Wealth and Hubris Just Sort of Go Together

Contrary to the beliefs of some of Curmie’s more conservative acquaintances, he is not, in fact, a socialist (although he’s been accused of worse). His retirement nest egg is tied up in things like stocks and bonds and mutual funds (oh, my!), he believes in personal property, and he advocates for equal opportunity rather than equal outcomes.  

That doesn’t mean, however, that he’s a fan of malignant capitalism.  While the Venn diagram of the extremely rich and the legitimately praiseworthy doesn’t quite look like Little Orphan Annie’s eyes, it’s a hell of a long way from concentric circles. Curmie offers two examples from recent headlines. Both involve corporate entities, but one of those enterprises really boils down to a single person. Let’s start there. 

There do remain a few absolute truths in the world: water is wet, dry ice is cold, and Elon Musk is an asshole. We all know about his narcissism, his hypocrisy, and his unwillingness to take responsibility for the damage he routinely causes. He has demanded that Twitter engineers allow him to bypass the algorithm to make certain his tweets are seen by millions, and he was particularly incensed that Joe Biden’s Super Bowl tweet was seen by more people than his was. Just as a side note, Biden’s was actually kinda cute; Musk’s, now deleted, consisted of three American flags, “Go @Eagles!!!,” and three more flags. Boring is as boring does. 

Oh, and of course a couple weeks back he fired an engineer who had the audacity to tell him the truth instead of what he wanted to hear. Hanging out at the Super Bowl with Rupert Murdoch wasn’t going to do his independent-thinking and anti-media credentials a lot of good, either. Indeed, the difference between Musk and Murdoch is that the latter is at least honest about his belief in unfettered capitalism and his country-club neo-Fascism. 

But alas, Gentle Reader, it gets worse. In one of the most perverse tweets in history, Musk first brags that “Starlink [another of his companies] is the communication backbone of Ukraine, especially at the front lines, where almost all other Internet connectivity has been destroyed,” then tries to defend his unconscionable decision to restrict Ukraine’s ability to use the service to control drones because, get this, “we will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.” 

This was in response to a tweet from former astronaut and Navy captain Scott Kelly, who wrote “Defense from a genocidal invasion is not an offensive capability. It’s survival. Innocent lives will be lost.” The rest of us would say “well, duh.” Musk, of course, prefers to spout inanities. Dude, you’re looking into the wrong end of the telescope again. Russia are the invaders, the aggressors, and, frankly, the evil ones. (Curmie saw that look, Gentle Reader: no, not the Russian people, the Russian government.) All Ukraine wants to do is to keep their country, and they’re looking for a way to do that. It’s not Zelenskyy who’s threatening WWIII; it’s the other guy. 

It’s unreasonable, of course, to believe that a wealthy buffoon like Musk would do the right thing, or that he’d refrain from butting in where he had no business (Ukraine’s outgoing ambassador to Germany told him that “F--- off is my very diplomatic reply to you”), but when he’d been (or pretended to be, back when it was more fashionable) a vocal supporter of Ukrainian sovereignty, it might not have been too much to ask that he not actively do the wrong thing. 

Many questions have now been answered, but one remains: who is Elon Musk’s most admired world leader in history—Vladimir Putin… or Neville Chamberlain? 

xxxxx 

The earlier mention of Musk’s Super Bowl tweet and his presence at the game ties in with the other manifestation of corporate arrogance run amok. Curmie refers, of course, to the National Football League. There’s this concept called a “Clean Zone” that the NFL has been pushing for years. This year, this nonsense forbade “temporary signage,” including “Banners (cloth or vinyl), Pennants, Flags, Window paintings, Posters/Flyers, Balloons” in an area of almost two square miles for five weeks, beginning four weeks before the Big Game (you can’t mention the Super Bowl by name, of course, and the NFL actually tried to trademark “Big Game,” too) and extending a week after the game. This latter provision doesn’t make any sense even if corporate greed is somehow a sufficient justification for the restrictions. 

