"Katy Perry, did you make yourself into a Hentai character as a critique of the fappy/sad male gaze?"
"I'm just here so I don't get fined."
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) January 29, 2015
From the blog Et tu, Mr. Destructo?, “Everything Stupid Is Alive, and Everything Stupid Can Kill You: Welcome to Goodell World“:
… [Y]ou will hear no end of invocations of “deflated balls” this Sunday. Deflating a ball is a crime only in Goodell World, where the fraction of people who give a shit about it is only slightly greater than the people who care about it in real lifeâwhich is zero. It’s a crime about the integrity of the game, one that only exists within the game and can only be prosecuted and disciplined within the game. It is the sweetest outrage because it is 100 percent recreational. Most importantly, it’s not a crime, or at least a horror, created by the normative function of the game.
Goodell World started to collapse before the season began, when the hard corporeal truths of the NFL dropped a passel of bodies through the bubble and when Ray Rice drove a fist through it, forcing Goodell to attempt a patch job on something irreparably broken, revealing a system more devoted to its preservation than justice. Football completed the first stage of a terminal assault on itself this year, and it will do anything to convince you that the organism has never been healthier.
So, on Sunday, you will learn how much every second of it cost to broadcast, because expensive things are always beautiful things. You will hear how lucky everyone is to be there, and how much famous people feel privileged to both perform and attend. You will be told that it is a showcase of spiritual struggle that transcends mere human meat because it has to be more important than that. And you will hear how the sharpest knife held to the heartâthe integral workingâof that spectacle is two dudes poking a pin in a pigskin bladder…
kc
That’s a bit overwrought.
Omnes Omnibus
Okay, AL, you don’t like sports. We get it.
Helen
Who is David Roth? He’s been on a couple of your threads in tweets Annie and I swear I can’t tell if he is serious or a troll.
But for sure either way, he seems like an asshole.
mdblanche
That stupid Goodell-bot hasn’t worked right since the NFL bought it.
mikej
Since people love to steal xkcd, it’s a pity yesterday’s wasn’t spread around more.
cokane
this anti nfl anti gooddell pushback is getting tiresome
look deflated balls arent a huge scandal in the scheme of sports, and it certainly didnt decide the indianapolis game, but it is a form of cheating, however slight. seriously these “think pieces” talking about all that is wrong in the nfl in the wake of deflate-gate are insufferable
jl
@kc: I bit overwrought, but I think essentially correct. The sport of American football has increasingly become an amusement park of the mind, a kind of virtual sport. It barely exists anymore as actual play, but rather a theater of the mind and is pushed forward by brief bursts of action and violence that last for a few seconds every two or three minutes. The NFL can make more money keeping it that way than running like a real sport.
The Superbowl this year will again not be in the city where the NFL will put on its big show. It won;’t be next year. Getting fakier and fakier every year. Except for the violence and brain damage.
I admit that I am still a half-hearted football fan, even though I am an adult, I haven’t been able to put all childish things away.
I even like watching hockey better now, and I don’t even understand much of the game. How does offsides work again?
Tree With Water
I read that article via Deadspin.com a couple of days ago. It is absolutely spot on in it’s take of the NFL in 2015. It should have been delivered, rather than Goodell’s insulting-to-the-intelligence “State of the NFL” address that he gave a couple of days ago.
If someone were to tell me that Roger Goodell is Donald Trump’s brother and that they’ve been close all their lives, I’d be inclined to believe it.
Omnes Omnibus
@jl: Please define a “real sport.” Just for comparison’s sake.
Anne Laurie
@Helen:
Please: Anne or AnneLaurie — the only people who get to call me by the form you use are relatives. That I like. And if your people were in Belfast, we’re not kin (mine were in Connemara).
As for Mr. Roth, please recalibrate your snark meter.
jl
@cokane: I think the real scandal of the lack of NFL hard balls in the playoff game is that the NFL has not really given much of a damn about treating the actual football used in the actual game. Rather, for years they have regarded it as a promotional gimmick and money making souvenir. it’s role in an actual game is kind of an afterthought. It is not clear at this point whether a team cheated, or NFL incompetence at monitoring how an important piece of equipment should be handled is to blame for the flap.
