Drift Reality

For this year’s Super Bowl I headed over to the Newseum down by the white house, to take advantage of their stadium seating and massive screen. 

The game itself was entertaining and I allowed myself to divulge in the generous portions of junk food that was strewn about in the lobby – after all, the Super Bowl only comes once a year and it has been nearly a month since a holiday has provided me with a carte blanche on gluttony.

In the final minutes of the game, the Giants made what will probably go down in history as a legendary comeback to take the lead and ultimately defeated the Patriots, who had gone undefeated up to that point in time.  

As the final seconds ticked off the clock I found myself feeling starting to feel curious to know what it would be like to feel the thrill of winning the Super Bowl.  As the camera panned through the various people on the Giants team I began daydreaming about how each would spend their time in the aftermath of the championship game.

Many of the younger players would probably go to clubs in Scottsdale and revel in their victory, ordering bottles of champagne while surrounded by groupies.  The older players and coaches might go out to a late dinner and then head home to their families.  Tom Brady would go and find some consolation in spending the night with Gisele Bundchen until she gets her agent to hook her up with a different star.  Eli Manning would probably go back to his hotel to play Madden 2007 and eat twizzlers.  

As a commercial break ended, the broadcast flashed to a transitional shot of University of Phoenix Stadium (what a stupid name) and one could make out streams of red and white lights surrounding the stadium.  I then began wondering about how all the thousands of fans throughout the Phoenix / Scottsdale area would be spending the rest of the evening. 

I imagined many would probably be headed to post-Super Bowl parties to drink and revel in the upset. . .which made me feel suddenly confused, as did the elation I felt in my stomach after the Giants had pulled off an upset that I’m sure will go down as one of the biggest upsets in the history of the NFL. 

The question that kept popping into my head was, “Why the f%#k do I care?” 

What is it about the spectacle of an event broadcast to millions through television that is so powerful that it can elicit such an emotional, visceral reaction?  

What is it embedded in our collective subconscious that compels us to care about contrived social structures, and even moreso for individuals that we have never met or who are completely unaware of our existence? 

Through the viscerality of television and our own empathetic natures we somehow manage to glom on to the collective emotions of individuals who are so physically and practically disconnected from us they might as well not even exist.  

I think it is an unhealthy thing – I think it distracts us from our own relationships and our condition.  I think it creates noise to occupy us from the banality of our existences and there is some deep-seeded neurotic urgency to the way we cheer for teams because if that wasn’t there then we would have to do something that is infinitely frightening – we would start to retrospect. 

But the painfulness of retrospection is ephemeral because once we have refocused our perspective on a level that better befits our condition two things happen:

First, the banality of our life dissipates and the things about it that seem dull in the gloss of television suddenly become animate.  There is a strange sort of reversal in the value of our own experience versus the experience of others more famous than us.  Suddenly, the spectacle of televised reality becomes utterly insignificant.

Second, we can get back to the things and people in our own lives, which are the things that are ultimately important. 

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