War Criminal: "Sportsball"

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Hey, that Super Bowl sure was fun, wasn’t it? And I bet you’re looking forward to the fireworks-in-a-clothes-dryer insanity of March Madness. Unless you’re one of the people with the hilarious “Go Sportsball Team!” Tweets. You don’t see the point in blah blah fart fart yes I’ve heard this ten thousand times already.

Sports fan or not, you’ve seen and heard this line of thinking a lot more in recent years because:

a) everyone displays their opinions like a presenting baboon nowadays, myself included and:

b) we live in the Era of the Nerd

Comic book movies rule the box office. A fantasy swords-and-dragons epic and a zombie apocalypse serial are the two most popular shows on TV. People will giggle about the 11 hours of Attack on Titan they binged on Netflix right before they sigh that college football is such a waste of time.

So if it’s you LOUDSIGHING at the bar because the sound is on for the game, I do get where you’re coming from. And far be it from me to stoop to hyperbole … but you’re worse than Hitler.

As a kid, I used to take crap for even admitting my love of Marvel Comics. One particular booger-eating dipshit called me an “X-Men wannabe” once, which has always stuck with me. This kid’s particular power was brown teeth from fluorosis, so I didn’t get how he could throw stones at Colossus like that.

So you’d imagine that I’d love a world where you can get a soft cotton X-Men tee at Target with your Mountain Dew, Doreeta Chips, and paper shredder. But instead we’re just in a dark, horrible universe where the nerds wield a dickish middlebow swagger behind the rallying cry of Chris Hardwick. Sports are dumb, all books are part of romantic sci-fi/horror tetralogies, and jeans are skinny. The only conclusion to reach is that I must have somehow 12 Monkeys’d a lunatic version of myself back to 1997. Apologies for that.

Do you think that sports are incessantly shoved down your throat, even though you couldn’t care less? Star Wars. Athletes are terrible people and terrible citizens? Frank Miller created the version of Batman you love and he’s a walking racist email chain. The games themselves are ultimately meaningless? You posted a picture of a frittata on Instagram last week.

You aren’t a cultural elite because you watch Doctor Who. Every season of that show starts out fun and ends like a death march. If I wanted a life of breathless, joyous possibility followed by soul-crushing disappointment, I’d become a teacher.

No, newly confident nerd, you are not better than sports fans because your cultural tastes are shared by a different (likely overlapping) group of millions of Americans. Having read The Walking Dead comic doesn’t mean you’re improving the human condition. Choosing to pay for your favorite comedian’s pay-what-you-want album doesn't house war orphans. The cancellation of Firefly was not an actual injustice, and Joss Whedon only cares about your cult inasmuch as it keeps his kids from having to attend public school.

So embrace your ordinary-ness. Your selfishness. Your general lack of worth compared to the truly great humans of history (don't worry, they were probably awful too). You too are merely a distractible oinker rooting around in the same cultural mud pit as the rest of us. So let's share a bottle of whiskey and wish bad things on the St. Louis Cardinals and their fans. We're way better pigs than those pigs.

Go Sports Team!




*that said, public financing for stadiums is still a fucking scam