As is often the case, a writer for FIRE provides really good snark: “Sorry parents, but the decorations for your kid’s birthday party will now need the approval of the NFL and the Arizona Super Bowl Host Committee.” Think that’s an exaggeration? Well, the food trucks in Houston in 2017 had the audacity of having the wrong brand of tire. They had to be painted over. Yes, really. This time, though, someone decided to do something about it… more on that in a moment. 

According to an article by Sam Borden and Sara Coello on the ESPN site (linked above), this abuse of wealth and power came as a response to a ploy by another corporate behemoth, Budweiser, in 1999. Apparently Bud was not an official sponsor, but found ways of getting messaging out in the area surrounding the stadium. Jim Steeg, the NFL’s chief goon special events head marketing dude for a long time, whines that “All of a sudden, there were inflatables or signs—they’d buy [parking] lots up and put up things advertising their brands, while your official guys were only getting what was inside the stadium. We had to do something.” 

No, you self-righteous prick, you didn’t. You could have accepted the fact that you can make whatever restrictions you want on properties you control, but neither you nor local city councils can deprive citizens of their first amendment rights just because you can acquire more lucre by doing so. Oh, but the NFL says Clean Zones aren’t just about money: they’re “an important tool in protecting public health, safety and welfare” according to a hosting document for the 2018 Super Bowl in Minneapolis. If you believe that, Gentle Reader, Curmie has an ocean-front property you might be interested in purchasing. It’s in Kansas, but you’re not biased against the Midwest, are you? 

Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon, or a specifically American one. Curmie wrote about the utter stupidity that surrounded the London Olympics in 2012. The London organizing committee actually hired 286 “enforcement officers” who had no responsibilities other than to protect the interests of corporate sponsors, at the expense of Londoners and out-of-town spectators alike. Curmie is not an expert on British law, but it’s his understanding that there’s no equivalent to the US’s 1st amendment, so what happened there was unconscionable in ethical terms but probably legal. 

Not so, west of the Atlantic. It’s been clear for a long time that the NFL has no scruples and city governments have no spines. This is not news. But there’s a point at which someone has to say enough is enough. That person this year is a man named Bramley Paulin, a property-owner in the affected area. He got the Goldwater Institute involved, and filed suit. 

Quoting the ESPN article here: 

Judge [Brad] Astrowsky, the Phoenix judge, made his views clear: The original Clean Zone ordinance, which gave the NFL or host committee approval power over signage, was “totally antithetical to the principles of limited government” because the host committee is clearly “an entity interested in protecting NFL sponsors and the NFL” as opposed to serving the people of Phoenix.

Astrowsky declared the Clean Zone “unconstitutional,” which of course it has always been, but various other legal challenges have failed to gain traction. 

The city of Phoenix managed to drag out the process enough to all but make the situation moot, however. It wasn’t until the Wednesday before the Super Bowl before Paulin could install signs advertising a company called Max Guard. A few hours later, two men brought a ladder, cleared the fence into Paulin’s property, and removed the signs. They’re caught on tape, but as far as Curmie can ascertain, they’re still at large. 

Curmie, of course, is the embodiment of blissful naïveté, so he would never suggest that the NFL and/or city officials might be implicated in that theft. Were he of a cynical disposition, however, he might suggest that anyone confident of those organizations’ innocence might want to add to that Kansas property noted earlier with a similar one in Iowa. 

Rich people—absurdly rich people, at least—whether as individuals or gathered into an organization or corporation, really think their wealth ought to compensate for their lack of ethics. All it actually does, though, is to aggravate their moral failings.

The Game Was Good. Not Much Else Was.

This is the sort of image that ought to make
the NFL insist on better field conditions.
It won’t, of course.

It’s the aftermath of Super Sunday, that annual opportunity for the National Football League to demonstrate its obeisance to capitalist overlords with garish and vulgar displays of narcissism and hypocrisy, for advertisers to spend literally millions on commercials that are neither endearing nor humorous, for an over-hyped and over-produced half-time show appreciated by the fans of the artist in question and no one else, and of course for Fox’s attempt to find the worst possible team of broadcasters. 

