The Patriots Win, But What Does It All Mean for America?
The Patriots did steal, of course – ratfucking blown up to the same degree that Nixon and his plumbers took local- and college-level sabotage nationwide. However indifferent you might feel to nonviolent gamesmanship doesn’t alter the fact that they’re guilty as hell. Which is why we really could have used more righteous hand-wringing about this revelation. There is nothing funnier than watching moral scolds scattering like minnows whenever some pebble of ethical or narrative deviance plops into their small pond.
These are the people who wail about banned substances in baseball when a dude in the Hall of Fame dedicated half his autobiography’s title to the spitball. Or who ignore that their heroes were on amphetamines. Or who cite the health risks of illegal substances in football while all but ignoring that Mike Shanahan’s teams attacked the legs of opposing linemen with more ferocity than a half-starved wolf would if you made everyone wear sirloins as kneepads. Or who praised the 2013 Seattle Seahawks’ defense to the heavens despite their essentially planning to cheat comprehensively as a form of game theory: commit enough regular pass interference penalties that referees become reluctant to flag defenders on every down – fearing both the spotlight and the disruption of flow to the game – and eventually you get a more physically permissive game that plays to your strengths. These are the people who should have been shouting to the heavens about what everyday Americans would have to tell their children, and instead they went quiet for the NFL’s opening game.
Really, we deserved better. The people who spent most of the last 13 years anointing the New England Patriots as America’s Team should have had to reckon with the distinction now, if only to see how they’d fuck it up. For the rest of us, it’s not hard. The great thing about historicity is that most things are never so good or so bad as someone is desperately trying to make them seem, and the biggest cries of praise or horror are usually delivered by someone ignoring chunks of context and begging to be ignored in return.
The Patriots can be the best team in the NFL and a wake of buzzards without the two ideas being contradictory. We weigh similar pairings all the time. Just a glance Trumpward will reveal endless rhetoric about how America is simultaneously the greatest nation on earth and also a cesspool of socialistic handouts to “race-baiting” thugs, rapist illegals and women who always put out for other men, then stick you with the bill. Likewise, the NFL is simultaneously a delight of a game built atop civic plunder, labor exploitation and $11 drafts made in a country that only nationally discovered adding flavor to beer in the late 1990s. Hell, there’s probably no more fitting distinction than an (un)exceptional nation carved out of broken treaties and land grabs being represented by an America’s Team (un)exceptionally prone to theft.
This was the big comparison we deserved last night, the sort of long next-morning mirror gaze befitting the endless season of mythological self-examination we’re trapped in until November, 2016. Thankfully, it looks like the Patriots sabotaged the Steelers’ headsets last night. Or didn’t. At this point, either statement matters the most or not at all depending on existing opinions that wouldn’t have changed with or without this data, whatever it says.
All that matters is that this provides another opportunity for peals of the agony of victimization or the concern-troll whimpering of moral disappointment, both of which are hilarious. Just like the presidential election, the only question is whether we want it to gloriously go on forever or be ended immediately by the act of a merciful God. Considering that the best either arena can offer in the way of that last entity is Cruz/Huckabee or Roger Goodell, we’re going to be here for a while. Given that Tom Brady has a “Make America Great Again” hat in his locker, the only finish to all of this that we probably deserve is the Patriots stealing the election. They’d probably fuck it up less.
