THE QUEST FOR 0-17 - YEAR ONE, WEEK FOUR

[Reva Freedman's depiction of how the doomed mind becomes Doomed]

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I had already plotted out an angle for writing this week’s Quest for 0-17, involving first round drafted QBs, but then the Colts won their game, and both the Giants and Jets took games into overtime for slim victories as well, leaving us with only two teams left that have not won a game. And they’re two very different teams, stuck in the same position currently, and if I’m being honest, I think the chances of either of them even going 0-8 is slim, but we’re going to write this thing out as a manifestation of doom and curses upon the American Empire. But I’m left a bit shook by the two teams left, and their relation to failure demons, and Neil and myself to be perfectly honest. So this week’s going to be a bit more personal, because as Empire’s collapse, lords escape, and somehow survive to see another empire.

Detroit Lions (0-4; 9.5 average margin of defeat) – The Lions seemed to return to being the stereotypical Lions, with people retweeting clips of snappers hiking the ball to an unprepared quarterback in slow motion. That particular type of error is the most failure demon bad move of all, because it shows that not even your team is entirely ready to start at the same time. There’s literally only two people involved in such a thing, and often the only two people who touch a football in a live play. And yet they’re out of sync, because one’s hands is not on the ass of the other, where you are more closely connected, physically, less able to fuck up like that.

But I got to thinking about doom in more general sense, because let’s face it… Lions fans are doomed, whether this team finishes 0-17 or not. They were the first to go 0-16. And I actually think about that in terms of Neil, and myself, as when we first started Armchair Linebacker, there weren’t sites like that, with coverage across the sport but with dedicated individuals per team, written from that fucked up angle internet writing was developing, a sort of bastard child of Gonzo journalism as created by Oscar Zeta Acosta but popularized by Hunter S. Thompson, as practiced through the broken minds of those of us who were the early clinical trials participants of the world wide web’s deteriorating effects on critical thinking skills. Since those days, a bunch of shit has gotten more popular, creating “content” related to sports, much of it in a barely clever half-witted version of this gonzo style, that at this point is nothing more than a dragged net of a collection of relevant tweets compiled with a half paragraph of commentary that’s intelligent only if your mind is numbed by a steady intake of alcohol and Rogan-esque podcasts. The internet has become Barstool Sports.

And in this time, Neil and myself have seen people we actually know become “legitimate” journalists, though I probably could’ve used the scare quotes around journalist as well. They’ve compromised their souls enough to get blue checks, and be considered a part of the respectable mainstream, which has become far less honorable in the digital age, which is fine by me to be honest. But how does it become quirkier, yet still ruled by a connected caste system where blue checks are more valued than somebody who actually says wild shit because they’re wild, not because they’re pretending to be crazy for the clout and lols?

At this point, it’s important for me to clarify a thing I still struggle with, and Neil struggles with more than me – there never was a meritocracy. You don’t actually become successful by being good at something. It’s a matter of wealth, connection to wealth, and ability to navigate the wrought iron gates to larger access. Some idiot kid of a millionaire who mimics Hunter S. Thompson’s early writings for ESPN’s website (which were pretty bad, honestly; I was thankful he finally died, for his own sake) is more likely to become a “wildly” successful internet sports writer than some actual fucked up person who grew up using sports as escapism from their wretched existence, full of traumas, poor choices, and absorbing the self-destructive toxins of their native environment.

How does this relate to the Lions? Well, in the world’s football, a notable difference is supporters feel they have a claim to the club they follow that is deeper than ownership’s. We don’t apply this in America, because we’ve all been indoctrinated with this perverted notion of “freedom” that actually is subservient to the oligarchy. Shit, I’m the perfect example, for abandoning the Washington football team, and the NFL entirely, because their new (at the time) owner was wealthier, and likely to be healthier and live longer, than I could ever hope. It meant the rest of my life (and those close to me) was going to be torturous every Sunday until death. What’s the point of maintaining that self-destructive habit? None. But many of us do exactly that every day of our lives, simply because it’s all we know.

