“We won!” a neighbor crows to me. Apparently she’d watched a game of some kind on television the night before.
“What ‘we’?” I snort. Okay, scoff. “You had nothing to do with it.” She probably spent the whole game, and much of her life, eating potato chips and drinking beer.
The conversation ends. She can’t think about it.
She can’t see that her enthusiasm is manufactured. That her ‘support’ for her team isn’t support at all. That ‘her’ team isn’t her team at all. She can’t see that she’s been deluded into thinking that she’s somehow part of it, that she somehow has a stake in it.
Another neighbor, who’d been watching the Olympics, says the same thing. “We won!”
I point out to her as well that she had nothing to do with it.
“Well,” she makes a lame attempt to justify her feelings, “we’re Canadian.”
“I’m Canadian. But when I get a book published, you don’t cheer ‘We got published!'”
And if you did, I’d smack you upside the head.
How can she feel even a little bit of pride and achievement? She did nothing! Not one push-up, not one lap around the track.
“Well,” she tries again, “I support the team with my taxes.”
“And you support my writing with your taxes as well. Whenever I get a grant from the Arts Council,” I explain.
She still doesn’t see it. She doesn’t see that her emotions are being manipulated by the sports corporations, who want to deliver as many potential customers as possible to the companies who buy the advertisements that pay their salaries, because the more viewers, the more they can charge for those advertisements.
Quite apart from that, it’s no coincidence that sports are dominated by men. Or, rather, it’s no coincidence that it’s predominantly men’s sports that get television coverage. It’s just another way of making sure men are the center of the universe. My god, how many television stations are devoted to just sports? Why in god’s name does sport get a regular time slot in the daily news? As if men playing a game is as important as a war! And more important than the changing of our climate (which doesn’t get a regular time slot in the daily news)!
Which makes her ‘We won!’ just a little bit ironic.