But wait… that’s not all! (We’ll get to that in a moment. Read on, Gentle Reader.) 

We can’t blame the boring commercials on the NFL, and—to be fair—Curmie missed some because he didn’t watch much of the pre-game slop and a couple of ads he did see were actually good (Amazon’s was both cute and sentimental, with a nice twist at the end; Workday’s was actually funny—“Hi, I’m Ozwald” is good stuff). And the game’s officiating was no worse than usual: a couple of penalties missed, a reversal that shouldn’t have happened… but the call that had Eagles fans (and Fox designated moron analyst Greg Olsen) in a tizzy was actually correct, as even Eagles’ cornerback James Bradberry admitted: “It was a holding. I tugged his jersey. I was hoping they would let it slide.” 

We can’t expect much from the announcers, either. Play-by-play dude Kevin Burkhardt made a number of objective mistakes, but he’s not as awful as Joe Buck was, so there’s that. Olsen is a blowhard, given to stating the obvious as if it were Solomonic wisdom. 

Inexplicably, he got a lot of adulation for his call of a play late in the game. With the Chiefs well into range for a potentially game-winning field goal and a little under two minutes on the clock, KC ran Jerick McKinnon off left tackle. He broke through the front line and could have scored a touchdown had he wanted to do so. But as the Idiot Olsen screamed “He’s got to get down,” he did, staying inbounds and allowing Kansas City to run down the clock so that the Eagles had only a single shot at a Hail Mary after Harrison Butker kicked a chip-shot field goal. 

Sports Illustrated’s Andy Nesbitt gasped that “That is so good. His energy and sense of urgency on that call were exactly what that play needed, and Olsen made a dramatic moment feel dramatic, which is what good announcers do.” All this proves is that Nesbitt is even stupider than Olsen, which is no small hurdle to clear. 

Here’s the thing. First, it wasn’t a dramatic moment at all; making the mundane “feel dramatic” is what people who don’t understand drama do. Second, Olsen trod all over Burkhardt’s call, making the game about himself (he’s trying to be the NFL’s version of Bill Walton or Dick Vitale, either of whom will make Curmie watch a different game, listen on the radio, or hit the mute button). Third, the two announcers had just discussed what the Chief’s strategy should be. Burkhardt even says they “could essentially run it down to the field goal try.” 

Earlier, Olsen argues for not scoring the touchdown, but he doesn’t say why. There are two kinds of people who watch the Super Bowl: those who know something about football and those who don’t but who take advantage of the opportunity to have a party with friends and loved ones. The former group sees the Chiefs’ forgoing the touchdown as a likely if not obvious strategy, so Olsen isn’t telling us anything. The latter might wonder why you wouldn’t want to score a touchdown. The answer—that you’d rather be ahead by 3 with 5 seconds remaining than ahead by 7 with over a minute and a half left and a Pro Bowl quarterback on the other sideline—went unspoken throughout. 

Of course, Fox also felt compelled to show us all the celebrities at the game. Curmie remembers LeBron James and Paul McCartney; there were others. Exactly why anyone should care surpasses Curmie’s feeble ken, but it did serve as a nice reminder that there was virtually no one at the game who wasn’t stinking rich: the average ticket price was close to $8800. Note: because the average fan can buy tickets only on the secondary market, there is no real “face value ticket,” and different distributers offer different deals. But hey, you could get a crappy seat across from the corner of the endzone for a mere $5,308. But if you wanted one of those luxury boxes, that’d run you between $1.5 million and $2 million—they were “in high demand,” after all. Of course, several people can fit into one of those boxes, so it could work out to only $100-200K per person. 

Curmie’s favorite moment was when we got to see Elon Musk sharing a box with Rupert Murdoch. Musk was even looking in the direction of the game, although whether he was paying attention isn’t clear. Fox’s Burkhardt, of course, felt compelled to marvel at the two “brilliant” men; Curmie supposes that the more accurate term, “narcissistic sociopaths,” would be too many syllables. The shot also underscores the fraudulence of Musk’s claim to being independently minded or anti-media, but you already knew that, didn’t you, Gentle Reader? 

