Thoughts

On national football

The Super Bowl for me means the trails and museums are less crowded, a great time to run errands, etc., and then I recently read an article revealing the spike in human trafficking in host cities to meet the demand for our other “national past times”…so my sense of superiority is now paired with disgust. What else am I missing that might fuel this sense of superiority and disgust? (p.s. I don’t give shit about concussions)

 

This is a list of NFL franchise owners.

Each person on the list should provide you with a lovely little jolt of disgust. It consists almost entirely of grotesque old white male billionaires, and on the rare occasion when owners are neither white nor male, they are inevitably corrupt oligarchs or heiresses.

Green Bay is the only franchise that is in any way owned by what might be considered “the people.” It is the exception that proves the rule.

Football is the national pastime of a magnificent and horrifying plutocracy. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.

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20 thoughts on “On national football

  1. zeek says:

    I live in wi. Really happy coke pointed out GB. Which is very ironic considering our rich blue collar union history to Walker and his current right-to-work efforts. Wi is a weird place to live right now… That is all.

  2. Anna says:

    You might be missing out on an occasion to observe a popular sociological phenomenon.
    I’d love to actually be in the US for the Superbowl one day. I mean you talk incessantly about it for a month before and a month after, it supposedly reunites people around a love of sports, but we mostly hear about the ads afterwards. It’s weird and kind of fascinating.

    • M says:

      That’s why I’m tuning in right now. You can learn a lot about American society in 2016 just by noting the nuances of this entire event. Plus, it’s the 50th Superbowl. Hopefully the half-time show will impress.

    • Jenny says:

      True, but it’s a sociological phenomenon that gets increasingly repetitive and repulsive if you’ve lived in it your whole life. There are some things you just don’t want to see, like ads about “super bowl babies.”

  3. Florence says:

    That whole “human trafficking at the Super Bowl” thing is based on exaggeration, misrepresentation, and straight up lies. 1: Law enforcement in many areas classifies ANY sex work as trafficking, whether consensual or not. This skews statistics so the presence of by-choice sex workers turns into more victims for abolitionist crusaders to point to to justify raising money for their charities. 2: After paying for tickets to the game, travel expenses, hotel rooms, and food, very few Super Bowl attendees are going to have money to buy sex.

    Further reading: http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2016/01/21/the-myth-of-super-bowl-sex-trafficking-obscures-real-issues/

  4. Kelly says:

    I do give a shit about concussions. And rape and domestic violence. I really can’t continue to rationalize my football fandom, can I?

  5. RocketGrunt says:

    I’ve always thought football was kind of like the Aztec ball game that some historians think ended with the losing team being sacrificed. That and the gladiators of Rome.

  6. Haley says:

    Kim Pegula. Young, Asian, female, born in poverty in South Korea. Co-owner of the Buffalo Bills.

    While she is married to an old, white, male, billionaire, she runs their companies and is a boss. Exception to the rule in my book.

    • The Coquette says:

      It’s fine if you think she’s a boss, but you really don’t understand what “exception to the rule” means if marrying an old white billionaire is the only reason she’s on the list.

        • The Coquette says:

          Um, no. You clearly have no understanding of how money works. And why are you even arguing with me? Pegula made his billions fracking the living shit out of this country, married a woman half his age, and then bought a football team. If you wanna believe all that bullshit cinderella origin story propaganda, that’s on you, but I suggest you learn how to pick better heroes.

          • Haley says:

            I’m barely arguing. Why are you getting so heated? I’m trying to give Kim the respect I think she deserves as an intelligent career woman who co-built an empire. I think you’re vastly oversimplifying her story to prove your point about NFL owners. The point is valid, I agree with it. It’s just that Kim doesn’t quite fit. It’s not a bullshit story when you know enough to know its true.

          • Bruce says:

            You got me interested in this Kim Pegula person, so I got a one-hour degree on her from Google Academy and she does seem like a cool lady. She’s definitely out in front with Terry.

            But I haven’t seen anything that suggests she “co-built an empire.” She joined his company East Resources fresh out of college and married Terry two years later. At this point the company was 10 years old, so although Terry probably didn’t have the Chris Rock definition of “wealth” he was likely already a *very* eligible bachelor. Since then she’s raised almost half a dozen kids, which seems a pretty big accomplishment on its own, but I haven’t yet seen anything that suggests she hasn’t essentially been an employee these past twenty years.

  7. chris says:

    I get most annoyed by people talking about nothing but the ads. Ad agencies already shove this shit in our faces every day, do we really need to encourage them any more?

  8. Chops says:

    God, I fucking love the Packers. Their charter gets even better, too. If the “owners” (the people, kinda) ever do decide to the sell the team, ALL of the money made on the sale goes to charity. Not to some billionaires pocket book.

    • z says:

      Holla!!! Fuck the super bowl unless the pack is in it.

      Just wanted to add Lambeau expansions (6k seats, sound sys and whatever else) after 2011 were all done without taxpayer money. That’s always a plus.

  9. twp says:

    Congrats, questionperson, you’ve bought into the “anti-trafficking” hype, aka scare mongering to give the police as well as predatory NGOs even more power to rape, extort from, and imprison sex workers. There is no sex trafficking boom around the super bowl. You can’t get a hotel room and men are busy partying with their dude friends. Sex workers who can afford to take the weekend off, so it’s the most economically desperate who get caught in police stings. Why does it not count as trafficking when police round up women, often raping and stealing from them, to imprison them until they can pay off an arbitrary and often-increasing debt of fines and fees?

    • Crybaby says:

      I am the questionperson. And I appreciate you complicating my thinking, which frankly was just an offhand, insensitive remark that may have only served to reveal my ignorance and privilege. And while we’re on the general subject of my question, I want to amend my p.s. to state that I actually do care about people getting concussions, preferring that they would not, even if they self select the sport. (There’s probably a great quote out there somewhere about football players a la Jasper Johns’ “Artists are the elite of the servant class.”) And furthermore, I don’t really feel superior to football players or fans; I’m just indifferent, though Coquette’s response has tipped me more into the woke position in regards to the whole enchilada. So with all of that said, during the Super Bowl, my wife and I went grocery shopping and sincerely enjoyed having the shop to ourselves.

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