I couldn’t resist writing about Brett Favre’s defection to the Vikings, and the outraged reaction of Packer fans. I don’t care about Brett Favre, and I do not care a damn for professional football (though I’ve gotten pretty good it feigning interest in social situations), but I did live in Wisconsin for most of Favre’s tenure with the Vikings. During which they covered Brett Favre on the nightly news every single night.
And to judge from the tone of the coverage, Favre’s job title was not “quarterback” but “Anointed God-King of All Wisconsin”, and the job titles of the sportscasters was not “sportscaster” but “Priests of the Sovereign and Most Holy Lord Favre On Earth”. Every single night. There were TV specials about Favre, regularly. This is how bad it was: when Hurricane Katrina hit, the majority of the coverage was about Favre’s house in Mississippi. “This just in: most of a major American city underwater. Now let’s go back to our round-the-clock coverage of the Favre estate!”
And the Brett Favre kitsch was everywhere. Commemorative plates, sweatshirts, team jerseys, hats, posters, the entire range of made-in-China plastic crap. My late grandfather paid a ridiculous sum of money for a little Brett Favre statue, and when the statue arrived, the deliveryman offered to buy it for twice the ridiculous sum of money. My grandfather declined, and kept the statue in a glass shrine thing in his living room, along with commemorative plates of farm scenes.
So it is with unwholesome schadenfreude that I observe Favre joining the Vikings. That, and the reactions of the Packer fans, how quickly their hero has become the Antichrist. They react much the same way I imagine Catholics would react if the Pope announced he was converting to Satanism to “make a little more money”.
It is hilarious.
In fact, it puts me in mind of a poem…
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away
-JM
Posted by JM 
