Dave's Daily Dose

9/28/2021

More Backlog:

• Another Hero of Two Worlds noodling: It’s really hard to get context for this sort of thing, but based on the last few chapters of the book, I think it’s safe to say that the US in the 1800s was kind of like today’s “Nordic socialism”: the hip new thing that people in the politically stagnant Old World looked over at and said, “Man, I wish my country could be that cool.”

  Of course, as we know, that sentiment may not have been all that accurate and realistic — duh, because slavery — but it’s also important to understand that this is something people genuinely felt.

  What it makes me wonder is, what is going to be Nordic socialism’s “slavery” in a century or two? What’s the one thing that future progressives will wish the Nordics hadn’t done?

• I’m fed up with country singers doing those NFL opening sequences. In fact, I’m fed up with those opening sequences to begin with. It’s just a bunch of useless fluff! I feel like most football fans are actually conditioned at this point to be totally fine with whatever jingle and graphics they toss up when coming back from commercial breaks or the halftime. Play the jingle, let the announcers talk over it with their habitual rape of the demonstrative pronoun (“… Alright Joe, let’s get back to THESE New Orleans Saints!” is a crime against the English language), and get the ball game going.

  What grates on me with the country singers though, is that the whole exercise just reinforces the rednecks’ fraudulent sense of ownership over the entire sport, despite the fact that only 20% of the country is rural anymore. The same fuckheads squeal to high heaven about rap music on the broadcasts and in the stadiums, but no one bats an eyelash about their misty-eyed whitewashed bullshit crap twang assaulting our ears for a whole five minutes before every game.

  [Sorry for the rant. I just REALLY hate country music. And having grown up in the suburbs of a red state full of rednecks, what I hate even MORE are the suburbanites who pretend like listening to country gives them some sort of hillbilly street cred, all while it overwrites their brains with a bunch of whitewashed nostalgic fairytales about god and country.]

• Speaking of misty-eyed nostalgic nonsense, is there a reason why ideas like this seem to be so popular in our beloved country? I’m genuinely asking. It’s just so stupid. People here just love tossing out the dumbest, most simplistic ideas, as if they’ll actually fix anything, instead of trying to figure out what’s really at the root of all our division.

If y’all haven’t noticed, I’m at least working down the backlog now! Sorry some of these are a little stale, but this 2-3 items thing is really helping keep up the productivity.