NFL is a nice example of rich incompetent white dolts running a show into the ground, except they can figure out how to make huge bails of money out of the scam, so let us not criticize the NFL.
jl
@Omnes Omnibus: Baseball, basketball, soccer, rugby, Canadian football, field hockey, tiddly-winks horse-shoes, badmitten, tennis, ping-pong, lacrosse, pillow-fights. There are many.
I admit that pro-wrestling does not qualify.
Edit: and just for you, Omnes, HS forensics too! My brother did that, and it was exhausting. I could tell.
Omnes Omnibus
@jl: That’s a list, not a definition. Why isn’t American football a sport?
Amir Khalid
I has a puzzled. Why is the only non-Van Halen member of Van Halen commenting about American football?
Alison
@Amir Khalid: And when did he start looking like Huey Lewis?
Helen
@Anne Laurie:
OMG you are a racist. FUCK YOU BITCH
Anne Laurie
@Amir Khalid: Heh. Check his twitter-bio, it ends: Not the one from Van Halen or magic.
Could be worse — there are now apparently 3,654 John Coles just in the United States, as compared to just 801 David Roths.
Anne Laurie
@Helen: Quite possibly, but I wasn’t commenting on your family’s religious affiliation — just that it was unlikely a family in Belfast would be within the cousinship of a family in Connemara.
And, TBH, my paternal granny was Orange. We didn’t discover this until after her death; her only child, who predeceased her, probably never knew that’s why two people from the same Connemara hamlet ended up migrating separately to the New World before marrying!
Morzer
It’s a nice idea, but I very much doubt that the NFL is feeling any sort of significant pressure to change. They’ll keep pumping out the same expensive, over-rated product as before with the usual bungles, embarrassments and sustained attempts to game the system by the usual suspects and people will keep buying it.
Are we not entertained?
Tree With Water
@Morzer: Events are in the saddle, perception of the game among die hard, lifelong fans such as myself have irrevocably changed (it was Junior Seau’s death that woke me up). I too doubt the owners will depart from business as usual. But I also think that fact is largely irrelevant, and that they’ll be swept along in the wake of those changing perceptions whether they like it or not, or even whether they choose to adjust or not. None of the bastards will ever be hurting for money during their lifetimes, that’s for sure. No one can predict how much worse they’re going to fuck the game up..
Morzer
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/31/1361398/-YT-Armed-Gamergate-r-Crashes-Mother-s-Prius-en-route-to-Brianna-Wu-s-House
Ethics in games journalism etc etc etc….
mai naem mobile
The Arizona Republic had a huge story several weeks ago on how the NFL keeps all the sales taxes at the stadium for this Super Bowl. This just infuriates me. Glendale paid for the fucking stadium. The Phoenix area.bears the cost of the extra traffic/security/airport needs of this game. The stadium is several years old now. Why the hell should the NFL be getting the sales tax? The lowest non scalped ticket is a little over $2000. The NFL gives the state. B
big fat 20 tickets for charity purposes (the governor is giving them to vet organizations.) There was a blurb.how there was barely any space in the small planes area ar Sky Harbor.because of all the corporate jets already there for the game.
Tree With Water
@mai naem mobile: Forgive me for condescending, but welcome to the NFL.
Major Major Major Major
Well, that was a memorial service marathon. Phew.
In related news, the cat figured out how to turn on the Wii U, gonna have to do something about that.
jl
@jl: It’s an ostensive definition.
I apologize to all right thinking BJers for insulting American football. I am a bad person.
I am also a contemptible hypocrite, since I plan to watch the SuperMaximumBowl, or some of it, at the laundromat tomorrow, when I do my laundry. Well, some big bulky laundry I cannot do at home.
jl
@mai naem mobile: Well, I apologized, so I really shouldn’t say anything. Maybe I don’t need to.
All pro-sports are a ruthless cynical money making machine. But NFL takes it a step up to the next level. And we will be reminded of that constantly during most of the three hours or so in between the few minutes of actual athletes actually playing the game. In between the lame blockbuster commercials. But I will look for truly hilariously lame commercials, since they are worth the pain.
Uh oh, I said something.
jl
@jl:
Sorry that was a reply to
@Omnes Omnibus:
Morzer
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jeb-bush-andover-marijuana
Are we really sure that Mitt Romney isn’t running under an assumed name?
jl
@Morzer: What really happened at the Jeb Mitt meeting? Did Mitt steal Jeb’s body?
Karmus
@Anne Laurie: Apparently there are 6,296 of me. I’m actually surprised there aren’t more.
