Our Epic Hero’s journey. Saints to Sinners
Part VII: Death to the Hick
However unlikely this might be for my fellow Hicks I found myself in uncomfortable territory when the full impact that violence and the profession of violence was having on my heroes, my beloved New Orleans Saints and their antagonists the Atlanta Falcons and all other teams and players of the National Football League. (There is no international squad. )
The injury rate for NFL players is and continues to be 100%. Our friends suffer grievious harm and that is terrible.
What is truly discomfiting about the game is the hypocrisy of violence. The quarterback is unfairly protected. The loss and “retirement” of Troy Aikman and Steve Young to concussions was a massive financial loss calculated in billions. You couldn’t say premature. The average lifespan of the NFL player is 3 years. They lasted 10.
Quarterbacks now unbelievably play until 40. And yet the impact on their amygdala disposition, (The enormous size of it!) the dysregulation to stress and trauma, and the inability to make neural connections in their prefrontal cortex are unmistakable. It is not helped that quarterbacks are mostly white and living longer. It is not at all helped that those positions requiring violence are played by those in society that are inured to it. It’s not helped that the sport is draped in the flag and those in a position to protest the disadvantages of class and ethnicity are taken to task by Hicks in the White House who surround themselves with card carrying members of the Nazi party like Rep. Steve King and Sebastian Gorka and literally dozens of others.
(Christ, is there anything more Hick than the legacy of Hank Williams, Jr. and the Monday night football country hicked themed football promo? It is so dastardly non country. So polished and cumslick of the bullshit Nashville chrome)
What contortions this professional yogi must take to support a suicide squad sacrificing their lives for country. The sport hurts them. The White House wants them to behave like good Uncle Toms and smiling n***ers. Is it then my patriotic duty to stop them from playing or cheer them on?
Football’s impolite hypocrisy
We have forced the players into choosing between patriotism and being a Patriot.
The player objects injustice in the Nation and rebels in demonstration--as is his right as a citizen. He is now the man in black. The flag has become image of oppressor to the player. The anthem reminds the player that the State is injust to the citizen. He kneels for America. He kneels to save America from itself. He saves an American from the State.
The game is the path of freedom to the hero. Without playing a child’s game he will, statistically speaking be incarcerated. This injustice is the fact of poverty. These are the circumstances of my own impoverished Hick parents. The game drapes itself as the game of the people, and uses the military and the flag and the jets to better associate itself with the act of Patriotism.
But, really this is nationalism. All of the little city states in competition with each other to secure the love of the Nation. This Player who has secured financial freedom from the game opposed to the League that benefits from the player’s physical and emotional sacrifice. He protests the enslavement of his fellow man. The unlucky average man.
The Führer objects and condemns the irredeemable hero player: the man in black.
The people reject those who do not rebel against the leader. The celebrity rejects and opposes the musical halftime celebration of the Player and the Game unless the hero player is redeemed. The player continues to play. The Game suffers its own popularity. The NFL game. Not others though.
When Roland Barthes wrote his short essay on Operation Astra he could easily have been writing on this situation. He writes on the polite hypocrisy of the institution that both exploits us and saves us. For example Barthes might say:
“Football is an evil, dangerous bullying act that destroys its participants mind and body. Yet we can be saved by the pure joy and tribalism of football. Our city can be lifted. Our jobs can be joyous come Monday.”
The Führer begs us, demands of us, sells us on a belief in a transactional zero sum cost of football. We get pleasure. you get money. Do not object to the brutality of your fellow’s existence on the platform we have granted you. We seek only pleasure.
The game drapes itself in the flag. We as viewers were seduced and manipulated. The league suffers its vulnerability. Unsurprising the NBA which is a black man’s league nurtures it’s strengths. Our people, our coaches, our owners see and understand our polite hypocrisy. Tall people win. We understand how lucky that is. The NBA’s popularity is unbowed.
As an aside Kyrie Irving’s (the Celt formerly the cavalier) faithless rejection of the mythology of American thanksgiving on Turkey day caused him some tsuris recently in the media.
The day Americans fed the illegal aliens who had come to this land. This is an interesting story in that Irving has already come out and said the earth is flat. Seeing now that his world view is shaped by a mystic indigenous society and not Christian Science has allowed in me some tolerance for his position. Which is indignant. Thanksgiving is not his favorite. I understand. The day whitewashes his people’s experience of suffering and genocide. More power to him.
One last commentary on Fake v Authentic v Sincere:
The next great quarterback, Baker Mayfield of the Browns here neatly writes on his own failing. As an authentic person and he rejects the notion queried from a journalist I suppose that he should change his behavior. Or that his morals or values will ever evolve in any way. He says “I am what I am. That’s me” He is a young man. He may never change or evolve his point of view.
This was the attraction to W. Gore and Obama must forever be vilified by their careful and thoughtful evolution. An evolving view on drug laws or gay marriage signifies to the Authentic that this person is of weak character and conviction.
