Making sports analogies is like being political on Facebook. It gets you a lot of attention, and you can be saying intelligent things, but it’s nothing some blogger hasn’t already beaten to death, and unless you’re astoundingly subtle you’ll alienate half of your audience right off the bat — but we keep doing it.
Anyway, we’ve just gone through two of the bigger significant American events of the year in a week and a half: the Super Bowl and the State of the Union.
One is a pageant of commercial excess, a scripted display of pretense and coercive prowess masking empty pandering and desperate appeals to and for various demographics — the other one has Peyton Manning.
They really are more alike than different, but the Super Bowl is a lot better at doing what the State of the Union is really meant to do in the first place — you know, assess the state of our union and whatnot.
The Super Bowl is that time of year where our whole diverse, opinionated society gets together and drinks until it’s not awkward (family reunions!). We try not to talk about anything divisive — but you know some people can’t help but chime in (and you can’t really blame them, because it’s not like Uncle Ben stops being a dick over Thanksgiving, we’re just actively trying not to talk about it).
The State of the Union, on the other hand, is when a small segment of our nation gets packed into an auditorium, fidgets in silence for a couple of hours and claps until their hands snap off.
Even with the embarrassingly uncompetitive little league soccer match that somehow passed for a serious athletic event this Sunday, more people watched it than have ever watched anything on a screen at the same time in American history. And the people that didn’t watch it all posted statuses to make sure everyone was aware of exactly how little they cared.
In both events there are always going to be farcical attempts and failures to somehow make everyone happy. (See: Bruno Mars and Red Hot Chili Peppers with their guitars unplugged.)
The smallest, subtlest things carry a lot of meaning, and they’re easy to miss. Bob Dylan had all of 30 seconds to talk to America during the Super Bowl, but he only needed four to write off three-fifths of the world’s population (“Asia makes our cellphones”).