Oh, and we mustn’t forget Terry Bradshaw’s bizarre encouragement of hefty Chiefs head coach Andy Reid to “waddle over here” for a post-game interview. Just as many people initially thought Sylvester Stallone was a great actor because he couldn’t possibly be as stolid and inarticulate as Rocky Balboa (he was), lots of us thought Bradshaw had carefully cultivated his good-ol’-boy image, pretending (we thought) to intentionally play into Hollywood Henderson’s great line that Bradshaw “couldn’t spell ‘cat’ if you spotted him ‘c-a-.‘” It turns out, alas, that he really is that stupid. And crass. And mean-spirited. He should get a job writing Super Bowl commercials; most of them appear to have been written by drunken frat boys who think they’re hilarious, which is certainly the persona Bradshaw seems intent on emulating. 

But the most egregious displays were by the NFL itself. We can start with the half-time performance. Curmie is not a fan of Rihanna, which is fine. A lot of friends thought she was wonderful; they are absolutely entitled to that opinion, even if Curmie thought the lengthy performance (which more than doubled the length of the half-time break) was boring and more about announcing the star’s pregnancy than anything else. 

All that, though, is perfectly reasonable. A halftime show Curmie that would really like would no doubt bore younger viewers. Curmie objects, rather, to the hype about how Rihanna didn’t get paid for her performance. Her estimated net worth is about $1.3 billion (yes, “billion,” with a “b”)—no multi-million dollar donations to charity (à la J.K. Rowling) or attempts to influence policy about an issue she knows nothing about (à la Bill Gates or Elon Musk) for her, apparently—so we might suspect that the free publicity will be enough to leave her above the poverty line. 

The point is that everybody else involved in that show had damned well better have been paid: the choreographer, dancers, lighting designer and technicians, sound techs, computer programmers and operators, the engineers who created and built those amazing LED rising platforms and the rigging that made them safe, the techs who got all that machinery on and off the stage in mere minutes. Most if not all of those folks are union workers (see this graphic of the unions involved), so they were appropriately recompensed for their time and expertise. Add in the cost of the equipment, and the total pricetag had to have been in eight figures (yes, Apple paid for some of it). Certainly the NFL could have spent a little less on glitz and made a more generous contribution to the Pat Tillman Foundation if that’s a cause they actually believe in rather than one they think looks good to fans. 

But it’s the pre-game festivities where your particular political and quasi-political philosophies come into play, Gentle Reader. If you lean a little to the left, you no doubt winced at the hijacking of Pat Tillman’s legacy by the very military that killed him: no, not just put him in harm’s way, killed him and strove valiantly to cover up the evidence of having done so. Even the Military Times is raising an eyebrow over the whitewashing of Tillman’s death. 

Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals safety who turned down a multi-million dollar offer in order to enlist in the army in the aftermath of 9/11, was a legitimate hero. Curmie’s pacifist friends might object to that term, but it is undeniable that he rejected personal wealth in order to follow a path he believed led to the greater good. Of course, he thought he’d be sent to Afghanistan—you know, where the threat was located—but ended up in Iraq, instead. 

Significantly, he regarded the invasion of Iraq as “fucking illegal,” and generally objected to US policy in the area. He was subsequently transferred to Afghanistan, where he was killed by friendly fire; the military then proceeded to burn his uniform and body armor to conceal the truth. 

The Pat Tillman Foundation is an honorable organization, as far as Curmie can determine, and their honorees are worthy recipients. But, as Jay Willis tweeted, “Obviously the Army killing Pat Tillman and covering it up afterwards is the worst thing the U.S. military did to him, but the years they’ve spent rolling out his portrait backed by some inspirational music as a recruiting tool is a surprisingly close second.” 

