CURIOUS CITY — GO LONG DOWN THE FROZEN FOODS AISLE AND I’LL THROW A ROPE. I admit it, I can be a pain in the butt sometimes. I’m that guy who will complain, if I feel a principle is involved. Calmly but firmly, injecting a sense of humor if possible, not going to extremes, but I do believe if you always say nothing about what’s wrong you can have no expectation that it will change for the better.
My family didn’t even raise an eyebrow when I said I was going to return the 20-pack of Dr. Pepper I just bought, because when I tore it open to stock the fridge and pulled out the first can, there was a great big “NFL” and the outline of a hulking player wrapped around 2/3 of the can, staring at me.
Ordinarily I would have been perturbed but might have shrugged and thought, I’ll put up with these, try not to notice and next time make sure I get less morally offensive packaging. But now, this week, is different.
I have always disliked football. Yes, it has athleticism and some amazing performances, but at its core it doesn’t have the grace of other sports. It’s all hit and run, by extremely large men.
It’s more Roman coliseum than Olympic stadium. It’s a blood sport, as far as the fan reaction it is calculated to invoke. Hit ‘em harder! Concussions? You wimp, it’s part of the game. Not to mention what it does to the gladiators’ bones. Watch the opening sequence again of “North Dallas Forty.”
No other sport besides boxing is more based on hitting your opponent as hard as you can, with no regard for injury. Yours or the other guy’s.
With recent revelations about head injuries, plus statistics for ex-NFL players for memory loss, diminished life expectancy, depression, suicide rates, dementia, debilitating effects from a steady stream of team-injected painkillers, and more, it’s become clear what kind of performer NFL teams require for excellence. So is it any wonder they and their commissioner Goodell try to sweep all the bad stuff that seeps off the field into the real world under the rug and certainly don’t see it as a problem, given the athletes they’ve molded to play this game? We are talking billions, at stake here.
It’s the same physicality and mentality that makes slugging your girlfriend unconscious or beating your four-year-old black and blue and cut and bleeding with a tree branch switch not much of a surprise.
All this is background to the antipathy I felt holding that Dr. Pepper can, and not wanting 20 of them in my house. Von’s refunded my money with no fuss, but here’s what got me.
The manager-of-the-moment seemed clueless as to why this would be an issue for me, or anyone. Not derisive, offended, incredulous or amused, just… mildly curious. “That’s on every can, you know,” she informed me.
“All of them?” I asked. “Coke and Pepsi and 7 Up?”
“Yes,” she replied, then seemed puzzled what to say next. “It’s the NFL ‚Äì football. It’s very popular.” Like I might possibly be from Mars and not aware of this.
“Well, it’s a lot less popular now, with what’s been going on the last two weeks,” I countered. (A hope, not a fact.)
No reaction, no response, like, suit yourself, I have no idea what’s bothering you but I’ll refund your money.
I asked her to pass along my return and my complaint to higher management. She seemed confused by the request. “We can’t tell the companies what to put on their cans…”
“I know,” I said, “but I want your company to know there are customers who find this offensive.”
I doubt she did mention it to anyone. But I was surprised at the neutrality of her response. Is it possible she did not know anything about what dominated the news for the previous 10 days? Hadn’t even heard anyone talking about it? Or she knew but still couldn’t figure out why anything NFL would bother anyone? No scandal, nothing troubling here?
In the middle of pondering this and writing about it, I received a note from my friend Diane with a piece by Charles Simic titled “Age of Ignorance,” from the New York Review of Books. It starts out, “Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise… What we have in this country is the rebellion of dull minds against the intellect.
“An educated, well-informed population …would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country.” Uh oh, here we go, into la-la conspiracyland. This is intentional, planned, engineered?
But doesn’t this explain a lot, of other nagging questions? “There’s more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened… A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.”
Simic has been teaching college-level American Literature for 40 years. He posits that our current state of the celebration of ignorance “is the product of years of ideological and political polarization and the deliberate effort by the most fanatical and intolerant parties in that conflict to manufacture more ignorance by lying about many aspects of our history and even our recent past.”
