I've compared politics to sports before in passing, and it's an easy superficial comparison. You root for your favorites, ha ha, something something referees, etc. I'm not one of the first few thousand people to write about this, but I'm still going to. On this Fake Inauguration Day, after my favorite team shit themselves on national TV, it seemed appropriate.
The Victory Parade
The Fake Inauguration (I call it that because he was already sworn in; it's not a slight. And since it's also the observance of MLK Day, i.e. Fake MLK Day [it's always the Monday after the 15th], all the better!) has quite the lineup of performers, and why not? It's the Victory Parade. We could argue that the whole song and dance of the ceremony is a waste of money, and then someone else could argue back that there's an entire group of people whose income depends on the ceremony and then we could...but why bother? Are you going to second-guess the right of a team to have their victory parade? If Duck Boats were a thing in DC, Obama would totally ride to the ceremony on one.
The Partisan Pretzel
Bill Maher may be a self-congratulatory blowhard, but he has a way with words: the Partisan Pretzel refers to a state of mind wherein one will forgive anything a friend does while demonizing anything an enemy does, no matter how hard he/she has to twist. Hated the Patriot Act under W? But drone strikes are okay. Against the main tenet of Obamacare with all your heart? Wasn't that bad when a Republican House Committee first proposed it decades ago. For every time we raise cain regarding a head-hunting defense, we're also defending our quarterback when he basically tries to spike someone. See, I'm doing it now.
The New Scheme
Okay, this one's a bit of a stretch, but stay with me: Chip Kelly probably isn't going to try to bring his spread offense wholesale to the NFL, even if you could do much worse than Michael Vick for that sort of thing. Even so, you can bet that there will be significant changes to the Philly offensive scheme. Kelly may have had success right out of the gate at Oregon, but history dictates that it might take a few years to draft and coach a team that can use that new scheme to make a dent in the playoffs.
But we want results now. Right Now. Who knows how many coaches had a great plan that never had a chance because it took too long? How many politicians have been voted out of office because their "new schemes" didn't yield immediate positive results? Culture isn't immovable, but it is mostly molasses. No big changes to our financial, social or military culture will happen quickly, unless they secretly don't matter that much. In an Instant Gratification society like ours, I worry that we're moving closer to an Idiocracy scenario where we refuse to believe that it takes a few weeks for plants to start to grow.
WHY'D YOU WRITE THIS?
It's not just because I have very few coherent things to say about politics, though that is part of it. The last time I made this comparison was in 2008, when I was slightly more lighthearted about the state of the world. Not that I thought everything was going to be fixed immediately, but there was a high voter turnout and it seemed like we were, at the very least, headed in a new direction, even if we may have been following an imperfect bearing.
I write things like this because sports and politics have many similarities. And that's fucking pathetic. The idea that our strongest collective political act, voting, is undertaken by a scant majority is sad. But the fact that there is an entrenched two-party presidential system where intellect and tangible plans are undervalued in favor of immediate public perception is downright depressing.
In every election, we must vote our conscience. With the information we have. Regardless of which team we root for. If all we have is our votes, we have to make them count as a democratic act, not a Facebook status.
Go Niners.
