Where there was once a manic parade of high-fiving bald eagles and beer-drinking pickup trucks and panty-raiding Founding Fathers in the commercials that fill out most NFL broadcasts, there are now two more boring types of ads. You've got the ones predicated on grim, recession-appropriate anxiety-comedy—the foxy bartender makes fun of you for not properly appreciating Miller Lite's futuristic new bottles and then your friends also make fun of you. And then you've got the increasingly baroque paeans to increasingly unconvincing rugged individualisms, of the build-your-own-boat-and-sail-it-to-the-top-of-a-mountain variety. The ultra-traditionalist and progress-averse language of the average on-air commentator—toughness, grit, more toughness—has been uncomfortably and incompletely but also undeniably modernized.
Still, for all these hesitant mini-evolutions, the general spectacle surrounding the NFL remains defined by a manic, flop-sweaty patriotic pomp. Of course, it would be really tough to sell macro-brews as bafflingly crummy as Coors Lite without attaching an overdetermined symbolic heft—patriotic or gay-panicky or whatever—to what is, essentially, a beverage that tastes like farty seltzer. Put these ads in the context of a NFL broadcast, though, and the symphonic overcompensation in the average commercial break starts to seem… well, deeper isn't the word. At some point it's still Sam Elliott's voice pitching faintly wheatish headache juice. But all that desperate Americana makes a bit more sense when you consider just how frankly socialistic football actually is.
Not the NFL, mind you. The NFL itself is platinum-plate plutocracy, and from the bluff, too-adored bully atop it all to the surly billionaire paranoiacs in the owners suites, the NFL behaves more or less the way the U.S. government would if one of the Koch brothers was president and the Senate had 70-odd Mitch McConnells in it. But the game at the center of the spectacle, the thing that powers the TV deals and merchandising and personal-seat-license dollars—that is as glaring an example of from-each-according-to-his-ability collectivism as a Bernie Sanders block party. More consistently and more inherently than any other sport, football just does not work if every player on the field does not dedicate his individual performance to team-scale goals. There's room for individual brilliance, of course—that's what sells the replica jerseys, certainly moreso than the prospect of any adult looking good in a giant shiny drape of nylon mesh—and that virtuosity is where much of football's excitement comes from. But wins come from collective effort, from the sublimation of the individual to a greater common good.
That the nation just cast millions of sour, terrified votes against some un-understood version of socialism is a not-so-necessary reminder of just how scary most people find this sort of talk outside of a football-related context. The ambient, omnipresent uncertainty of these years of multiple and near-total systemic failures has sent people reeling into the rococo Rand-ian fantasy that all this collective failure can be reversed only by individual… well, not individual action. But individual something, or individual everything.
Community Forum
Topic: no football next season? what do u think? (Read 2227 times)
July 26, 2009, 06:43:14 am
