A decade ago I was reading articles about the societal idea of the sacred and how sport has become the last sacred thing in American life.
Now, at the time I embraced this as some "lol, football is a religion" and then later dismissed it as the same, but I think in both cases I missed the actual point.
The sacred forms the foundational metaphors that we use to interpret the world. It's the blueprint that everything else is projected on.
And, yeah, we read everything through the lens of sport so now we treat literal Nazis versus people who don't want Naziism like it's one-upmanship in a middle school kickball game gotten out of hand.
Individuals obviously vary, but at the societal level, at the layer of speech that mass communication must operate on to be understood, sport is the framework we hang all our ideas off, and it's going to kill us.
It's not even conscious. This isn't just overt football metaphors, it's into the bones, the framing of things as teams and scoring wins as though at the end of the year we're going to tally up if Antifa or literal goddamn Nazis scored more points and hand out a pennant.
It's valuing the Sports Narrative and airing bigotry unchallenged on national media like it's Jake the Snake warning Hercules he better watch his back at Summerslam.
Richard Spencer gets interviewed like it's halftime outside the locker room.
I'm so tired.