The Lions have been owned by the descendants of Henry Ford for most of their fans’ lifetimes. Henry Ford helped make Detroit a pre-eminent post-industrial American city. Those days are long gone though, and despite the downtown revitalizations we spoke of last week, the bulk of the city and even the older suburbs are a sprawling network of metaphysical tumbleweed, where those left behind carve out existences, despite there not being an encouraging environment for them to do so. If you think of it as a garden bed, most of the nutrients have been pulled from the soil, plus somebody dumped a bunch of five-gallon buckets of changed oil at the edges of the garden; but there’s folks left there told to fruit. And on top of that, they’re told, “If you work hard, you can overcome all that shit, and not only fruit but fruit amazingly well, with the healthiest and most succulent fruit that history has ever known, because America is unique as a garden bed of opportunity.” But lolol, me or Neil was never gonna be like the descendants of Henry Ford, ever. I could hit the Powerball and MegaMillions every drawing, for seven drawings in a row, and still be more fucked and poor than them. That is the nature of being Doomed. You are born in a poisoned environment, with a mind that has been genetically inclined to make poor choices, over the course of generations, positioned in a mine field of self-destructive choices, and when you get blown up, you are blamed for your own failings, by those who stand on top of a hill overlooking all this, free of mines, who mock you, saying, “It was so easy for me to stand on this hill of excellence… why did you fuck it up?”

So of the two teams, I think the Lions have the better chance of doing poorly for longer, even if they don’t go 0-17. The Lions will always do poorly, because the team is a faded artifact of Ford prominence, no different than if they’d bought a silver and blue Faberge egg, that they loaned out to a public museum for display every fall. That’s essentially what the Lions are at this point – a remnant of previous wealth, a piece of fucked up art since we don’t elevate actual art in America, that these wealthy bastards roll out year after year in autumn, for mark ass people – many of who are born doomed – to have some emotional investment in, which allows those frustrated masses to blow that emotional frustrations out during football games. It allows the Doomed to leak their explosive toxicities in safer ways for the wealthy as well, so that all their life frustrations of failed dreams and continued failure demons and “personal failings” of addiction and dysfunction sneak out their twisted intestines at the same time as them yelling “FUCK!” when the center tosses the ball against the quarterback’s face mask while he’s still barking out the rest of the play to the wide receivers sideways. It is a preventative mechanism, the synthetic opiate of the masses.

In thinking about how Ford’s great-grandchildren are still ruling over the Lions, it’s made me question how close to failure the American Empire is. These bastards can trick us for a long time, perhaps for generations. So I guess I’d love to see an 0-17 team happen, to sidestep that trickery, but I’m not sure it’s in the cards (though I will be checking the literal cards this week, the Appalachian conjure deck I’m fond of now). But the Lions are more doomed than any other club (except maybe the Browns, which oddly has been proven in the past), and there will be little salvation from that any time soon, for all the actual Doomed fans of them. The meritocracy has never been real either, so a few good drafts and a new coach like this tight end dude, who has the fighting spirit of a football player, it makes no difference. When you are doomed, it’s only a matter of time before you are Doomed. (And I guess regardless of whether somebody goes 0-17 for this symbolic death knell for the American Empire, I take solace in the fact we all can see this empire is doomed, which means it’s only a matter of time before it also becomes Doomed, and we can hope to build something next not ruled by these false meritocracies of exaggerated inequality.)

Jacksonville Jaguars (0-4; 10.25 average margin of defeat) – The Jaguars are different though, even though all those blue check false-quirky sports media systems are in overdrive right now talking about Urban Meyer, and the scandals of this 0-4 team, proclaiming them both doomed, even though they’re not. Like not even close. They have a highly marketable first round draft quarterback, a beautiful white man with blonde hair, who is so “American” in all the coded racist ways the far right markets as being American, that he’ll never fail. Just as local big fish in small pond oligarchs are running as write-in candidates for local school boards all over rural and suburban America, to fight perceived threats of “critical race theory” and the replacement of Christians (which is just a quick switch of identity as the long-time racist white nationalist theories that white people are being replaced), Trevor Lawrence will win games. He’s too based Chad looking to not get a few beneficial calls, or rules verdicts, ala the creation of Tom Brady. (Let us never forget the “tuck rule” and it’s direct involvement in manufacturing the dominant aura of both the Patriots and Tom Brady, who – non-coincidentally enough – faced each other for the first time last Sunday night in the second-highest watched Sunday night game ever… a complete engineering of the collective psyche, over the course of decades.) So Trevor Lawrence is too beautifully American (meaning white, male, and submissively obedient but in alpha-presenting ways) to not win a few games. Shit, they were up last Thursday night before blowing it, which all could’ve just been more manufacturing of future legend for all we know.

