There isn’t much about George F. Will that I find endearing, but the one thing that I find totally endearing is his deep dislike—verging on an irrational loathing, really—of football and, most particularly, the Super Bowl. For some reason, the Super Bowl seems to make George feel like—okay, I’m going to go for it—a Jew on Christmas.1 He’s been excluded out.
Was George set upon by boorish football hearties at Princeton, leaving him with deep emotional scars regarding anything that smacks of the pigskin? A possibility not to be dismissed. If only George had attended Oberlin, like me, where there are no football hearties.
Like George, I find the elaborate festivities surrounding the Super Bowl grotesque, but is it really that terrible that the whole country turns into a Las Vegas of the mind for a weekend or so? George is, I think, a strong believer in Original Sin, though he eschews any theological scaffolding for this belief. So why is it so upsetting to see theory confirmed by fact?
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Okay, that’s a little harsh. How about “a Christian on Passover”? I do know a few Jews who hate Christmas almost as much as George hates the Super Bowl, but for the most part they’re pretty blasé about the whole thing. ↩︎
