Why Do We Care

The Super Bowl is here: in fact, it's going on right now.  You probably didn't need me to tell you that.  Unless you live in any country other than the U.S. or are living under a rock, you'd know that the country is going  through its annual football fervor.  The commercials, the promotions, the constant, incessant hype!  Packers this, Steelers that!

And I could care less.

I'm not even watching it right now, and I don't plan to.  Truth is, I don't give two flying shits about football, especially NFL football.  There's no NFL team here in Oregon, so the whole "local pride" thing doesn't really cut it.  Hell, the college I go to doesn't even have a football team (we're big on basketball, though).  The only sports I have even an inkling of interest in are NASCAR, MMA, and whenever they show poker on TV.  With NASCAR there is always the possibility of an epic crash, MMA is basically two people beating the snot out of each other which is always viscerally fun, and I feel like when I watch poker I'm learning skills that can make me some money sometime in the future.

Football, however, I find painfully dull.  It's incredibly slow, horribly repetitive, and since all the players are decked out in insane amounts of padding, the chances of anyone getting seriously hurt while playing it are ridiculously slim.

Why do we even care about it, though?

This has more to do with culture than anything.  Football is right up there with baseball and basketball in the Holy Trinity of American Sports.  It doesn't have to be better than soccer, rugby, hockey, lacrosse, tennis, or the rest of the myriad of sports with huge international followings that Americans don't give a shit about.  As long as it's made in America, we're more than happy.

American culture is pretty much what happens when you mix exclusivity with a superiority complex.  We don't care about anyone else's stuff, and no one else cares about our stuff, whether it be sports or systems of measurement.  And since we're the only nation that measures their football plays in yards, we get the impression that we're better than everyone else.

Since the time of America being a global superpower will draw to a close (it will happen, people), it's about time we started taking steps to join the international community on an equal footing.  Back when we were waffling on whether or not to sign the Kyoto accords, I though that we should, not because it would have any significant impact on our carbon emissions, but as a sign that we were willing to submit to the same rules as any other nation, that we had grown out of the "AMERICA!!! FUCK YEAH!!!!" mindset that has stuck on like an ideological cancer at least since World War 2, and that when someone else started doing way better than we were, we were willing to pass the torch.

Wow, this really ran off course didn't it.  To wrap up here, Americans like football and the Super Bowl and all that because they're American and nothing else.  Have fun watching the Steelers win again!  Peace out!