And UD uses any golf game! For UD, there’s no white noise like the sotto voce, basso continuo, green-hills-far-away gestalt of golf.
Of course she’s not the first to discover this.
She discovered football as white noise in a long, very thoughtful New York Times comment thread appended to the 450th article UD has read in which a conscience-stricken person reckons with his inability to stop watching football even though it’s so nasty. This particular cri-de-coeur has become so common a plaint that it now constitutes a whole school of American philosophy: Reformed Calvinism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, Post-Thiesmann-Fracturism.
But what she really wanted to share was the most thoughtful comment of all. She plucks it from comment obscurity and places it here for you.
“Football is really the new American Pastime, not baseball. It’s like guns at this point – woven into the meaning of being American for large swaths of the populace. Among the potential player pool which is largely Black (as am I, and I played and loved football), it is still seen as a “way out” — fortune and glory overrides concern for CTE in their 50s. For a teen, life ends at 30 anyway. And for all the racism in the sport, the players are still largely black and show up to play every weekend, so it’s only logical that the public takes its cues from them. If they all went on strike to protest, then they could really open eyes.
And let’s not overlook the “manly” aspect of it. Those with more of a progressive streak will scoff at the barbarians smashing their heads together, but we’re still mammals. And mammals are hard wired in specific ways. Yes, over-glorification of manliness and the NFL’s fusing with military marketing is particularly perverse. But it comes from a real place.
Remember, boxing was a huge sport for a long time. 95% of the spectators would never get in a boxing ring to get their bodies pummeled for a living, but yet they came to watch. Now MMA is picking up where boxing left off. Let’s face it, we have a bloodlust as long as it’s someone else getting bloody.”
January 19th, 2022 at 7:42PM
Yes, a nice comment. But hard-wired? Give me a break. There is not a single other species of mammal in which crowds of males watch other males bash each other. Zilch. Now the smell of all those football fans…that’s because they’re still mammals.
January 20th, 2022 at 8:40AM
Anon: I guess you’re right that the whole mass audience spectacle of the thing is our own species-innovation.