What early 20th century Austrian writers have to teach us about watching football

The neurotic lyrics in this song make it pretty awesome. Who doesn't want to know the IQ of the person they're with, or whether they're going to talk during television shows. Good stuff.


Some quotes from The Man Without Qualities by Rober Musil. Anyone who writes a book for twenty some odd years before kicking off without finishing it, making virtually no money in the process and causing his family to be destitute, is worth quoting a bit. Writing, it appears, despite some people's belief to the opposite, has very little interest in happiness.

"This man who had returned could not remember any time in his life when he had not been fired with the will to become a great man; it was a desire Ulrich seemed to have been born with. Such a dream may of course betray vanity and stupidity, but it is no less true that it is a fine and proper ambition without which there probably would not be so very many great men in the world. The trouble was that he knew neither how to become one nor what a great man is."

Here, my dear friend Mr. Musil makes an excellent point. Why, just the other day I was struck by what a waste my current life is because I'm not involved in politics, which, when one is worrying about nuclear war and helping the global poor et al, seems like the only logical choice. However, that is just the problem, I have this very active mind, which is constantly spinning out scenarios in which things could have been different, but no deep seated interested in pursuing them. I'll lazily refer to it as post-modernism and thus refer to myself as a post-modern anti-hero to make it sound better.

"The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indifference towards the whole, man's monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money grubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking!"

Here Musil nicely hits on the advent of the Internet, the increasing prevalence of shallow thinking induced by constant social media updates, the paucity of restraint we see in our current financial system that causes this melt down, except that Robert Musil was writing about Austria in 1913, which had none of these things.

"But on top of this, a horse and a boxer have an advantage over a great mind in their performance in that their rank can be objectively measured, so that the best of them is really acknowledged as the best. This is why sports and strictly objective criteria have deservedly come to the forefront, displacing such obsolete concepts as genius and human greatness."

Musil makes an excellent point. The truly great thing about sports is the pure and decisive conclusion. I could sit at a table with a dear friend and argue for hours, though I'd rather not, whether Flaubert is a greater writer than Dostoevsky, he isn't of course. However, neither one of us could ever be "proven" correct. This sort of conundrum arises nearly every day in our society, ie the financial reform bill lifted our GDP by somewhere between 1.74 and 4.25 percent, saving, by the Congressional budget office's estimation one million jobs, yet, people are still upset about it. Why? because even if those numbers are right one could argue, like myself, that the money would have been better spent on more infrastructure, or that too many Wall Street execs were bailed out. However, if I asked you who won the Super Bowl last year, in no way shape or form could you argue that anyone but the New Orleans Saints did. We could argue about various mishaps along the way, but by a purely quantifiable measurement the Saints won the game.


The same sort of criterion could be applied to any of the major religions, Christianity being my particular choice, but the endgame, death and the existence or non-existence of an afterlife, or the particular quality/make up of that afterlife is disputable until the end as we don't really, Lazarus withstanding, get to return from the dead.

This is all just a very long defense of the inordinate amount of pleasure I take in watching Michigan football games on fall Saturdays. It's not that I love sports so much. It's that I love that they are definitive in a way that nearly nothing else is any longer.