While we’re kvetching about football…I wrote a column for the previous-to-current Free Inquiry about my dislike of the sport and its cult. (US football this is, not association football aka soccer.)

What’s so annoying about it is the crackpot assumption that everyone is wildly excited about football when after all sport is only one branch of human activity, and football is only one branch of sport. I, for one, like the other football, a.k.a. soccer, and then there is lacrosse, jai alai, bowls, darts, bocce. . . . There are many sports, and I dislike the assumption that in America we’re all supposed to share the enthusiasm for American football. I dislike the social bullying aspect of it, just as I dislike the social bullying of public religiosity or nationalism or mass mourning when a movie star dies suddenly. [Read more…]

More celebration of Super Bowl Day by attacking the sacred institution of Murkan Football. Josh Spokes is on a tear on the subject, thanks to people treating football fandom as some sort of marginalized minority identity. Friends are making informative comments on his on-a-tear posts, and I sought and got permission to quote a couple.

Hope Stansfield:

Here’s the thing: I grew up in a rural and impoverished town in the Midwest. Football was a cultural juggernaut. It was a tool the privileged and powerful in that town used to demonstrate and exact their dominance, while also paying lip service to the idea that they weren’t viciously racist and bigoted – after all, if you could play football and not call them out, they’d treat you like a person.
[Read more…]

It’s Super Bowl day. Normally I get to ignore this, which is how I like it, but ignoring it is not possible this year as it was not possible last year, because the team based in the city where I live is in it, as it was last year. In the god damn Super Bowl. The Seattle team is in it, for the second year in a row, and “the fans” won’t let anyone forget it. There are footballteam-patriotism decals EVERYWHERE – literally. You can’t go anywhere on foot or by bus or car without seeing them constantly. They’re hung in windows, on the external walls of buildings, on car antennas; they’re on gigantic flags flown from the Space Needle, downtown buildings, houses. Even the god damn buses have their electronic destination signs programmed to flash the name and logo of the team in between the destination names.

This pisses me off. [Read more…]