“Why haven’t you ALWAYS been enlightend? Is it poll numbers is that it? Are you cynical? Are you taking advantage of us? “ This is the constant attack on the evolving and vulnerable, emotionally and otherwise liberal. That we are insincere. Sincere is a state of always becoming, gentlemen.
As Richard Pryor said “That’s why they call it Justice. Because It’s Just us.”
I was observing another national and celebrated example of patriotism and moral hypocrisy in the Netflix production of the Norseman. This a show that was produced simultaneously in Norwegian and English. Fully one quarter of the population of Norway watches the show. And rightly so. What is truly magical about the production is this sense that people behave as people do. In that we prop up polite fictions so as to rationalize the brutality of our daily lives. Like the neuroscientist Dr. Robert Sapolsky says the reason our PFC takes so long to fully develop, say 25 years on average depending on gender (you can guess) is that we must learn to rationalize these little hypocrisies of cultural choice. When is murder appropriate? The bible tells us not to murder. And yet the State sanctions murder. This is a polite hypocrisy.
This rude reality is constantly at play in the Norseman. You might say that Mythologies by Barthes is the thematic foundation of the show. The dynamic tension between the petite bourgeoisie’s learned expectation for niceness entwined with the incessant severity of death is the comedic form at play.. And yet the characters, especially the Roman slaves, their expectation of death means that they go on ahead enjoying their day moment to moment thanking their little pleasantries, like a hay bed or a warm companion like a sow.
In the first episode the great warrior Arvid, on explaining his existential crisis for being to his Chieftan Olav, is encouraged to initiate the ancient ritual of Hölmgang. That is, Arvid is within his civil rights to kill his neighbor and take his wife and home if he simply but challenge him. The Justice of this act is the social convention. They have all agreed to it. And if one refuses the Hölmgang, then that citizen is shunned from society. It is a law that tends to weigh toward the practiced killer. And yes after some humble and Hick social niceties involving a circle, an introduction, a pretense towards fairness, Arvid cleaves his neighbor’s brain and torso in twain. The wife is delighted.
Just as in the American society that wide swaths of open rural country dictate the civil rights to those urban dwellers is another polite fiction.
For example: directly antagonistic to the rational life preserving values of city dwellers (and they are far and away the majority) the Right to shop online for an AR15, a “make your own assault rifle”, easily converted into an automatic weapon with a file, and without state license or catalog is maintained as precedent.
We cannot change this Law writ in the original Bill of Rights as we would have to then overturn the 75% of rural states who though in the popular minority wish to arm themselves against strangers who live very far away from their front door. Our neighbors in the city live next door and are statistically likely to kill us and themselves. Therefore logically in a social contract we should change State policy. We cannot, however, as the issue does not involve those who hold the power to do so. This is not adequate representation.
We have always given our rural neighbors unequal and disproportionate power. Because in the old days they had free coloured labor and wealth. It ts not Just. It’s just that’s the way we have always done it. That’s why we continue to do so.
The Norseman is truly a wonderful and camp-y (it knows what it is) illustration of Norse life in all its intricate rituals and life. It has, frankly, an over-abundance of naturalistic detail for a comedic farce. Typically something like this caricatures the mise en scene. For example when Johnny Carson does his Tarzan with Betty White. It’s just a couple of Hicks in skirts and construction paper jabbing at dicks.
The Norseman is much the same puerile and juvenile sense of humor, but with extraordinary learning opportunities. So much so, that as we observe the real grass growing on the thatched roof of the langhús we burst out laughing. The detail is the absurdity.
The Tonight Show and The Vikingane
As a Jew (Jew-y) in America, I am aware of and have been reminded of how problematic polite fictions can be. Egregious and excessive acts of tribal patriotism raise the hair on my neck the same way a borderline case does to a family therapist. Suddenly.. here in the room.. a threat.
My mother, Michael Hick reminded me as a child and often that it was German normative behavior that created the Holocaust. My grandfather, Ted Hick would tell me that is was German Normative behavior which lost the War. “They couldn’t think for themselves.” He said. Howard Zinn might say that it was our overreaction to Hitler that increased exponentially the number of deaths in the camps. Well.. who knows. I, like Sapolsky just wish I had killed him myself personally. The threat was real.
The threat is real now. The instinct is that these people, these Hicks and Hucks and Kings, and Kushners, given their brain shape, their disfigured amygdala disposition that is easily measured and weighed should just be removed. Forcibly. There should be a suspension to the rule of law. There should be a national cleansing and rewriting of the constitution that favors the majority of us who live in the cities and live peacefully.
It is extraordinary how easy it is to slip into rational dehumanizing behavior. Extensions of logic that prescribe state sanctioned violence as an answer. The cleansing act, the Romanoff, The Hick move, (the aspiration) the genocide has come from the left with Lenin, and it has come from the right with Hitler. It has come from the yogi and the non yogi in Partition and with Robespierre respectfully, and it has come down to A Final Answer.
The alternative is too complicated for the Hick.
