The Relief Valve

Strong passions can erupt in unpredictable ways.

The government understands this – and desires that strong passions be diverted in a harmless – to the government – way.

Enter the cultivated, culturally and socially enforced  obsession with organized, mass spectacle sports.

These games – a new one to keep people busy almost every day, year-round –  are not so much “bread and circuses,” as they are often called. They are the vivification of the fictional Two Minutes’ Hate in Orwell’s 1984. A means by which the passions – the frustrations and anger of men in particular – are diverted and dissipated.

In order that they aren’t directed at anything important.

Such as the ever-increasing control exercised over men by the state.

The stifling of independent action, the punishment of deviation from any official orthodoxy, the relentless suppression of independent judgment and self-reliance.

The systematic thwarting of a normal man’s inclination to be a man. The movie, Falling Down, captured this brilliantly.

In red giant stage America, the average man has little meaningful control over his life. He does as he’s told – from driving the speed limit to paying “his” taxes. In the land of individuality, collectivism is the rule.

He must Submit and Obey. He must never raise his voice to question authority. This lesson, in particular, is hammered into today’s boys – usually by women.

Orwell got one thing wrong. It is not Big Brother.

It is Big Sister. 

Everywhere, there are short-haired, pants-suited fraus vested with power; the sort who in a better time would have been spinster librarians and generally harmless. Today they infect bureaucracies such as EPA and DOJ and many others besides.

The beetle-like little men that Orwell described abound, too. But they tyranny of our times is not a masculine tyranny such as Stalin’s. Note that in the Soviet Union, people were still largely free to partake of petty vices such as booze and cigarettes. Soviet power didn’t limit the size of sodas or force people to wear seat belts.

Maybe that’s why fuhhhhhhttttttball was never a big deal in the Soviet Union.

America’s tyranny is the tyranny of elementary school in perpetuity. 

These days, a man can’t even paint his own house without first begging permission from the local Gertrud Schlotz-Klink. . . and if he doesn’t cut his grass when ordered or erects a shed unapproved…

Threatening letters. Then a lien or some other encumbrance. Eventually, the thugs scrum will come. So he learns to do what he’s told.

The rage boils but silently; it has no outlet.

Enter the game.

He is empowered! He bellows like a rutting Cape Buffalo and basks in the reflected glory of “his” team. He merges with the crowd, it overtakes him. Becomes him. He is a member of the community of men once more.

He proudly waves the flag of “his” team, puts garish flappy pennants on his vehicles. This, of course, being not only allowed but encouraged by the government.

On the other hand, if “we” lose, he is dejected – sometimes, for days on end. He feels great disappointment.

He is angry.

But in a way utterly harmless to the state.

He seethes, he yells, he shakes his fist . . . at the enemy “team” on the screen.

Never at the true enemy. . .  .

Axiom: The more hopeless a society is, the more under the thumb of the government-corporate nexus, the greater the adulation of professional sports teams. It is a kind of sweaty lottery – a means of dangling desperate hopes before hopeless people who might become dangerous if it ever occurred to them that there is no hope for them.

But hey – did you see that tackle?

Always “the game.” Tonight’s. Yesterday’s. Tomorrow’s. A recurrent obsession with irrelevance.

Enstupidation accelerates.  

It has been said that religion is the opiate of the masses. But religions center on values – and so, upon philosophy. In other words, on things that matter.

The game does not matter.

Fuuhhhhhhhtttttballl worship is ingenious.

All the natural – healthy – emotions (including anger) are stifled – then adroitly redirected. Instead of being furious about constantly being required to disprove his alleged guilt, about having to submit to random, probable cause-free searches and such like by an increasingly tyrannical state, about being micromanaged and taxed and never, ever left in peace . . . the gelded, stoop-shouldered creature sitting in front of his TeeVeee is apopletic that “we” weren’t able to go the extra few inches on third and three.

He is a fan – truly, in the actual derivation of that word. A fanatic  . .  .about something utterly irrelevant.

Just what’s needed, from a certain point of view.

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