I wrote about the ongoing Failure Agenda on the pandemic, the national inability to self-soothe, and other current events. The good stuff! https://t.co/3okSkN35ie
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) October 13, 2020
Always worth reading Dave Roth, even in a piece that’s mostly about football (and the NFL’s reaction to the pandemic):
The Friday before last, the anti-government demi-celebrity Ammon Bundy forced the cancelation of a high school football game in Idaho…
…[O]ppressive state tyranny had taken the form of Caldwell High School’s requirement that fans wear masks and social distance. Bundy was livestreaming his stand on Facebook, which meant that while he was yelling “When are you going to stand for freedom, coach?” at the head coach of visiting Emmett High School, the town of Caldwell’s police department reportedly received numerous anonymous threats. “I will not put on a mask!” Bundy responded when parents and fans who had been in attendance confronted him outside. “I have a right not to put on a mask! You guys should be brave enough to do the same thing.” Two of Bundy’s sons play for Emmett, which was up by five touchdowns at the time the game was called. “Bundy was told before the game was stopped that he could cost Emmett a win and potentially a playoff spot,” the Idaho Statesman noted in its story.
Bundy’s exhausting public life is proof that, for some people, this country is an absolute wonderland of public places in which to become upset. But there’s something perfectly apposite about this last gratuitous, thirsty, unreasoning tantrum happening at a football game. No venue, and no tragicomic streaming meltdown, could have better anticipated or mirrored the President and his party belatedly attempting to defeat a rampaging pandemic with old-fashioned smash-mouth football…
When Trump himself finally, preposterously, inevitably got sick, he was at last finally invested in the whole thing. When Trump emerged on what either is or isn’t the other side of his illness, vibrating and fluttering and looking even more like a photographic negative of himself than usual, he brought with him a realization. He had faced Covid and bested it, and in so doing he’d learned that the soaring collective threat of the pandemic was … exactly what he has always thought everything was all along. In proclaiming that Covid was a test of individual will and personal strength, Trump spoke with a liberation and purpose that couldn’t be credited to the various powerful steroids currently bearing him aloft on a storm cloud. He had finally found a way to care about the pandemic, which was to make it about him. He had found a solution that appealed to him, which was to make it about his lifelong fixation on fear and domination in general, and his fear of being dominated in particular. Once he had confirmed that he was in fact immortal and the pandemic was just another binary matter of winners and losers, Trump was free to live as a dumb god…
It makes sense that the NFL, like Trump’s administration, did not so much fail to plan for Covid as make a principled choice to go on misunderstanding it. There are only so many ways to try to pull off a football season in a country that’s being overrun with a pandemic. The NFL attempted zero of those. This was not just because the few options available are difficult and annoying and require massive compromises and collective action, although that surely didn’t make them more appealing. It’s because the very act of doing that work would be an admission of vulnerability; the facile conceit that makes football work is that the people who play and coach are just different, and both less human and somehow superhuman for it. Every other American sports league has had to warp and wrench itself out of order just to have some kind of season. The NFL, being the NFL, was only and always going to do it without changing a thing…
Excellent Read: “We’re On to Cincinnati”Post + Comments (153)