Idiots and Maniacs
“I’m sick of you people, you’re nothing but a pack of fickle mush heads.” - Mayor Quimby
“He’s right.” - Springfield Woman
“Give us hell, Quimby!” Springfield Man
Today the 2007 NFL season really gets going, thirteen games in eleven hours. We are also gearing up for what could be a major debate on the Iraq War. Watching these twin spectacles will take up the majority of my leisure time over the coming month. Of the two the NFL will last longer but the war debate is more immediately important. I’m looking forward to both of them because internecine American combat is always the most fascinating kind. We’re still obsessed by the Civil War almost a hundred and fifty years later, there’s a reason.
This is a big country and a lot of our politics derives from the fact that citizenship is the only thing a lot of us have in common. I’m not just talking about the obvious Boston vs. Crawford, liberal vs conservative, Democrat vs Republican stuff. Even people that live in the same community can have almost nothing in common but their ZIP code.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The myth of Our Town is just that, a myth. There were small farming communities where everyone knew everyone else. Hell, there still are such places. But they haven’t comprised a majority of Americans in a very long time, if they ever did. Grover’s Corners, Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show and romantic notions of virtuous frontier life exist as collective Americana (at least for white people), long on nostalgia and short on detail. It wasn’t quite like that; we’ve always been a society of strangers.
There is another profound American notion that we all love and it’s almost the opposite idea; fortunately, this one is true: you can always move to a new place and start over. No matter who you are or where you are, if you put your mind to it, in six months you can be someone else in a completely new place. I’m not even talking about something illegal like faking your death or forging social security numbers. You can always keep moving, find something better or get away from your past. It’s not easy, but it can be done.
We don’t want to have a whole lot in common with most of our fellow citizens. That’s one of the deepest things to love about this country. The vegan lesbian couple living near Coit Tower has just as much claim to being American as the soy farmer and his wife in Kansas. America is a country where everyone can do their own thing.
That’s why the NFL is important in a way that pretty much any other cultural institution we have is not. It is the most popular thing you can talk about without straying into the dangerous realms of religion or politics, movies, television, other sports, nothing else comes close. I find this tremendously comforting.
No matter how deluded the Bush administration gets (and it will likely get worse before it gets better) the America Shield will still go up across the land on autumnal Sunday afternoons. That’s one of the biggest reasons I always thought those liberal doomsday scenarios about permanent Republican majorities and nationalist tyranny were overblown. Even in the darkest of dark days following the 2004 election, when a mere pair of quote marks around “values” and “political capital” couldn’t do justice to the amount of times they were said and printed, it was all silly overreaction.
The same can be said of the last Republican apocalypse, in the mid-seventies. Nixon resigned; Gerald Ford had who knows how many vetoes overridden, and a liberal dystopia was on the horizon. Yet the Republic survived, the economy grew and the 1980 hockey team beat the Soviets. The John Birch Society still isn’t happy, but neither is Greenpeace. That is a good thing, on both counts.
This country is not populated by crazy people, which is not to say that there are no crazy people who live here. There have been crazy people in every society since the dawn of time, but they do not constitute even a significant minority. It’s easy to lose sight of that precisely because it seems like we have so little in common with each other. Plus the really crazy people tend to be loud (Ms. Coulter, please stand up). But crazy is as crazy does, as Forrest Gump might say, and in the end we are all Americans.
There is an old George Carlin joke in which he points out that there are only two kinds of drivers on the road: idiots going slower than you and maniacs going faster than you. Like all the best of Carlin it is as true as it is funny and the gag is on all of us. We love football, we love our kids and, my sappy political ecumenicalism aside, when the chips are truly down we will all come together.
