My wife and I work across the street from one of the most hallowed college football stadiums in the United States.
“Hallowed” is not too strong a word. College football where we live is something of a religion, and I have heard sermons preached and resurrected deities praised with considerably less conviction than the local football team.
Hymns are not in it: if you want real passion and faith and belief, sing “Fight for LSU,” “The Notre Dame Victory March,” or “The Aggie War Hymn” on Game Day.
About once every two or three weeks in the autumn, our workplace experiences a kind of military operation in which tens of thousands of vehicles, including RVs and even occasionally helicopters, cruise with surprising order and purpose around a mile radius, looking for parking spaces; and hundreds of thousands of people filter into a century-old steel structure to cheer for twenty-two men in retro clothing pushing a piece of leather around a field in ten-yard increments. (Clothing in many sports, like that in many religions, tends to freeze at a somewhat random moment in history. Or perhaps not entirely random: it’s usually either at the point that it began or the point when it started to make money.)
We, meanwhile, despair of being able to get to work without a police escort.
The United States of America is essentially insane, and two of my favorite indexes of that insanity are sports and music, both of which I enjoy immensely and both of which can fill the long, wide spectrum spanning from Stupid Cultural Bullshit to The Sublime Inkling of a Deeper Reality.
Recent estimates suggest that Americans spend $55.9 billion per year on sports and $17.1 billion per year on music. As a self-employed uninsured person who is one subcutaneous tumor away from total financial ruin in the richest nation the world has ever known, I know that as I die untreated and impoverished it will be of enormous consolation to me to know that the sports and music economies are flourishing. But I digress.
As a musician myself, I think (along with Humphrey Cobbler, my favorite fictional Anglican church organist) that music is one of the few really serious things, “in a hilarious sort of way,” and so worth fighting about. Music is one of the only things my wife and I regularly spar over. Sports? Not so serious. Therefore fewer fights. Money? Practically illusory, since we haven’t got much. We never fight about money.
But sports and music have this in common: no matter where on the spectrum we sit between Stupid Cultural Bullshit and Sublimity, we who actually participate in sports and music are charlatans clicking a Zippo lighter for the savages half the time; but more than half the time we are participating in the essential savagery of the human race without which our highest elevations are pointless and meaningless.
We musicians and athletes tap the lizard-brained limbic-system, we control dopamine production, we deal a drug, and the people want it and are buying it, and buying it in bulk.
Which brings us, as night follows day, to the majestic problem (I decline to call it a “flaw”) in Libertarian Economics and in Christian “worship” music, with both of which I am broadly but not uncritically sympathetic.
Let’s begin with Chris Tomlin and then move on to F. A. Hayek: this should be fun.
