In Defense of a Bad Sports Town

Some relatively on-topic content is in the works, but I hope you'll indulge me a little here, because I grew up in the Atlanta suburbs and I'm a fan of all the Atlanta sports teams—even the ones that are now in Midwestern Canada—so it caught my attention when ESPN's Rob Parker did the journalistic equivalent of poking the entire metro area with a sharp stick:

It's not fair.

And, we know, it really shouldn't matter.

But Atlanta -- the city, not the team -- doesn't deserve a playoff victory over the New York Giants on Sunday.

It has nothing to do with football. It's deeper than that.

Without question, Atlanta is the worst sports town in America.

To be clear, this is some world-class trolling. Parker doesn't expect his article to be taken seriously in any meaningful way—his primary goal is to generate some publicity for himself, and his secondary goal is to get a lot of people riled up, just because it's fun.

All that said, he's absolutely right. Atlanta is a bad sports town. And it's perfectly fine with me if it stays that way, because this, according to Parker, is the alternative:

Giants fans -- even with a fresh Super Bowl in their memories after the 2007 season -- are living and dying with their team. Football is a part of their lifestyle, it's who they are. On Sunday, every single moment of the game will be pure agony until the clock shows all zeroes and the Giants have secured the victory.

My God, that's one of the most miserable things I've ever read. The pure agony of EVERY SINGLE MOMENT. The merciless gloom of a poorly-executed screen pass. The heartwrenching sadness of an untimely holding call. The unyielding woe of a failed replay challenge. The indescribable pain—OH GOD, THE PAIN—of a walk-off punt return.^[1]

Meanwhile, in a bad sports town:

Your typical Atlanta fan -- who is probably from another city since so few are actually from ATL -- will be preoccupied with something else. They might not even be sure what time the game is on.

In fact, at some point, they might ask a friend -- filled with sweet tea -- at a pork-saturated barbeque, "Are the Falcons playing today?"

Pathetic.

Yeah, just imagine those monsters—enjoying a sunny Atlanta day with a multicultural array of friends and neighbors, feasting on the delightful cuisine of their adopted hometown, shamefully unaware that somewhere nearby a local professional sports team is hard at work in pursuit of a trophy or cup or whatever. Unaware that the game is winding down and the exhaustion is taking over and the players are looking to the stands, desperate for the sweet performance-enhancing tonic that is tens of thousands of screaming color-coordinated lunatics. But, as always, there are no lunatics. There is only the cold, indifferent silence of the near-empty arena.^[2]

Anyway, this is where I started to wonder if Parker was secretly on my side, because he just tried to make a picnic sound sinister, and almost invariably that is the act of a person carrying out a scheme several orders of magnitude more elaborate than necessary. But everything else in his article—paragraph after paragraph of unfavorable attendance numbers,^[3] a recap of the Braves' late-season collapse, and a helpful reminder that the Thrashers must now be referred to in the past tense, which may still come as a surprise to a substantial number of Atlantans—points to the conclusion that yeah, he really does think that Giants fans, by virtue of being more "passionate", deserve a win this afternoon, and that Falcons fans deserve a loss.^[4]

Of course, any time a city is called out like that its sports fans lose their collective shit, so in a fit of morbid curiosity I scrolled through the comments on Parker's article for as long as I could tolerate the ESPN commenting community—almost three minutes—and found what appears to be a bona fide, hardcore Atlanta sports fan. Here's what "Skyonex" had to say:

F the transplants in this city. I'm born and raised here AS a FALCONS/HAWKS/BRAVES Fan. I could care less for all these transplants from all over the country and the recent influx of NO Katrina refugees. You know who doesn't deserve a win? Idiots in New York who have no idea how hard it is for ATL hardcore pro sports fans.

Hey Rob, take it from a TRUE FALCONS fan for over 20 years... We've had it tough and we deserve a win. More so than any Ain'ts fan or Giants fan ever will...

