Deflate-Gate and the Politics of Mass Distraction

If you haven’t been living under a rock, I imagine that you’ve been made aware that the New England Patriots used footballs that were not inflated to the league mandated pounds per square inch in their AFC Championship Game victory over the Indianapolis Colts this past weekend. Remember when I mentioned that the President’s State of the Union would eventually be overshadowed by the next shiny object to be picked up by the news cycle? Well, Wednesday morning, after the speech, this “story” was the 4^th trending topic on Twitter. It’s been picked up by essentially all of the national news shows, and if you’re interested in news programming in this country, it is for the moment basically inescapable. I don’t have any skin in the game as far as this controversy goes. Neither the Patriots, Colts, or Seahawks (New England’s opponent in the upcoming Super Bowl) are my team, but I’ll admit the story looks bad for the Patriots (I would normally link to a story about the issue here, but honestly, any non-football beat writer covering this should be ashamed of themselves). Call me a curmudgeon, but this is the type of story that is slowly driving me away from sports. It seems that almost weekly something occurs that sparks or reignites what is starting to appear to be a moral panic in this country. Everything has some deeper meaning, and we all seem to be oh so concerned about notions of fair play and being role models. Meanwhile, banks and financial institutions continue to rip us off unabated. I hate to apply some type of half-baked neo-Marxist analysis to all of this, but does it seem like we are much more concerned with ensuring that our past-times are fair and above board than we are about making it that way in our real lives?  Seriously, can we just talk about the damn game? If not, I’m checking out until game time, when companies that spent millions of dollars for the privilege, attempt to sell me products I probably can’t afford.