Bill Maher vs Chuck Klosterman: Football is socialist

Why does everything these days have to be a liberal/conservative argument? Crazy (and kinda funny when he’s not pulling the uber-partisan bullshit) comedian Bill Maher recently used football to show how America loves socialism. He specifically used the Super Bowl as an excuse to send his own politicized left-wing message.

New Rule: With the Super Bowl only a week away, Americans must realize what makes NFL football so great: socialism…. just like President Obama wants to do with his secret army of ACORN volunteers…..Or to put it another way, football is more like the Democratic philosophy.

And now I kinda don’t like him because of it. Yeah, the NFL has revenue sharing. Yeah, it’s a more ‘Democratic’ system than baseball. But it’s a stupid comparison. The NFL is run by billionaires. It’s idiotic to call the upper-upper-class investing together as democratic. Plutocratic? Sure.

His argument is shallow and simplistic. The NFL should be loved by democrats, and baseball (a slow monotonous gawdawful sport) should be loved by conservatives. No. Baseball is enjoyed by people who don’t have hobbies. With 162 games a year they don’t need any real hobbies. And football is enjoyed by bros and people with obsessive personalities. And most people, like me, are casual sports fans who catch a game when they can. It’s not a conservative/liberal issue.

And this is why I like Chuck Klosterman. Sure, sometimes he doesn’t choose the most interesting subjects to write on. But he has a unique view of the world. A viewpoint that is not over-bearing or totally one-sided. As he wrote in Eating the Dinosaur:

Pete Rozelle…convinced America that football was conservative…And he did this while simultaneously convincing all the league’s owners to adopt revenue sharing, arguably the most successful form of socialism in U.S. history. The reason the NFL is so dominant is because the NFL is basically Marxist. This was Rozelle’s greatest coup, and everybody knows it. But you’d never guess that from watching the NFL Network. Marxism is not a talking point.

He doesn’t get in your face about it. He doesn’t make it a liberal/conservative issue. He just says it like it is. If only Bill Maher could do that, without a shit-eating grin on his face. Maybe then I’d still be watching his show.

<Bill Maher via Huffpo>

<Chuck Klosterman via Eating the Dinosaur>