On top of this, Urban Meyer is the Jaguars coach. And despite the fact he’s catching flak for having gone out drinking after their loss rather than flying home with the team, he’s still Urban Meyer. High profile college coaches have a learning curve when jumping to the NFL, because being a successful college coach is very much like playing a video game with all the cheat codes at major universities. You can recruit whoever you want, because you already have the history of success, plus you have boosters who come with big money, that improves facilities in the above-the-table ways, but also reward the best players in all the below-the-table ways. If you’re a halfway decent coach and get a gig at somewhere like Alabama or Ohio State and don’t do amazingly well, you’d be a complete failure in like managing a drywall company. Like you have to have NO SKILLS to fail at Ohio State as head coach. You’re pretty much given an expensive sports car, and asked to drive it 120 mph. Anybody could do it.

The NFL is not like that, as an actual capitalism-based meritocracy (like college football is, which doesn’t mean it’s a true meritocracy, but a model of that where wealth exaggerates possibility), but rather a socialist cartel of the extremely wealthy, who agree not to destroy each other’s investment by building in parity, or a guaranteed mediocrity. So you can’t just stockpile the best players, have the best facilities, and run away with shit.

The Jaguars though, are owned by a billionaire, who has already gotten involved in Urban Meyer’s behaviors, four weeks in. The reactionary fake-clever media of course has turned this into, “WILL URBAN MEYER GET FIRED? AFTER ONLY FOUR WEEKS?” and then they argue amongst themselves the fantasy scenarios of him either getting fired too early or being kept on when he obviously should be let go. It’s always highly dramatic, over-exaggerated, and ultimately two weeks later entirely pointless. It just occupies the minutes and hours of your life, to keep you dissatisfied and wrapped up in manufactured drama, which has to be sports-related for today’s modern American “alpha” male, who is a submissively obedient a medieval Serf. Urban Meyer is a huge name investment, not unlike Nick Saban when he went to the Dolphins, or Steve Spurrier when Dan Snyder brought him to Washington. It’s just marketing, so he’s not going anywhere.

The Jaguars almost beat the Bengals last Thursday, on a short week. Jacksonville is a growing market, on the coast, in the American South, but with a Pakistani-born owner. It’s the NFL’s crown jewel of young franchises, both completely traditional (in that it serves a predominantly white fan-base, in a conservative region) while having the necessary boxes checked to proclaim itself progressive (minority ethnicity ownership). The American Empire is currently going through a struggle as to how to best position itself for the next generation – whether to circle the wagons of white nationalism (as Republicans as tinged by Trump’s backers want to do), or switch our form of elitism to something less race-based, and built on a more diverse economic inequality, so that you can tell the growing mass of POC poor folks that they too could work hard and achieve greatness, even though it’s a lie, still. It’s a struggle to decide how to display the carnival game of the perceived meritocracy, and Shahid Khan is a wonderful piece of propaganda for neoliberalism, to move the NFL into another 40 years of being a social consciousness engineering program supported by the military-state.

Interestingly enough, this too relates back to Neil and myself, as Tony Khan, Shahid’s son, has executive positions with all of Khan’s sports possessions (the Jaguars, as well as Fulham FC in the English football system). He also is mostly occupied with running a wrestling promotion upstart called All Elite Wrestling, which is supposed to challenge World Wrestling Entertainment for dominance in that realm. Tony Khan was part of some of the same earlier internet wrestling message board culture as Neil and myself and others. Many of these people have latched onto AEW, as it feels to them like proof of their own merit, that somebody from the same background as them is having success running a major wrestling promotion. But Tony Khan was never the same as all us that were Doomed; he was born to be a blue check, whether those blue checks were on display when we all anonymized ourselves as much as possible in the chaotic message board culture of the time. It’s very much like Urban Meyer at Ohio State, in that there’s probably thousands of message board dorks who could have the same success running a wrestling company, if they had the tools. But they don’t, and never will. There is no meritocracy – never was.

So though the Jaguars are getting all the media hype right now, it’s all manufactured. They have an ideal owner, a name value head coach, and a smiling white QB that makes Tucker Carlson feel great. Both the white nationalist and neoliberal visions for continuing the American Empire are perfectly satisfied by what the Jaguars have in place. The chances of them going 0-17 are negligible. They’re not even close do doomed, much less actually Doomed.