A Leap of Faith and Freedom

The news was full of artful evasions about “violent extremism,” a judicial order against the president’s executive order on illegal immigration, Bruce Jenner’s sexual transformation and automotive misadventures, and similarly weighty matters, but our eye was caught by the story about people jumping out of windows in Boston. It’s not a mass outbreak of suicide attempts, although we can easily imagine how a Boston winter might cause one, but rather a rash of thrill-seekers diving from two- or three-story dwellings into the gigantic snowbanks that have piled up over an especially snowy season. There have been no injuries or fatalities as a result of the pastime, so far as we can glean from the press reports, but the Mayor of Boston nonetheless felt to obliged to tell his constituents to “stop their nonsense right now.”

Which struck us as precisely the sort of bossiness that is bullying America into an increasingly risk-averse, compliant, and joyless state. The days have long passed since we would be tempted to defenestrate ourselves into even the fluffiest pile of snow, or have any more interaction with the stuff than is strictly necessary, but it’s not the sort of nonsense that a mayor should demand free citizens stop right now. If you’re young enough, and bored enough, and don’t mind being enveloped in frozen water, it might even be fun.

It could prove dangerous to jump from a second story window onto a sports utility vehicle or other hard object that is covered by just enough snow to make it look like a fluffy snowbank, and we don’t doubt that there are people in Boston dumb enough to do that, judging by the students and faculty at the city’s most elite universities, but that’s no reason not to jump into a snowbank of confirmed fluffiness. If the mayor is going to demand a stop to all the specific sorts of nonsense people are doing in his city that might prove injurious to those who are dumb enough, his press conferences are going to stretch long into the night.

Popular culture has always depicted parochial small-town Republican conservatives as the blue-nosed scolds telling those crazy youngsters with their rock ‘n’ roll dancing and free love and leaps from second story windows to “stop their nonsense right now,” but the stereotype is long out of date. Boston is about as big city and sophisticated as America gets, there hasn’t been a Republican mayor there since 1930, the last conservatives in the city were the ones who threw the eponymous “tea party” prior to the Revolutionary War. and yet it retains the traditional “banned in Boston” impulse that small town folk still chuckle about as they jump from barn lofts onto haystacks and ride sleds tethered to pick-up trucks and do backflips on motorcycles and all manner of redneck bravado. The impulse to tame such rural exuberance is not to unique to Boston, though, but typical of urban and sophisticated America.

Bans on public smoking and children playing in parks unattended and anyone riding a bicycle without a helmet are not a product of parochial small-town Republican conservatism. Nor are the consent forms that college students are being asked to sign before coupling and the speech codes being promulgated to make sure that no one is offended by anything anyone else might say, or any of the rest of the on-going effort to keep everyone safe and un-offended and not a cost to the socialized health system, no matter how dumb they might be. The small towns still have salt shakers on the table at the local diner, unlike the elegant eateries in New York City, and you can fill as a big a bucket of soda as you care to drink at the convenience store, and we daresay there’s a wider range of opinions that you can express as well.

So we are delighted to hear of Bostonians leaping from tall windows, a welcome sign that a bit of that risk-taking rebellious small town spirit still exists so far northeast as Boston. We wish them a pleasant journey on their way down, hope that they land safely in cushioning snow rather than injuriously onto a sports utility vehicle, and urge that they ignore their bossy old scold of a mayor.

— Bud Norman

Football and Freedom

The high secular holiday of Super Bowl Sunday is approaching, and in accordance with our contentious times it has already been preceded by the perennial Super Bowl controversy. These obligatory annual brouhahas usually involve the exhibitionist tendencies of the half-time performers or some slightly politically incorrect aspect of one of the commercials or the pre-game felonies of one of the players, but this year all the scolds are in a huff about the very existence of the sport of football.

Any sensitive and well-read football fans have surely noticed that their favorite sport has lately been blitzed with criticism. The courts have sided with a class action of brain-damaged ex-players in a lawsuit against the National Football League, the president has declared he would not allow his hypothetical son to play the game, such elite corners of the press as The New York Times are wondering if it is “Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl,” while everywhere the anti-football folks are getting their kicks in. There’s even talk of banning the game altogether, and anyone who thinks that football’s longstanding place of honor in American culture and its multi-billion dollar standing in the business community makes this idea far-fetched should try exercising such once-sacred rights as lighting up a cigarette in a barroom or installing an incandescent light bulb in a living room lamp. Despite the massive ratings that Sunday’s contest will surely generate, the combined power of the liability lawyers, the prudish pundits, and the easy gullibility of public opinion will be hard for even the most barrel-chested linemen to resist.

This time around the anti-football faction is citing some admittedly believable and alarming statistics about concussions, but we suspect they have other reasons for their opposition. Football is ruthlessly meritocratic, a last redoubt of exclusive and unapologetic masculinity, draws its best players from that remote region of flyover country which persists in voting for Republican candidates, provides an analogy to both warfare and capitalism, uses racially insensitive team names, and is in almost every other regard an affront to progressive sensibilities. At all levels of competition the sport is impeccably proletarian and multi-racial, with an abundance of tattoos and dance moves and other fashionable accoutrements, but even these culturally-sanctioned saving graces cannot rescue football from the damnation of a modern liberal. The modern liberal envisions a world where cooperation replaces competition, where multi-cultural commingling replaces physical contact, girls rule, and a mean old game like football has no place.

Football is a mean old game, and there’s no use denying it. The sport has slowly evolved from the “mob games” played in vacant lots of slum neighborhoods by New England ruffians, which were of course decried by the sophisticated inhabitants of that region, by the 1904 college season it racked up an impressive 18 fatalities, which of course provoked an intervention by the progressive Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, and its toll of seriously injured players has steadily increased ever since. The undeniably macho Roosevelt’s sensible reforms spread out the offensive to end the Greek phalanx “Flying V” offensive formation that once trampled over defenders, effectively ending the fatal era of football, and all the endless rules changes that have followed have also been intended to make the game safer, but nothing the rules committees have devised eliminated the risk inherent in the nature of the game. Like the regulatory agencies struggling to keep up with an ever-innovating economy, the game has always lagged behind the rapid pace of improvement in the speed and size and injurious strength of the players.

That squeamish editorialist at The New York Times who wonders about the immortality of watching the Super Bowls describes the queasy feeling he gets watching the bone-crunching hits that occur in every game, and we have to admit that we can empathize. Our own football-playing was limited to neighborhood bouts in the backyard and a nearby cow pasture, but it provided enough hard hits that we can extrapolate that skinny wide receiver must be feeling after 270 pounds of pure linebacking muscle puts a sudden stop to his seven-yard gain. Nor can we fault the president for advising his hypothetical son against playing organized football, even if his hypothetical son looked just like a young thug who was seen slamming creepy-ass cracker’s head against the pavement of a Florida suburb, as we reached the same decision even without his wise fatherly counsel. For all we know of corporate liability law the courts might even have reason to order the NFL to pay some compensation to the leather-helmet era players who had their bells rung once too often, and as far as we’re concerned anyone who will forgo the Super Bowl on moral grounds is wished a nice afternoon at the art museum or drum circle.

For those who prefer to watch the two best in teams in football fight it out for sporting immortality, we wish you a well-played contest. For those gladiators who take that frost-bitten arena in New Jersey, we wish you good health and the God-given right to test your God-given talents in a championship game. Should the effort to ride the world of football be successful the effort to rid it of roughness, risk, and Republicanism would be furthered, and that would be a shame.

— Bud Norman