Of course, all this ties in with the NFL’s simplistic and repellent conflation of patriotism and militarism, exemplified by the now ubiquitous pre-game flyover by fighter jets (your tax dollars at work!). Ah, but if your predilections tilt right-ward, you were no doubt exasperated by the breathy announcement that all of those pilots this time were (gasp!) women. (Who cares?) Curmie is not quite as inured to quotas and virtue-signaling as he would like to be. Or maybe that’s a good thing. 

There was also the treatment of the national anthem as what Jack Marshall has rightfully described as “the opening act,” as it was followed by both “America the Beautiful” (bad enough), and “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is sometimes referred to as the “black national anthem,” suggesting not inclusion but separatism. Curmie frankly doesn’t care if he ever hears the Star Spangled Banner at a sporting event ever again, but if you’re going to play it, give it the respect it deserves, and that isn’t as the antepenultimate song, the warmup for the finale. 

Ah, but Curmie promised you a “that’s not all” story, didn’t he, Gentle Reader? Here it is: the NFL’s most glaring failure was the condition of the field. SB Nation’s headline that “The playing surface at the 2023 Super Bowl is basically a big Slip ‘N Slide” may be a bit hyperbolic, but it’s not terribly wide of the mark. It was a minor miracle that no one suffered a potentially career-ending injury from the slippery turf. Both teams’ kickers had their plant foot slide out from under them (that’s Eagles kicker Jake Elliott on the second-half kickoff in the photo above); ball-carriers and pass-rushers alike looked like something out of a silent movie comedy as they slid around. And apparently the half-time show made conditions even worse.

The grass itself was bad enough, but where it had been painted over (the NFL just can’t resist hyping itself) was worse: enough so that even the Idiot Olsen worried at game’s end that the easy game-winning field goal attempt might not be so easy, as the kick would come from the painted part of the field, which included virtually everything between the hashmarks from about the 17 to 33 yard-lines… where the overwhelming majority of point-after and field goal attempts take place, of course. 

Eagles defensive end Haason Reddick called it “the worst field [he’d] ever played on.” That, shall we say, is not commentary one wants to hear about the sport’s signature event. It’s important to point out that the Eagles weren’t making excuses—head coach Nick Sirianni said “It’s not like we were playing on the on ice and they were playing on grass.” 

Two additional points need to be made. First, the slipperiness of that turf has been an issue for a long time—time enough to notice and to do something. The Chiefs complained about field conditions when they played the Cardinals back in the season-opener. Injuries to Butker and cornerback Trent McDuffie, the Chiefs’ first-round draft choice, were both attributed to the slippery field. 

Another rather significant game—the NCAA national semi-final between TCU and Michigan—played on that field also featured players for both teams sliding around. Whoever is in charge of that turf needs a good talking-to at the very least. Which brings us to the other big point: there was lots of grandstanding about the grass prior to the game about the new $800,000 turf.

There was a puff piece in England’s Daily Mail, of all places, about 94-year-old groundskeeper George Toma who, we might reasonably surmise, kinda wishes he’d retired last year. And there were self-promoting posts from two different sources—the United States Golf Association (well, actually Golf Digest on the USGA’s behalf), and Oklahoma State University. The latter, at least, is now scrambling to say that their grass was only the underlayer, that it was some other totally different top layer that was the problem. Who knows, they may even be telling the truth, but we sure as hell wouldn’t be hearing about that part if the field had been fit for an early-season 1-A high school game. 

The bottom line is more concerning. Eight years ago, Curmie wrote about the decision to play the Women’s World Cup on artificial turf, suggesting that FIFA a). was being sexist, and b). really couldn’t care less about the health and well-being of the players. The NFL can’t be accused of sexism, and they’ve long since demonstrated their indifference to injuries such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, but this breaks new ground. Football is a rough sport, and injuries are an inevitable part of the game.  What we’re talking about here are acute injuries that could readily be prevented.  What is worse: the NFL not only doesn’t care about players, they don’t even care about the game. 

We should have known that already, but some of us held onto the naïve belief that no one could possibly be that stupid or uncaring. We were wrong. It’s time to admit it.