Letters to the Editor
tomreedtoon
Published Letters: 766 Editor's Choice: 80
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What's wrong is more than Texas. It's football.
[Read the article: Bright lights, big pity]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Football is for beer-swilling idiots. And it's dying faster than baseball. (Funny that Havrilesky, Ms. Starbucks, is interested in a sport that's just an excuse for selling overpriced beer. But I digress.)
There's a reason that ABC dropped Monday Night Football and threw it to their low-rent cousins at ESPN. The sport is no longer widely popular. It's more than the bunch of abusive, raping, gun-carrying millionaires on the field. Today there isn't a Howard Cosell to comment on it and try to keep it honest. The only people in the broadcast booth are paid-off media whores, there to praise the sport and its corporate owners and sponsors.
When it became difficult to get tickets to regular games, and impossible for civilians to get Super Bowl tickets (I think that happened in Super Bowl 2) the sport was no longer a sport of the people. It had become the rich masturbating for the rest of the rich, leaving ordinary people out of the party.
High school football is the junior version of this. I spent three semesters of college in a little mid-Missouri town, and the only thing the town had any pride in was its damned high school team, playing outside my bedroom window, depriving me of sleep, cheering This Year's Great White Hope. That guy, the quarterback of course, was the only one in the graduating class with a chance for a job better than gas station attendant. All that angst and hero adulation for a kid who happened to be the most violent punk in the school.
So, yes, Havrilesky, the big tough teens that seem to turn you all warm and runny aren't beloved by us normal human beings. In high school many of us were beaten up by them. Some of us were raped by them. (Males too). And it's harder to fall in love with their TV versions than the sluts of Wysterectomy Lane or the yuppies of What About Brian. So you'll have to just treasure that previously-worn jockstrap after this show is deservedly cancelled.
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If you're up this late...for "I was beaten up too."
[Read the article: Bright lights, big pity]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is awfully late in the thread, and won't be read, but what the hell, here goes.
First off, "I was beaten up too," you're a coward by not using your name. Are you afraid I'll come after you, slam your head against a cinder block wall and go over your face with a cheese grater because you posted something nasty about me? Sorry, but that fate is reserved for Heather Havrilesky. After it's done to that supporter of rape and abuse, Anne Rice. (And that's not saying I'd do it; I'm not a physical guy.)
Now, as to what you said...if it's so lucrative, why did ABC drop it? Its ratings on TV were dropping. It was no longer competition on Monday night. The economics of the game you seem to love are complicated. (For instance, most teams blackmail their cities into building them big arenas, using the taxpayers' money, which never gets repaid and which doesn't make any compensating money for the city's businesses.) The only factor I wished to point out was that TV doesn't like running sports like football any more.
Second, it's the culture of violence of which football is the most "respectable" part that I complain about. To my eyes (which probably aren't yours, 'cause you have your NFL beer goggles on) they're thugs given pretty uniforms and salaries. At least when there was a Cosell, there was some discussion of this factor of the sport. (And Sports Illustrated, even to a dedicated foe of sports, has a high quantity of the most incisive writing in print today.) Nobody cares anymore, because most of the fans of football just don't know how to read.
Those high school games kept me up all night. This being a small town, there was nothing else to do but study and sleep after going to the boarding house after school. (Rolla, Missouri, if you need a specific reference.) That was the big moment for those yahoos.
Finally, I didn't say I was beaten up by a black football player. I was damn near raped by one. That is the essence of football, and high school; the timid and intelligent being killed and maimed by the football players and their whores. If you didn't see it, "I was beaten up too," you're not very perceptive.
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Why should flying inspire awe?
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is the fastest way to get between cities. That's all there is to it.
The first airline flight I ever made was to a job interview, from St. Louis to Orlando (where I eventually moved). I thought the whole reason that Eastern provided me food and drink was to comfort what was intrinsically an agonizing process.
Being strapped into a too-small seat, being subjected to G forces as bad as the worst roller coaster I had ever dared to try, being seated next to strange and possibly obnoxious other people; this was supposed to be a romantic thrill? And those were the days before searches and baggage x-raying and watching every word said anywhere in the vicinity of an airport, even if intended in jest.
Sure, things have gotten lousier. But not that much. It was never that great to begin with.
The great benefit of air travel is that it is fast. I couldn't imagine, and I hope never to experience, trans-continental travel on one of those floating concentration camps called "ocean liners." Those people upset about germs aboard airplanes should note the great number of people taken in gurneys off cruise ships, nauseous and weak from whatever carribean plague the poverty-wage crew spread all over the ship. Or maybe it was the nauseating activities run by the cruise directors...or is that cruise distractors? As opposed to this form of house arrest, give me the wham-blam-thank-you-ma'am of an airline flight.