Sure, this person comes off as severely unbalanced and possibly racist (really? Katrina refugees?) and by all indications should not be allowed to venture outside alone, but does he not also exhibit the characteristics of the "real fans" Parker is extolling? His devotion to his city is intense to the point of utter disregard for human dignity. He's convinced that Atlanta's sports ineptitude (and there's been a great deal of it, to be sure) is an actual difficulty he's had to deal with in his life. And he believes this combination of blind devotion and imaginary suffering makes him somehow more deserving than fans in New York and New Orleans—as if they'd know anything about devastation and sorrow—of watching a specific group of professional athletes win a specific football game.

Point is, if that's what it would take for Atlanta to turn its reputation around—stadiums and sports bars and message boards full of despondent, entitled assholes (and I think that is what it would take)—then I don't want to see it happen. Rob Parker is merely the latest member of the sports media to chastise Atlanta by rehashing the narrative that being a good sports fan means supporting your team with equal ferver win or lose (instead of behaving rationally by rewarding good management and punishing bad management), and being upset that your neighbor still pulls for the team in whatever city he's from (instead of being proud that he'd rather live in your city than his), and conflating on-field misfortune with real trauma (instead of displaying the emotional maturity of an actual adult).

That's what the sports media wants from you, Atlanta. Don't let them win. They don't deserve it.

1. That's right, Giants fans. Here, click on this one too. Is the agony overwhelming yet?

2. But still the game goes on. The in-bound pass goes to Josh Smith and he surveys the court, looking for an opening, but in that place inside him where there should be strength and hunger and aggression there is only the unshakable feeling that nobody gives a shit—that on this court, in this city, there is no difference between winning and losing—and so he puts up a 28-footer that misses everything.

3. To the extent that there's an actual problem with Atlanta sports fans, I suppose it would be the attendance, but even there it's hardly a crisis. Sure, there's room for improvement across the board, but the Braves and Falcons are in the top half of their leagues, and the Hawks aren't terribly far off. Only the Thrashers truly suffered from poor attendance, and they were a last-place team in a sport nobody cared about—I'm shocked they lasted as long as they did.

4. If my experience is any indication, Parker isn't being hyperbolic with the "are the Falcons playing today?" stuff. And he was wise to put the Falcons there instead of the Hawks—people are generally aware of the Falcons, whereas ill-informed curiosity would be a whole new level of prominence for the Hawks. In 2008 a friend and I went to an Atlanta bar to watch Game 6 against the Celtics—it was the Hawks' first playoff series in almost a decade, and merely by making it competitive they were wildly exceeding expectations. With about a minute left and the outcome still very much in doubt, a dozen people at a nearby table brought out a cake and launched into "Happy Birthday", completely oblivious to the game.
    (My other memory from that night is that after the broadcast ended a Cheers rerun came on, and nobody in the bar cared enough to change the channel. Imagine if this was Boston and the show was The Dukes of Hazzard—Waylon wouldn't make it to "never meanin' no harm" before something violent happened to the TV.)

Alright, Fine, I’ll Add a Disclaimer to My Emails

For reasons probably related to the fact that I'm now one of them, I've been involved in more and more email exchanges with lawyers lately. Their emails often include fancy disclaimers,^[1] while mine are just out there, naked and vulnerable, which made me self-conscious, so I decided to write a disclaimer of my own. I was rather happy with the result, so I sent it in to McSweeney's, where it was recently published:
Alright, Fine, I’ll Add a Disclaimer to My Emails.

What does this have to do with politics and political discourse? Um…I'm still working on that. In the meantime, so that this post isn't entirely an exercise in self-promotion, I thought I'd link to some of my all-time favorite McSweeney's pieces:

What Your Favorite Classic Rock Band Says About You.
And by all means, check out the follow-ups too.

An Open Letter to the Person in Charge of New Punctuation.
Probably the most compelling punctuation-related proposal I've ever seen (and there's more competition than you'd think).

Straight Answers to Some Popular Rhetorical Riddles
"If the police arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to remain silent? Only if the police intend to question the mime."

