics/ society that are, at present, largely absent.

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