Where The Grapes Of Wrath Are Stored

Both my teams lost in the runner-up to the Super Bowl which proves I looked into my crystal ball through a glass darkly. It’s safe to say that folks could become very wealthy if they followed my picks and bet on exactly the opposite outcome.

It wasn’t always so. In 1949 I became the headline on the back page of a New York City paper for picking seventeen winners out of twenty college football games in a week of many upsets. The newspaper happened to be the Daily Worker and I expect that notoriety rewarded me with a file in J. Edgar Hoover’s office.

Worse still, I believe my prognostications became the breadcrumbs which brought two F.B.I. agents to our front door. When my father stood his ground and would not give names of others to the men in suits, he was summarily fired from his job the following day. His silence was his spine.

As a measure of how far we have come as a country, The F.B.I. have become the good guys protecting our democratic institutions from barbarians at the gate. Hoover has been hoovered out of our collective memory.

Football has become the national pastime edging out baseball which belonged to a more pastoral era when a slower pace was our rhythm. It is basically a board game on grass. Hitting a projectile with a piece of wood must go back to cavemen swatting at tse-tse flies. 

Football is territorial, as befits colonialism. It is trench warfare battling over yards as if their lives depended on it. To reduce the carnage of war to an entertainment of contained violence is both a way of expiating hostilility and legitimizing it. In yesterday’s game the Lions lost which means the opposing gladiators won. It wasn’t always thus.

The United States currently has over two million servicemen and women stationed in bases all over the globe. A staggering number yet a small fraction of the 117 million expected to watch the Stupor, I mean Super Bowl game in two weeks. One hopes we can sublimate our aggression through this most American high holiday which rearranges the great divide for a few hours.