Thirty-Nine Questions for Charlie Daniels Upon Hearing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” for the First Time in 25 Years.
Actually, just go to John Moe's author page. It's all outstanding.

And, of course, Kevin Collier's Get to Know an Internet Commenter series, which I'm a little upset I didn't think of myself.

1. To be fair, some of these disclaimers, like the one about tax advice, are legally required in certain situations. I know very little about how that particular disclaimer came to be, or whether it's an effective solution to an extant problem, but the government probably knows what it's doing, right?

Deleted Scenes

For reasons indirectly related to this blog's consistent failure to provide me with a decent income, new articles might be few and far between for a while. Fortunately, I've been planning for just such an occasion, to the extent that keeping a list of my favorite lines from articles I started but never finished can be considered a plan.

So here you go. No attempt has been made to clear up whatever ambiguity results from the lack of context,^[1] as if that isn't obvious. Enjoy!

—————

A few months ago, House Republicans bestowed upon grateful Americans "a new platform to share their priorities and ideas for a national policy agenda." The site is open to all ideas—as it should be, considering the American people are paying for it—but the mission statement on the front page makes it clear that certain ideas are more welcome than others. Specifically, the following, to which the House Republicans boldly declare their commitment:

• Limited, more accountable government
• Economic freedom
• Lower taxes
• Fiscal responsibility
• Protecting life, American values, and the Constitution
• Providing for strong national security

That's right, if your solutions involve amending the Constitution to outlaw government accountability, hand-delivering our nuclear launch codes to North Korea, or earmarking federal funds for wanton and indiscriminate killing sprees, you can just take your ideas somewhere else!

—————

I can't say that I'm financially responsible for much of anything, but that's because I'm financially responsible enough to know I can't afford anything, so it's kind of a wash.

—————

These definitions reflect my view of how these terms are used by conservative pundits. I made every effort to be objective, except where I chose instead to be sarcastically hyperbolic.

—————

The hyphen is a sign of the impending downfall of traditional values in favor of political correctness (e.g. African-American) and gender equality (e.g. U.S. Representatives Sheila Jackson-Lee, Ginny Brown-Waite, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz).^[2]

—————

I'm probably about as liberal as I am Floridian—31%, in terms of how much of my life has been spent with a Florida address—but I like calling myself liberal, for roughly the same reason I like calling myself Floridian.

—————

This isn't entirely an exercise in over-analyzing nonsense for my own amusement (but it's not entirely not that, either).

—————

I know, I know. As soon as all this happens Fox News' ratings will plummet, talk radio will cease to be relevant, and politics will be at least 80% less interesting. But we don't have to totally give up our beloved inane bickering. We'll always have sports.

—————

Christine O'Donnell exemplifies a problem to which conservatives are especially susceptible. On most non-Bible-related issues, the conservative position boils down to "let's sit around and do nothing and see if things take care of themselves." And from this simple idea a truly compelling philosophy has emerged, and a lot of very smart people have said and written some very smart things about the wisdom of sitting around and doing nothing and seeing if things take care of themselves. Hell, they convinced me, and I think I'm kind of smart. But the downside is, even a dumb person can learn to say "let's sit around and do nothing and see if things take care of themselves," and it's hard to tell that she's dumb because she's saying the same thing as the smart people.

—————

Statistics show that most Americans don't understand statistics.^[3]

—————

Great as Paul McCartney is, he's also responsible for the line, "in this ever-changing world in which we live in", and that's something for which I can never forgive him for.

—————

I'm not in the business of pointing out hypocrisy, for the same reason I don't go around discharging firearms into small containers stuffed to capacity with halibut.

—————

The subheading at the top of NewsBusters.org, "Exposing & Combating Liberal Media Bias",^[4] is technically accurate, but would be no less so with the word "bias" removed.

—————

There's a lot of nonsense out there, but at least this is enumerated.

—————

No hay nada que me enoja más de los tipos que les gustan gritar "¡This is America! ¡Speak English!" Esa actitud es igualmente irrespetuoso y ignorante. ¿Piensen que aprender otra lengua es fácil? ¿Piensen que inmigrantes no quieren aprender inglés? Claro que sí lo quieren, y—por lo general—sí lo aprenden.

