I haven’t followed football since watching the SB that immediately followed 911. I had been really into the sport for the year or two preceding. I originally got interested when I bought a Dreamcast on ebay and it came with a copy of NFL 2k. I loved playing that game, and my dad was big on the Ravens, and I was in college and really psyched to find some easy way for us to bro down (before I moved out of the house I was a little too high-strung to bro down with the fam most of the time.) So I get into the game around the beginning of the season rooting for my home team, turns out that year we take the whole thing. Ba’al timor went full-on pandemonium after the win, and it was trippy and mind-boggling, dancing in the street with total strangers, shouting and wilin out— between that and all the brainiac tactical shit you can chatterbox on during the games, I was pretty much sold on football.
I stopped following football exactly one year later, after the post-911 game where the Patriots beat the Talibanladens in the final minute of the game with a retardedly unopposed drive down the length of the field. By that time, I had nerded out on the game so hard that I knew there was no way that shit wasn’t some emergency USA triumphalist mythmaking shit being carried out on the most-scoped stage big money could get. Those last two minutes stank of statistical improbability and the symbols on the table were just too conveniently political for me to play along with— I lost my faith in the NFL. It was kind of like finding out about wrestling all over again, except without the reassuring part where dad explains how of course everyone knows it’s fake and it’s like one big awesome in-joke normal people like to bait snobs with.
So I haven’t followed the game but obviously last night’s was impossible to miss- squares everywhere (and some weirdos, too) had some shit to say about big bad superbowl XLII. I didn’t even have to watch that shit, though: all you gotta do is read the symbols and that shit was telegraphed from a mile away. The Patriots are obviously Cheney’s gang, the triumphant protectors who emerged after 911. They’ve been unbeatable, which has started to make your average square kinda nervous, kinda politicized… Joe Square’s a little broker than he wants to be and the war is a total drag and anyone can see BO as a real easy choice, which has helped Joe find a little bit of idealism and progressive-mindedness underneath all that ice cream and Blockbuster/Netflix he’s been stuffing himself on the past few years. Joe never thought of himself as a political guy but now, goddamnit, things are gonna change! The primary carries on all tense and exciting, getting Joe more and more amped, until the very end, when some faceless fuck in a suit explains, “Well, he didn’t get enough delegates here, and she won these caucauses over here, and well… the Senator from New York is getting the nomination.” And all that idealistic air goes out of Joe Square like a popped balloon.
They won’t even need a soundboard recording of Obama’s mic this time— Diebold connects have gotten tighter, and nobody’s gonna have the heart to have another post-election debate if the confusion involves delegates, caucauses, and/or chads. Joe Square and his friends vote donkey, but not the donkey they wanted, and it’s back to ice cream, netflix, and bu$ine$$ a$ u$ual come wednesday morning— although, now Joe Square will have felt the sting of having gone out on a limb and believed in change, something quite a few of his friends can be cured of with just one good tug of the rug.
The new prez will smile for the other countries, try and pin all the ill-will the US has built up over the past few years on GWB personally, and politely secure the rest of the world’s consent to continue bombing the bad arabs (just the bad ones) on the DL— like the first Clinton did.
But you’re ready now, right? Got that hood on tight, eyes sufficiently winked? Are you comfortably ignoring the symbolic aspects of the game because it’s ridiculous to think that superbowls/elections might be influenced by people who can start/sustain unjustified/unwanted wars? Everyone ready to root for the giants from New York against those unbeatable patriots, even if it means you have to root for giants from New York?