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Notes -
As an Eagles fan, I had about the best weekend possible.
On Saturday night the Eagles beat the Giants in a performance so dominant that they pulled their starters by the end of the game. Hurts' and his receivers had anemic stat lines, it simply wasn't necessary to try very hard to dismantle the Giants. On a podcast afterward, former Eagle Tra Thomas said you could watch the Giants' players collectively decide it was time to "piss on the campfire" and just get out of the game and into the off-season unhurt, by about the middle of the second quarter. That was great.
But Sunday night was even better. The Dallas Cowboys and their overrated Quarterback Dakota* Prescott managed to completely blow a playoff game against unheralded rookie-back up Brock Purdy and the 49ers. Ending it on one of the most bizarre Hospital Ball plays you will ever see. Instant meme. Let's get our running back fucking murdered, then throw the ball into traffic ten yards in anyway. It was beautiful.
So today, I indulged in one of my many vices. I went through and downloaded a series of Dallas Cowboys fan podcasts. I love listening to other teams' pain. Probably even more than I love listening to Eagles' podcasts gloat after a big win. It's beautiful to listen as Blogging the Boys or About Them Cowboys, and just hear the pain. Hear the bewilderment as to how their massively highly paid quarterback and running back blew the game; how the team just can't seem to execute under pressure; how Brock Purdy now has as many playoff wins as Dak Prescott or Tony Romo; how the same thing seems to happen every year with the Cowboys managing to blow it late in the season; how just last season they blew a playoff game against the Niners in similar fashion.
I love the schadenfreude. The NFL is my outlet for Tribalism. The human mind has an inbuilt capacity for discriminating against and punishing the out-group. This works for any out-group, no matter how tendentious. We must hate someone, it's a required field to fill out on the form. Try to hate no one, you'll just claim you hate those who hate someone. The best way to hack hatred, is to pick an inconsequential hatred to burn it out on. This is ancient knowledge, the Romans had Red-White-Blue-Green Chariot factions. RetVrn! Bread and Circuses generally has a negative connotation, but it worked for a long, long, long time. Rome wasn't built in a day, and it didn't fall in a century. Bread and Circuses kept the plebs in line for centuries in much of the Roman world. By directing their hatreds towards inconsequential things, political rage was blunted, drained of vitality.
I hope to maintain a clear mind on topics that matter. Are there people, groups, factions I dislike? Yes, but I don't want to do so irrationally. My ideal is intellectual Jeet Kune Do, taking the good from everyone and the bad from no one. I don't want to irrationally hate Donald Trump or Joe Biden, I want to understand why they are powerful, absorb what they have right and critique what they have wrong. But the brain wants to hate, wants to hate irrationally, wants to hate viciously, wants to admit nothing positive about anyone wearing the wrong colors. I sate that beast, I feed it the Dallas Cowboys. While my Id is busy hurling batteries at Ezekiel Elliott and joking about the 90s, my rational Superego is free to consider politics and philosophy and religion.
*Men should not be named Dakota. Place names are female; and anyway English shares so much in common with the romance languages that we should stick to their gender rules and name boys DakotO.
If the Cowboys have a million haters, I am one of them.
If the Cowboys have ten haters, I am one of them.
If the Cowboys have one hater, I am him.
If the Cowboys have no haters, that means I am no longer on this earth.
If the World is for the Cowboys, I am against the World. I will hate the Cowboys till my last breath.
Dallas Delenda Est, is what I'm saying.
And even better it's against the 49ers; who I am obligated to by family tradition.
If you can keep it contained to a triviality instead of just generally becoming a hater, I agree with your greater observation as well. I've enjoyed many long blood feuds about which piece of consumer electronics is superior.
DFW resident here. Yeah, that's a fair cop.
My dad had a longstanding personal rule that he won't buy any Cowboys merchandise until Jerry Jones extracts his head from his posterior. He broke that rule last week to buy someone a birthday gift. Let this game be an object lesson.
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More beautiful Cowboys facts:
"Jalen Hurts wasn't born the last time the Cowboys made the conference championship game. That means Hurts' parents had sex, gave birth, raised him, he learned how to play football, went to 'Bama, transferred to OU, got drafted, sat behind Wentz, and then lead his team through a soft-rebuild to the NFC Championship game before Dallas got back." -- David Akers
Dallas Goedert was literally named for the Dallas Cowboys, and he's going to play in the NFC Championship Game before the Cowboys get back to it.
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