“The world is in a mess,” in the immortal words of SCTV’s Mr. Mambo (John Candy). “And there’s sweet diddly you can do about it.”
Is there ever a benefit to fiddling while Rome burns? What about as an act of protest for the opposite of Nero — the powerless.
Even before the latest spate of international horrors, your average American male may have found himself questioning the sanity of spending time in front of a television watching professional football, the sporting world’s proxy for warfare, with its slow-rolling and nonlethal, but still queasy, weekly tally of casualties.
It’s an escape. It’s a distraction. It’s a regression. It’s childishly loyalty-forming. It’s a comfort. It’s a topic of conversation that bridges divides of success and failure, class and luck. It’s there for you when you can’t articulate what really matters. When you don’t want to. It’s an addiction. Something to relieve the pressures of everyday life, like having to tie your shoes, to paraphrase Matt Dillon in “Drugstore Cowboy.”
There’s a double whammy of difficulties most Americans can relate to — not knowing what to do with ourselves when not working, and compromised psyches brought on by devices, social media, misinformation, and other matters digital. So the solution would be, what, finding God or nature?
It was striking, Sunday afternoon, to see the banter and bonhomie among analysts on the set of the postgame show following CBS’s N.F.L. coverage: the voice-of-reason coach (Bill Cowher), the QBs who’ve been to the heights (Phil Simms and Boomer Esiason), the sparkly wide receiver (Nate Burleson), the defensive lineman who’s new but quick of tongue and overgrown-boy-next-door appealing and that’s what matters (J.J. Watt), all shepherded by an affable M.C. (James Brown).
They say that’s what professional athletes miss most when they retire, the camaraderie. And there it was on the TV, sports fans, the next best thing, and maybe for viewers, speaking of proxies, some small reprieve from the contagion of loneliness we keep hearing about.
After all, a return to death and depravity was just a channel away.