Boy Do The Straight Boys Hate It When You Diss Their Favorite Homoerotic Passtime

Someone, in a private communication, points out to me that in the late mid-19th century there was an important distinction between elite private universities - especially those that became the Ivy League and the Ivy equivalents and public universities, even, for the most part, public university education was an upper-class phenomenon.  Which would somewhat mitigate the distinction I made. 

He points out that the legendary "first game" of American football was between what would be renamed Princeton and Rutgers, a public university.  I hadn't known that so I looked it up.  I didn't much care about the description of the game but I was interested to see that the "first game" apparently turned into the first American football riot as the Rutgers fans made the (what would be) Princeton boys flee for their own safety.   The violence among football fans is another enduring part of that criminal depravity, it would seem. 

Baseball has its problems but it isn't an inherently depraved game like football is and despite the line about it being boring as opposed to modern football, it's actually a more active game with more minutes actually spent playing the game.  it is, however, more nuanced and without the generally homicidal frenzy of those few minutes of a football game in which the game is actually played.  Neither of them are real football, "soccer" in the pace of action but baseball isn't inherently immoral in the way football is.  

I don't understand why adults would care a. where they put a ball or a puck or whatever, b. who wins and who loses.  I can't think of anything given so much attention which matters so little and which is held in the pseudo-moralistic regard that sports are.  These days if you don't worship at the altar of football, something is thought to be wrong with you.  That's how much a part of American neo-Imperial Pagan-Secularism it is. 

My correspondent touts the alleged exercise benefits of the game, which, given football players die on an average of two decades sooner than the general average, many of whom are grossly obese (you can be obese and very muscular) not to mention the injuries, the permanent as well as those which somewhat heal, is not a debatable claim but a clearly dishonest one.  

My response was that for efficient exercise, nothing beats exercise.  If you want to get exercise doing something else, I'd suggest gardening or yard work or splitting wood or moving rocks.  Most of the avid gardeners I've known are remarkably fit into our senior years.   Even playing some musical instruments would seem to be better.  The one time I got together with my high-school classmates I noted that it was the football players and, to a lesser extent, basketball jocks who had gotten seriously fat.  The ones who stayed lean into their middle age tended to be non-athletes, some of them my fellow musicians.  I'd go on about that but would be tempted to repeat some of the complements I was given at the time - and I'd feel too simelsy if I did that. 

Football being a positive, healthy and morally elevating thing is a huge lie, a massive lie, a lie that is as cynically depraved as other lies of eutrophic imperial America.   Rejecting it is an act of subversion. 

Update:  Unrelated, Grandmere_P?  I'm tempted to go into how she airs her family linen over at Duncans so I'm not surprised she liked what the Simp said.  But she does that so well that I don't feel any need and certainly have no desire to repeat what she says so fully, herself.  They can both get stuffed.