Notes from the New Vermont
Commentary #179: We’re Talking Dynasty — Sports vs. Politics

The older I get the more I become convinced that the United States of America produces only two kinds of human beings: those who love sports, and those who love politics.

Granted, there are a few overachievers who crave both, and a few underachievers who crave neither. But basically America is split down the middle — half of us willing to paint our stomachs to help the Patriots win on Sunday, and the other half willing to dress up in a chicken suit to force a rival candidate to debate.

Myself, I’ve always been a chicken-suit kind of guy.

It’s not that I don’t like sports. I do. But I like sports the way someone likes, you know, a game: I’m willing to play if the weather’s nice, I’m willing to watch if the Super Bowl’s on, and I’m willing to read about a guy who’s had a historic season or something.

I can sense the poetry when a guy plays hurt, and yet manages to score the winning run.

But I’ve just never been able to get that worked up about whether one group of really strong, overpaid guys marginally outplays another group of really strong, overpaid guys at a game that is so patently fictional.

And yet I have friends who are obviously devastated when their teams lose; they actually experience something like heart-ache, and existential angst. They worry about these ballplayers, whether their ACLU’s will heal, whether their assault charges will be dismissed; they sometimes call in sick when their team comes up short the night before.

Statistics matter to these people in the way that scripture matters to the faithful: as an obscure path for reaching the Afterlife — which is next season.

None of this makes any sense to me.

And yet, although I live in Vermont, I’m the kind of guy who has his eye on a special election in California’s 50th-district right now, as well as one just coming to a head in Italy. I desperately want Berlusconi out, and Busby in.

Vote totals and percentages are like nutrients for me.

Why? Because I have ancient political grudges to hold, and scores to settle, and only winning at the ballot box can make these powerful urges die down.

Now let’s say that my favored candidates win not just in these two elections, but in all the elections held this year, and there will be a lot of them. Will that put the fires out for good?

Not a chance.

Because having won, it’s then necessary to keep winning — we’re talking dynasty! — because if you’re not winning, you’re heading for a loss, and that’s the worst thing of all, next to actual literal losing.

Still, I like to think that my obsession is the healthier of the two, because it produces consequences in the real world. Imagine that they played the Superbowl, I tell my sports-fanatic friends, and the winning team didn’t get a ring that they’ll later hawk on Ebay. Imagine instead that your team got to decide whether to repave your street. Imagine that your team got to decide how many particles of arsenic were allowed to remain in your kid’s drinking water. Your team got to decide whether we go to war, and once we’ve gone to war, whether to come home.

That’s the way it is with the games I play, I tell them. People win, and they get to do stuff off the playing field — good stuff or bad, there’s no denying that it’s real stuff.

But my sports-fantatic friends are always unimpressed. They point out that politicians wear boring uniforms, have insane muscle-to-fat ratios, and nearly always value themselves above the team.

And as for what’s actually real, it’s politicians who come to the season-opener and pretend unsuccessfully to be athletes, not the other way around.

Which, in a word, is true.

[This commentary aired previously on Vermont Public Radio.]

Late Update, 7:38 pm —
George writes in with a quote from the doomed Eugene McCarthy that’s so apt it’s spooky: “Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.”

No wonder so many people went Clean for Gene back in the day.