Tree With Water
Charles Pierce has a compelling take on recent remarks made by Jim Webb (over at Esquire.com). Webb would be wise to read it the first thing every morning if he really wants to be president.
Calouste
@jl: The NFL are amateurs compared to FIFA and the IOC.
Tree With Water
@Calouste: Boston is out of its gourd to court holding the summer games. My hometown of San Francisco wanted them, too, the idiots.
different-church-lady
@Amir Khalid: I will never doubt your sense of humor again.
jl
@Calouste: I think the IOC is a different kettle of fish. You are probably right about FIFA. I should have been more careful and not let my rage at the NFL be so indiscriminate.
I’ve liked football less and less over the years. Now, I actually like watching CFL games better. I think the NFL dicks around with the game in ways that mess it up. It seems to me that messing around with the game for marketing the game and making money is more important that making sure it is a good game to watch.
But OTOH, there are things about the CFL that remind me more of the game I played, which was intramural flag football in HS and college, so maybe as I approach geezerhood, I like it more for bringing back memories.
It is true that all pro-leagues are money grubbing goons. I heard the new baseball commissioner was musing about eliminating the fielders’ ability to adjust, in order to get more runs for more cheap BS action, and I guess more $$$. (edit: how would that lame idea work, draw circles around the fielders? Maybe tether them to a ring pounded into the ground. The owners would like the look of that approach) Thing about baseball is that ideas like that tend to get stopped. In the NFL they seem to do what they please.
I am still in a rage from hearing an interview with John Madden where he went over the history of the NFL dealing the issue of the football more as a marketing gimmick and money making operation and didn’t seem to care much about whether how they dicked with the ball allowed the players to, like, you know, play the game with it. Also, history of ad hoc and slapdash rules for checking and handling the balls.
And, also, Goodell. I mean, case closed: Goodell. He must have minders to help him find his way from home to work and back. What a dolt. I am very reassured that Goodell handles problems by assuring us that he will take care of it his own dumb self.
NotMax
@Helen
Also too, who is Katy Perry?
As for the Big Game, fooey. What hath Pete Rozelle wrought?
Kylroy
@Omnes Omnibus: Sight unseen, without scrolling down, I jumped down here to predict association jl will say football. Going up to see if I was right…
ellennellee
@jl:
thank you! could not agree more! well, actually, i do… more. lots more.
in addition to the ball scandals, and the concussions and the exploitation of the women and the blackboyz, there’s the rape and violence and murder – all selectively attended by the public and the system – as well as the phenomenal suction (not accounting for the deflated balls) of money into the media conglomerates, akin to what we see with the post-citizens united election process. mix all that together with the overt racism, the game catapults far beyond your amusement park metaphor, even beyond the coliseums of rome.
the game and everything about it has become so sick, so tainted with all these nasty realities all the fans – and certainly the owners and moneychangers – choose to ignore, it increasingly astounds that otherwise rational grown-ups persist with the spectacle of our own depraved decline.
childish things, indeed; what drives this crazed addiction to all things adolescent/male/testosterone that translate with such inhumanity as the glaring class and race divisions, the insensitivity to the margins, the weak, the afflicted? all for the glory of …what? money? certainly not the game. certainly not winning, as that becomes so trivialized. the fight? the spectacle? the bliss of ignoring all these horrifying reminders of just how we have fallen?
someone asked recently why the koch brothers didn’t just give their pledged campaign millions to american citizens who need it; the same question might be pertinent here. sure, athletes take risks, that’s part of the thrill, for doing it and watching it. but damage is designed into this game, the way plutocracy is designed into capitalism. i mean, i love athletics and watching skilled athletes, but c’mon people; really, this is not just risk here, this is knowingly sending these guys to dementia and early death, too much like knowingly sending soldiers to PTSD and their graves.
the game? it’s become a parody of a parody of itself. as jeb lund points out (in AL’s linked piece), the deflated balls are designed to distract from all these other failures and vices, much as the cool ads are designed to distract from the fact that the game itself has become almost as boring as watching baseball. or golf. to dupe us into sitting for hours watching other people exert themselves, while we sit on our unhealthy duffs and chow down unhealthy crap. why can you not quit this?
