Several people on my email list replied to my celebration of the New York Giants SuperBowl victory with dismissive harrumphs, and I'm sure others quietly did the same. For those who are not football or sports fans in general, suspend your disinterest or prejudice for a moment and consider the following narrative — a parable if not a harbinger of the times we live in:
The New England Patriots, losers in last Sunday's SuperBowl, have been the dominant NFL team throughout the Bush era, winning their first championship in 2002. A victory on Sunday would have earned the players their 4th SuperBowl ring, and was deemed all but inevitable by Vegas bookmakers, the nation's whole cadre of sportswriters, and anyone at all familiar with the season, for the Patriots had racked up an unprecedented record — 18-0 — and were poised to become the Greatest Team of All Time. In the 87-year history of the NFL, only one team has achieved a perfect season — the 1972 Miami Dolphins, who went 14-0.
All year long, the Patriots didn't merely defeat their opponents — they crushed them, in some cases racking up huge, unnecessary and humiliating scores in the final quarter, an unsportsmanlike practice rarely indulged in the NFL or any professional sport. But skeletons have been discovered in the Patriots' locker room...
In the third game of the season, the team was fined $200K and the head coach Bill Belichek $500K for illegally videotaping an opponent coach's sideline signals. And last week, the Boston Herald (the Pat's hometown paper) revealed that their source, a Pats' staff employee in 2002, had admitted to secretly videotaping the St. Louis Rams' workout on the day before the 2002 Super Bowl — the final practice, wherein teams hone the patterns, plays and strategies to be used against a particular team. Gaining "intelligence" about such a workout in a covert operation is an egregious cheat that, unchecked, could lead to runaway escalation: bugs in the coach's office, double-agent waterboys, biological warfare against the opponent's Gatorade, encrypted signals beamed to the quarterback's earpiece, codebreakers furiously trying to hack it... we don't want to go there.
In response to the Herald exposé, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced that the league's czars had been aware of such "rumors" all along, had already conducted an investigation, accepted the Patriot's profession of innocence —that nothing untoward had been done with admittedly once extant tapes — which Goodell subsequently destroyed (this has prompted Sen. Arlen Specter to initiate his own investigation).
The "missing tapes."
Illegal electronic surveillance.
Violation of the league's "constitution."
Steamrolling all opposition.
Is this beginning to sound familiar? It appears that Coach Belichek borrowed the playbook of Karl Rove, and all the team's stunning victories may have been aided by dirty tricks. And like our supine Congress, the NFL Commission has decided to sweep the tainted victories under the rug, in the interest of maintaining faith in the system, however much it has been corrupted — with furtive camcorders, or the hacked results from Diebold voting machines.
Some juggernauts, ruthless in their exercise of raw power, are simply too formidable to tackle with any genuine hope of success. So it was said of the 2007 Patriots, with the trail of carnage in the wake of their historic 18-0 season. The "19-0, Undefeated SuperBowl Champs," "Greatest Team in History" T-shirts, caps and other memorabilia had already been printed. A Boston publisher had already printed commemorative books with the same title. That the Patriots would insure the perfect season by demolishing any foe in the biggest game of the year was a foregone conclusion, and only hopeless-cause romantics could entertain any delusion otherwise.
The New York Giants got off to a rocky start, losing 2 of their first 3 games, and struggled to a second-place finish in their own division. But they entered the playoffs as a "wildcard" team — second-chancers who would have to play an extra game while all the top seeds enjoyed a rest. The Giants won their wildcard game, then handily defeated their own division champs, the Cowboys, in the next round.
In the third round, they played on the Green Bay Packers frozen home turf. Air temperature at game time was —2 degrees, with a wind chill factor of —35 — the kind of brutal conditions that the heavily favored Packers excel in. Lombardi's progeny even pulled their own dirty trick, shutting off the heaters on the Giant's sideline. But the Giants battled to a tie at the end of regulation time, then won in overtime. Now all they had to do to cap an improbably successful season was make an appearance in the Super Bowl and lose to the Greatest Team of All Time.
Incredibly, they pulled off a shocking upset, scoring the winning touchdown with 35 seconds remaining — one to rank with Seabiscuit's victory over War Admiral, or the American hockey team's victory over the invincible Russians (all pros) in the Lake Placid Winter Olympics. So what is the parable here?
Sometimes, a seemingly inconsequential sporting event may signal a shift in the Zeitgeist. Those familiar with the peculiar workings of Synchronicity know that, in Jung's definition, some coincidences are meaningful — a timely eruption of the implicate order that may be shifting under our feet. The relevant coincidence herein:
The fraudulently invincible dynasty of the New England Patriots. And the fraudulently invincible dynasty of the magnificently corrupt Bush-Clinton machine.
The pundits have been assuring us that Hillary is certain to be the Democratic nominee, and that a wildcard like Ron Paul on the Republican side hasn't a ghost of a chance. These become self-fulfilling prophecies, when the GOP establishment and MSM ban Paul from debates and do everything in their power to marginalize him, while HIllary almost certainly benefited from Diebold fraud in the New Hampshire primary. For those who believe that her tearjerk performance was responsible for erasing Obama's 13-point lead... please send me your bank account information post haste — I have a wealthy acquaintance in Nigeria earnestly seeking to augment your net worth.
The dirty tricks have only just begun in this campaign season. Gutterball is the order of the day. Will we succumb to the vile manipulations? A friend who reviles spectator sports laments the lardass Americans who never get any exercise watching superbly conditioned athletes exert themselves — an apt analogy to our political process in recent years. If we stand any chance of taking our democracy back from the cheats, liars and military-industrial complex shills, we are going to have to turn off the TVs, climb down from the bleachers, and get involved.
We are going to have to play with the same indefatigable determination as the New York Giants.