—————

I don't care if it's my girlfriend running for office—if I go to her campaign website and a video starts playing automatically, I'm voting for her opponent.

1. Also, footnotes are left as they appeared in the original drafts.

2. It should be noted, however, that most conservatives do not oppose traditional uses of hyphenation (compound adjectives, certain prefixes, line-wrapping, etc.).

3. I don't have a source for that, but it's probably true.

4. That subheading, by the way, is phrased in the present progressive tense. That's right, progressive. It seems even grammar has a liberal bias.

So It's Come to This

A links post.  Actual content will be returning in August, but for now, here are a few things I've been paying attention to lately.

Back in June, Nate Silver released a remarkably comprehensive and thoroughly transparent set of pollster accuracy ratings. The ratings are interesting enough on their own, but the reactions—especially from polling organizations on the wrong end of the list—have been fascinating. Silver has been accused of using faulty and/or concealed methods, threatened with a lawsuit, sharply criticized by John Zogby, and confronted by another disgruntled pollster armed only with embarassingly flawed logic.

Around the time of my last article, another Language Log post further analyzed the pressing question of whether Obama disproportionately favors the passive voice, and, if so, what sort of unfounded inferences can be drawn. A few days later, a similar load of nonsense appeared. This time, the question is whether Obama disproportionately favors the first-person pronoun (i.e. "I"), and, if so, whether that proves he's a narcissist.

And to return briefly to our regularly-scheduled unfair and unprovoked attack on conservatives, I'm amazed by this Fox News online poll, titled "Is the New Black Panther Party Racist?" Aside from a short summary of the voter intimidation fiasco, the question pretty much stands alone, free of annoying hyperlinks promising cumbersome information. The current results, after more than 19,000 votes:

• 0.6%  No, this case has been blown out of proportion.
• 2.1%  Some members clearly are, but the group doesn't condone racism.
• 96.8%  Yes, there's no doubting the racism after cases like this.
• 0.6%  I don't know.

I suppose I'm most upset because there's so little support for "I don't know," which is really the closest any of the choices come to being undeniably true.

Introduction

I support smaller government, lower taxes, less spending, and more individual freedom, yet I want nothing to do with modern conservatism. Here begins an open-ended attempt to explain just how that came to be.

I'm sure I’ll eventually broaden my scope, but for now I’m going to look exclusively at one prominent pundit: Neal Boortz.

[Update (added Nov. 9, 2010): Alright, maybe I broadened my scope a little sooner than expected. Not that I won't continue having things to say about Boortz from time to time.]

Why Boortz? Several reasons:

• I grew up in suburban Atlanta, where Boortz is on the radio roughly 27 hours a day. He was my first exposure to political views beyond those of my immediate family, and is probably the single most important reason I began calling myself a libertarian as a teenager.
• Modern American conservatism is essentially a coalition between libertarians and religious fundamentalists (how did that happen, anyway?). I am absolutely opposed to government-imposed morality, but Boortz comes from the libertarian side of the coalition. Thus, I tend to agree with his opinions on a vast majority of issues.
• From a practical standpoint, I like that he posts a ton of content on his website. I don’t listen to his show every day, and even if I did, it’s nice to have something written to refer back to. (Also, the comments on his “Nuze” items are a lot of fun, in a hopeless, depressing way.)

And most importantly, Boortz strikes me as an adequate representative for conservative/libertarian discourse in general. He’s not a renowned scholar, but neither are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, or Ann Coulter. Instead, he is a powerful influence on the conservative masses. He shapes not only popular opinion, but how issues, arguments, and opposing sides are defined and characterized in the first place.

I mentioned above that I generally agree with the substance of Boortz’s views. That should allow me to focus less on the merits of his arguments and more on his rhetorical tactics, which is the point of this project. Basically, I want to examine how an ideology that I still largely subscribe to has, in actual practice, become so repelling.