i tried to point some of these things out before, and was roundly dismissed, with betty cracker – whom i adore like a key west sunset – trying to defend the strategy and complexity and so on, and being reminded by others that i don’t have to watch. sorry, but i have to ask, really? you can really overlook all the horrific features of what this monstrosity of ugly america has become for …strategy and complexity? forgive my being blunt, but that sounds about precisely what gen. turgidsen would say about war! fully short-sighted obsession with the intricacies while fully ignoring the context and consequences, not to mention the implications. (sadly, too many real generals operate with the same blinkered myopia.) and suggesting i not watch is like telling all the anti-war protestors they don’t have to acknowledge the hell of war; just look at the cool strategies and complexities! really??
some on this blog have eloquently and aggressively addressed the hell of football scandals in the past year or so, the concussions, the violence, the exploitation of women and black men and the fans, tsk tsking in all the right places, and appropriately clutching the pearls. but, once the season started, it was like all those concerns flew way beyond the goalposts and into the next county, like these problems no longer existed. now there came posts discussing the player trades and the odds and the coach strategies, like bookies with backs turned to the injected horses at the race, not to mention the families of the sad gamblers losing their bets.
so yup, i’m tsk tsking here. i’m asking, is it really worth it? do you really have to have this fix? do you even know what it is? what it stimulates in you? what gets you off so that you can ignore these glaring problems? and it means nothing to do your own tsk tsking off-season; that’s as craven as the addict blithely admonishing his children’s pot use when knows his coke dealer is a block away.
this is a very serious sickness, people, and each and every fan is a part of it. you perpetuate it, just by participating. if you think the insanity of what football has become will ever have a prayer of abating, even a little, from the top down, you are clinically certifiable. a bit like hoping obama can fix america, all by hisse’f.
until the fans refuse to partake of this barbarity – merely a mockup of war, replete with wannabe urges – it will not just continue; it will only get worse.
to bastardize charlie pierce, this is your american metaphor; cherish it.
marduk
Holy Shit.
Absolutely unreal.
ellennellee
@ellennellee:
so sure my rant will generate not even a peak, much less a response, but there is also this from salon on just the concussion and its NFL coverup, from salon.
and that’s just the concussion issue.
c’mon, peeps; wake the hell up here.
Cervantes
@ellennellee:
I agree.
Thanks much for writing.
ellennellee
@Cervantes:
wow. i’m quite shocked. grateful, truly. but just as truly shocked.
also, not just a little embarrassed; quite the unbridled rant. but, it’s been bugging me for months, and it felt good to relieve my chest of it.
thx again.
Cervantes
@ellennellee:
Why the shock?
Anyhow, what’s embarrassing is not that you wrote your “unbridled rant”â it’s that it had to be written at all.
Thanks again.
ellennellee
@Cervantes:
man after my own heart.
which i poured into that rant, i did.
thx for noticing. and saying such perfect, kind stuff.
Cervantes
@ellennellee:
Comments here are searchable (and therefore findable) via Google et al. but I wonder if there is somewhere your unbridled rant can be featured more prominently and gather comments of its own. Perhaps you could ask one of the front-pagers here: Anne Laurie and Betty Cracker both strike me as good possibilities, even if the latter may not agree with you (never mind me).
Incidentally, I wasn’t trying to be kind. Your comment speaks for me almost word for word. I wish I’d written it. This “sport” is a violently suppurating disgrace, at least the way it is currently “played.” Defending the art of human sacrifice in terms of skill and grace is the sort of thing one might have heard in Roman dialect at Vespasian’s Colosseum. Panem et circenses, said Juvenal in utter disgust, and he is as right now as he was then.
ellennellee
@Cervantes:
good morning. that is, if you bother to check in here again; seems this thread dwindled to the two of us as soon as i hit my first ‘submit’ button.
again, you are way too kind. and i take it as a special compliment, coming from someone so clearly versed in the classics, as well as inclined toward our better angels (and offended by the brutish).
i’ve been a BJ fan for years, but it has been a few since i cruised the comments. now i typically search or scan for an angle i hope to find, and rarely will post anything. am i recalling correctly your moniker from way back?
in any case, i will consider your suggestion to contact anne laurie directly, as she is something of a neighbor up here in the winterland that is now dumping upwards of a foot of snow on our greater boston heads. (most of those filled and thrilled with the superb owl’s outcome, of course. ;-)
i again give a deep and humble bow to your most gracious words, and will look for your honored pseudonym in future reviews.
be well.