Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • January 19, 2011 system was brutal at best and became criminal once political pressure intervened, but people in those days were very careful about laying hands on a respectable woman who wasn’t interested. Enter football. The first varsity game was played between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869. Note the year. The college kids from Princeton and Rutgers who played were just a tad too young to have taken part in the Civil War, even as drummer boys. The Civil War was the watershed event of America in that era. Every U.S. president after Lincoln and before Theodore Roosevelt, except for Grover Cleveland, was a Civil War veteran. Andrew Johnson was a political general. William McKinley was a drummer boy. The young men of Princeton and of Rutgers may have wanted to develop a form of combat so their older brothers and the townies didn’t call them “Nancy boys,” which was the term used in those days. Early collegiate football was so violent that, in one year, 11 players died on the field. Andrew Carnegie refused to donate a stadium to Princeton because he thought the game was a senseless waste of life. He donated a lake instead. College football didn’t settle the issues of slavery or secession in any way, shape, or form. The violence was certainly manly, but it was also pointless. On the other hand, it was almost certainly better than heading out West to kill the Indians who were still available, or heading South to lynch blacks who tried to vote. One could call it mitigated evil. The generation of World War I turned sports into the national obsession it is today, again by default. The war left a whole generation of Americans embittered against the so-called statesmen who sent healthy, brave young men overseas to be killed or crippled under the worst battle conditions in the history of the world for no clear purpose. Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota found out that Wall Street banks had loaned $2.5 billion to the Allies as against $27 million to Germany, which could have had something to do with it. The fact that the Allies didn’t pay back our war loans didn’t sit well, either. Politics turned Americans off. Religious values were challenged once the automobile gave young people latitude they had not enjoyed in the days of parlor courtship. Culture was out of the question because most classic composers were German or Austrian, and Prohibition -- and the police corruption Prohibition fostered--made the social mores of the day seem vaguely ridiculous. Sports were what America had left. While the Anglo-Saxons still had a lock on government, many of the most celebrated athletes of the era were German (Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig), Italian (Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto), Irish (Notre Dame teams headed by Norwegian Knute Rockne), Greek (Jimmy Londos), or American Indian (Jim Thorpe.) Commendably, the sports world became an open playing field – except for the shabby way that organized athletics treated superb black athletes like Jack Johnson and Paul Robeson. The cycle turned into a perpetual motion machine. As individual lives became increasingly meaningless for people who neither farmed nor produced handicrafts nor took art and music seriously, the athlete as surrogate provided a huge proportion of the population with a way to feel important even when individuals knew they were irrelevant. What was important in life was not banging out a defective car, but the spectator sports and beer and bonding with people who had become equally irrelevant, and subconsciously knew it. The obsession with team sports shows up in everything America does on the basis of mass participation. Presidents are all supposed to love sports. Most people with the IQ to function at that level find spectator sports tedious and pointless, but they have to pretend to be interested so they can get elected. The sports concept – our side is always right – would have been a tough sell to Socrates or Aristotle, but Americans generally buy into it. Read some of the comments that crop up relevant to very serious issues on the Internet, and you’ll find that most of the respondents prefer attacking “liberals” or “Republicans” instead of analyzing the ideas. Partisan obsession probably starts in the sports world, since few people on either side of the controversy have any respect for politicians, but the idea that they might somehow accomplish something by taking one side or the other is an extension of the idea that your team has to be supported whether they’re right or wrong. This has a crippling effect on how to cope with any problem. People who argue against a fair minimum wage and against at least a limited form of national health insurance are team players for one side. People who argue that every kid should go to a four-year college at the taxpayers’ expense are team players for the opposite side. Both groups are delusional. Nobody can live on the present minimum wage without draining the taxpayers by plugging into entitlement programs, and a surprising number of kids are not smart enough to get anything out of college. But each side supports its own agenda – and pushes the nation ever closer to a Third World economy because they would rather rant and rave than reason. The voters who support either team didn’t learn this attitude by reading when they should have been out there at football practice. Here is a sad story from America’s heartland. A young woman with traditional values studied hard and got into the Midwestern college of her dreams. During her freshman year, a star football player groped her in a way that may have been an attempted rape. She evaded the rape, but when she tried to complain, she was threatened by the football player, his friends, and her own friends of both genders. Her personal feelings could not be allowed to interfere with the college football program. The administration appears to have dithered and shown a lack of interest in her complaint. In the end, she committed suicide. There you have it, sports fans! Never mind that she tried to comply with the teachings of the religion upon which the college was founded. Never mind her rights as a human being. She could have messed with the football season. She died by her own hand. Some people don’t see this as a big deal as long as no football games were canceled. Nobody even suggested that they should be. I think that is crazy. People who wonder if they might be insane still have a tangential grip on sanity. Some prayer, some rest, a few good friends, a reprieve from financial stress, and a hobby they enjoy will generally get them through. People who have a mental health problem but are in denial about it have far more serious issues. The people who have issues but think they’re sane present a far more serious threat to the community than those who are anxious or unhappy. When people hear voices and take the guns to the post office or the school, they feel justified by doing what the voices tell them to do. A large portion of America’s population is “crazy” about sports. This is a national problem. Americans got by for several hundred years with only the most disorganized of sports. New Englanders played something called “stool ball,” which was like the English game of cricket, or “tip cat.” The “cat” was a conical piece of wood, and the player set one “cat” on another one, struck it with a bat, and knocked it as far as he could when it flew up in the air. “Rounders,” an early form of baseball, also existed before Civil War General Abner Doubleday got the credit for the modern version of the game. Mostly, serious people read books and frivolous people danced and played cards and raced horses. Almost everyone drank too much. Ruffians fought to gouge out one another’s eyes, and grew claw-like fingernails soaked in brine to facilitate this amusement. When eye gouging became a hanging offense, the sport’s popularity dwindled. Duels were fought over card games and horse races as they were over love or politics. The world was not a perfect place, but the idea that athletes had a license to rape, rather in the manner of Roman gladiators, was still to come. Ladies and gentlemen did what they did in secret, and rapists got the rope. This sort of thing was abused for politically racial reasons after the Civil War: About two-thirds of the 4,000 African-American lynching victims weren’t rapists, and neither were most of the 200 or so Germans and other whites who refused to swear allegiance to the Confederate States of America, and were hanged for it. The Let’s get our priorities straight Boy Scouts from Troop 13 of Glen Rock recently raced go-carts on a European-style Formula 1 track. They also challenged the leaders to laser tag in a 4,000 square foot, multi-level arena that had only black lights for visibility, with a heavy cover of fog. Troop 13, established in 1954, meets at the Community Church of Glen Rock at 354 Rock Road on Sunday nights from 7 to 8:30 p.m. All boys from 11 to 18 years old, all denominations, are welcome. Upcoming troop activities include the Klondike Derby, a ski trip, winter cabin camping, backpacking, kayaking, tenting at the beach, and a bike trip. There will be an information session for prospective members and their parents on Sunday, Jan. 23 at 7 p.m. at the Community Church. Parking is available behind the church, off Hamilton Avenue. Contact Mike Curtis at (201) 612-8798, Victor Harte at (201) 444-7669, or Mike Turanchik at (201) 444-7191. Scouts on right track