He implicates cable TV and the Internet “but to have it believed requires a badly educated population unaccustomed to verifying things they are being told.
“Despite their bravado, these fools can always be counted on to vote against their self-interest. And that, as far as I’m concerned, is why millions are being spent to keep my fellow citizens ignorant.” Oh, smack, fellow Charles.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.” – Edward R. Murrow
Charles Andrews has lived in Santa Monica for almost 30 years and wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world. Really. You can reach him at therealmrmusic@gmail.com
A great article — I enjoyed reading it! I look forward to reading more from Charles Andrews.
You threw “professional wrestling,” by which I presume you mean the WWE. Also popular, also not a sport. In my humble opinion.
More conclusion jumping: the 20-pack of soda I returned had not one indication on the outside that there was NFL promotion on the cans on the inside. Sorry. Fact. Also, I did not feel rage and anger. I know you don’t know me, but you also don’t read very carefully. Kindly inform me what part of my reporting of the conversation I had indicates that. Maybe you should look up “antipathy.”
The whole point of my interest was that there was so little emotion or apparent knowledge of the situation expressed by the Von’s employee. I apparently failed as a writer with you because you did not get that at all, but I’m thinking that’s not my fault. I did report that “Von’s refunded my money with no fuss.” That would include, no fuss on my part.
I love the “a few bad seeds” defense. That was a little more credible before one horrible incident after another came to light within 2 weeks, on top of the stonewalling over the head trauma book, etc etc. You have the right to that “few” opinion, but the important point of my piece was that this was not about a few exceptions, but how the nature of what is required or a successful NFL player is the same thing thing that leads to this horrendous behavior. It’s like training men to kill and sending them off to war then expecting them to be model citizens when they get back.
Various charitable acts by teams and players are laudable, but have nothing to do with this issue. When I was stationed in Germany in the Army years ago, I was shocked to hear old Germans say about Hitler, “but he built the autobahns, he did a lot of good, you know.”
By the way, the Von’s employee was wrong about all the companies having NFL on their cans. Today I peeked through the carrying handles on Coke, Dr. P, 7 Up and Pepsi, and not a one had NFL anything on them.
Robert, I bow to your obviously superior accomplishments in sports. I’m sure you must have a gold medal in jumping to conclusions.
I’m glad you concede that it’s “somewhat justified, given what has gone on this year,” to be “screaming” against the NFL, though I wouldn’t agree that I was screaming and I’d be interested to know where in what I wrote you got that. I also wonder what it would take for you to feel having bad feelings against the NFL is completely, not somewhat, justified — maybe if someone dies, if a player beats his wife or kid to death?
I know soft drinks are not health food. You know nothing about my eating habits but I will tell you, if you can believe it, that I am pretty careful about what I consume. Lots of veggies and fish, almost no red meat, organic milk and apples, etc. Soft drinks are one of my remaining vices. I hope to give them up some day.
But do you really consider that to be in the same area of “health” as all the problems I addressed that come from playing in the NFL? Besides the beatings of women and children, I mention lower life expectancy, serious head injuries, dementia, effects of years of team-injected painkillers, the trauma on bones including crippling arthritis, and on and on.
I never said soft drinks can’t harm you. that was not the point of what I wrote, obviously. It was about the big NFL endorsement photo and logo on each can. That’s what it was about.
Another conclusion jumped to: I know regular soft drinks have a lot of sugar in them, and I try very hard to avoid sugar. Which is why I have always only drunk diet soft drinks. No sugar. No high fructose corn syrup. Now, you may want to scream about aspartame, but that’s another issue, isn’t it? With completely conflicting studies.
As for brominated vegetable oil, I’ve never heard of that. Where do you get that? It’s sure not in Dr. P or Coke.
As the educated and well-informed member of the population that you deign me to be (thank you), I do know what UFC is, but… I don’t consider it a sport. Yes, I know it’s popular. So are the Khardashians. So what?