I’ll make fun of your Super Bowl, but you can’t make fun of my Spock ears

By David McElroy · February 1, 2015

I won’t be watching the Super Bowl today. I doubt Grumpy Cat will be watching, either, despite someone decking him out in a Seattle logo here. I figure he wants both teams to lose.

I enjoy football, but I’m a college football fan. The pro game bores me. I don’t have an attachment to any of the professional teams, so I just don’t care one way or the other who wins.

I get tired of the rabid obsession that seems to descend upon the United States on the day of this game. It seems excessive to me, and I’m sure it’s easier for me to see it that way since I’m outside of the mass of participants.

But despite my disinterest and my discomfort at the obsession, I’m getting increasingly uncomfortable with the backlash against it. I’m afraid that those of us who don’t care about the game have become a bit elitist and arrogant.

I see non-football fans competing with each other to see who can care the least about the game. I see people condescendingly saying that if others would just care about the things they care about — whatever they happen to be — the world’s problems would be fixed. I see people looking down their noses at others simply because they enjoy a game that doesn’t matter to the first group.

In a lot of ways, it’s just another manifestation of something that keeps troubling me. It’s just another form of people saying, “Why aren’t you people more like me?”

The funny thing is that those of us who might be prone to make fun of people’s Super Bowl obsession have our own obsessions. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Star Trek. (I still know more about it than a normal person would admit to.) I follow the tech industry obsessively. I don’t have any logical reason, because it’s unrelated to anything I do for a living, but I spend hours each week reading articles and listening to podcasts about insider details of the tech industry, especially Apple coverage.

Among those I know who take pride in not caring about the Super Bowl, I know people who have serious interests in things such as science fiction, video games, role-playing games, obscure musical instruments, ancient Viking history, linguistics, typography and more.

We all have things that fascinate us. For many people in this country, that’s football or basketball. In most other countries, it’s soccer (or what they would call football). Those are all socially acceptable interests that are seen as normal. I think some people are so eager to prove they’re not like the mainstream that they go out of their way to say, “I reject what you like — even if I’m absolutely ignorant of it.”

I didn’t grow up knowing much about sports. I felt ignorant and marginalized in many ways. I went through periods when I followed college football, but as I started understanding more about social roles — especially the divide in high school between jocks and nerds — I thought I hated sports.

It wasn’t until I had to start covering high school football and basketball for a newspaper — taking pictures and writing stories — that I learned enough about the games to even have a real opinion.

I surprised myself by enjoying the games.

I learned that the games are little dramas that are contests of skill and will. They were about intelligence and emotion and the will to prepare physically. There was much more to the games than I had realized.

I’ll never be obsessed with sports. I enjoy college football, but I mostly just follow University of Alabama sports, not football in general. (I wasn’t even an Alabama fan until I want to college there.) I enjoy the games. I enjoy it when we win. I’m addicted to the feeling that comes with winning championships. But when a game is over — win or lose — it’s over. I’m not obsessed and it doesn’t rule my life. I like to think I have a balanced approach to it.

If you divided the country into groups and call them jocks and nerds, I’d definitely be one of the nerds. It’s the group I identify with. Most of my friends are most solidly in that group. They’re “my people.”

But in the same way that the jocks have been nasty and unfair to the nerds over the years, I suspect many of my people have been unfair to them, too.

There’s nothing wrong with following football and enjoying it. There’s nothing wrong with getting caught up in the excitement of the Super Bowl. There’s nothing wrong with using it as an excuse for a social event (for those who actually like social events).

I won’t be watching the Super Bowl, not because I’m disdainful but because I just don’t care. If you do care, I’m not going to make fun of you, just as I hope you won’t make fun of me for the Spock ears I owned as a teen-ager.

For my fellow nerds, let’s enjoy our nerd lives, but let’s realize that it’s just as reasonable for others to have their obsessions as it is for us to have ours. Remember, we’re the ones out of step with the world, not them.

A guy who used to wear plastic Spock ears has no room to make fun of people who do things such as wear cheese hats on their heads.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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