On Sunday we were treated to three spectacles:
Eagles fans booing a man winning an award for philanthropic works because he happens to be from the team that plays when the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are taking a break.
A team with a wildly racist name winning a extraordinarily violent but guiltily entertaining game while the whitest people on Earth tomahawk chopped their way into infamy because no, we absolutely have not changed.
Rihanna reminding us all that she is better than us and does not, in fact, need our money.
I love football. It’s a beautiful game. It is not THE beautiful game, that is soccer, the greatest sport known to mankind, but it is A beautiful game. There’s a kind of ballet to it, a dance in which men who eat 12,000 calories a day give each other brain injuries while trying to get a very small ball from one side of a very large field to the next. It is proof that human beings are both total morons and also incredibly resilient. Football is the most American game of all time.
It is impossible, if you are a person who cares about people, not to feel guilty while watching this most American of games, which is another thing that is extremely American about it. You watch college football knowing that (until recently) these players were living on scraps while making trillions of dollars for large institutions that generally could not even be bothered to make sure that they could read. I remember being in the University of Michigan bookstore, a university that is traditionally better than most at demanding that the players at least pretend to be getting an education, and a large very young black man in front of me in line rented a textbook. As a person who was about to spend the average price of a gently used Hyundai on my law school textbooks, I incredulously asked the sales girl, “DID HE JUST RENT A TEXTBOOK???”. To which she looked at me like the idiot I was and said, “Yeah, he’s on the football team. It’s not like he’s going to highlight it.”
Then there is the NFL, which only last year was forced by the courts to admit that black men might have the same earning potential as white men so should probably be paid equal compensation for the life threatening brain injuries incurred by getting their heads smashed in since the age of 5 that tend to make them incredibly violent monsters who regularly commit acts of domestic violence (and the NFL has gone out of their way to ensure us that they absolutely, in no uncertain terms, give exactly zero fucks about domestic violence). And then you watch them get those injuries. And you cannot escape the fact that the vast majority of these crimes, in college, in the NFL, in high school, in preschool, and soon in the USFL and XFL (it’s too many FLs) are being committed by old white billionaires against black men.
But it’s a beautiful game. So we watch. And feel guilty. Because this is America, and everything we do is with a side of guilt. I mean, we also eat avocados that have led to extreme violence as they have become a key part of the Mexican cartels’ revenue streams so who are we to judge?
It’s impossible to do anything from drink water to use cell phones without hurting someone else in this, the latest possible stage of capitalism, and we are not billionaires (if you are a billionaire and you are reading this I would like to ride on your large yacht with garages for tiny yachts and also I have a nonprofit that I would like you to donate to pretty please). Taking shorter showers is not going to end climate change and not watching the Super Bowl is not going to end institutionalized athletic violence against black men. And it really is a beautiful game.
Luckily for us, the aliens are finally here. And we have Rihanna.
So really, all is as it should be.
Watch:
The Last Of Us (HBOMax)- Is everyone telling you to watch this? Yes. Can anybody shut up about episode 3? No. Is it absolutely worth it? Absolutely.
Marc Maron: From Bleak to Dark (HBOMax)- Sometimes I feel like Marc Maron is the only one who understands me, and then he starts a comedy special with “I don’t want to be negative but, I don’t think anything is every going to get better ever again” and I know I’m right.
Stolen Youth: The Cult at Sarah Lawrence (Hulu)- You may have read this article and thought “holy shit this is dark” but buddy, you have no idea. This might be the darkest documentary that I have ever seen. Me. So, you know, prepare yourself. This may be the first time that I have seen a completely broken person on television who is still broken. Dark dark dark dark dark.
Listen:
Waloyo Yamoni from The Drop that Contained The Sea (Spotify)- This song is going crazy on tiktok and for good reason. The whole album is truly wonderful.
My 21st Century Blues by Raye (Spotify)- I can already tell you that this is the album of the year. It is absolutely stunning. Listen once and you’ll listen a thousand times.
The Paddlefish Caviar Heist (Podcast)- The Russian Mafia was stealing paddlefish caviar in Missouri. That’s it. That’s the show.
Read:
My book club is reading The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith because I’ve read it and I love it and I’m hoping I can convince them to read all six books so if you like a classic detective novel this is for you. Then (and only then) you can watch the series on HBO. They just started season 3. It’s a great show.
Can we finally accept that this massive experiment has failed and kill social media forever? Please?