Football is the most successful cult, in terms of members and profits, in human history. Oh wait, there's also religion.
Steve AlmondA good teacher, after all, wields the authority of a parent with none of the psychological baggage. The best of them are semi-mysterious figures whose wisdom seems boundless and whose approval helps us discover who we are.
Steve AlmondBut the real life of a writer resides in showing up at the keyboard every day, with the necessary patience and mercy, and making the best decisions you can on behalf of your people. Itโs a slow process. It often feels hopeless, more like an affliction than an art form. Most of us will have to find our readers one by one, in other words, and against considerable resistance. If anything qualifies us as heroic, itโs that private perpetual struggle. Put down the magazine, soldier. Forget about the other guy. Remember who you are.
Steve AlmondEven a hundred and fifty years ago, football was popular because it provided a manly spectacle that lots of men needed, after the industrial revolution. We went from a culture that lived out doors and expanded the frontier and fought the Indians to a bunch of guys in offices. So football provided this jolt, a kind of exalted cult of masculinity. And it still does that. Perhaps even more so today.
Steve AlmondAmericans seem to be living in a state of fear about the world, one that just keeps intensifying. I mean, look at our cars and homes. They've become these massive barricades. Look at what we watch on TV and in the movies - it's all a bunch of violent ideation. And all these TV shows about dead bodies.
Steve AlmondOur lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.
Steve Almond