David Roth's Weak In Review: Sticking To Sports

Keep your eyes up and life will periodically toss you some good things to see: laughing kids and happy dumb puppies and tacos and friends and family and the less exhaustingly antic Coen Brothers films. Life is not easy or fair or long enough or kind enough, and the horror and cruelty it throws at us can be annihilating, but we do get thrown scraps on occasion, and that helps. But we don't get convenience, mostly.

We get things that look like convenience—the opportunity to purchase those nightmarish bagged pickles and marked-down DVD's at regular intervals along our nation's highways or the freedom to bloop up a ride home through a button on your mobile phones or whatever—and we get them all the time. These things are generally more convenient-seeming than actually convenient; a dine-and-dash is what it is, even when it's dressed up as a free lunch and explained as a more efficient solution to the problem of having to wait for a check. This fundamental inconvenience tends to reveal itself with a little bit of consideration and over a period of time, which means that the actual convenience lies more in not thinking about it too hard than anything else.

That works right up until it doesn't, or until we acknowledge that it isn't working. For now, ours is a culture soaking in this facile convenience, and it is getting kind of zonked and increasingly prune-ish in there. This is a tub that's deep enough to drown in, and the one thing that everyone with an opinion seems to agree about regrading the week's goings-on at the University of Missouri—which began with the football team joining a campus-wide movement aimed at raising awareness of racial bias on campus and getting rid of a widely reviled university president and achieved those goals in record time—is that this is indeed what's happening.

This is not a particularly useful sort of agreement, though. Convenience, again: the agreement that something significant and bad is happening quickly gives way to a polarized certainty that asserts that, whatever that significant/bad thing is, it is the fault of whoever you are inclined to blame. Whatever this was once about is already indistinct and shrinking fast in the rearview by the time the conversation begins in earnest, and by the time things really start getting loud, it's all the way gone. By this point, everyone is already well on the ride home and headed back to wherever they started, headphones on. This is not a game to the students who were made to feel unwelcome and unsafe on the campus of their state's flagship public university because of the color of their skin, but the next stage of it plays out like a game—an old and un-fun game, whose rules we remember from the last news cycle and the one before that. The object of the game is to make the world about you.

And so Missouri's football team's activism is either a defiant response to a rotten power structure, as former NFL player/NFLPA President Domonique Foxworth wrote at VICE Sports, or a bunch of spoiled college kids whining because things were insufficiently comfortable for them, as any number of salt-baked grumpsteaks declaimed at other venues. It is likely that you already know who you agree with on this, and I know my choice of words doesn't do much to conceal where I stand. No one gets to be all the way right, because this all unfolds along the grayscale of humanity in action; no one is perfect in their presentation or absolute in righteousness; there's more laziness and narcissism in the mix than outright villainy, because that is almost always the case. This is why evil is so startling when we see it, and shaming: all this time and energy spent turning the narcissism of small differences—or simple narcissism—into thermonuclear rhetoric, and then the world wakes us.

Where Mizzou is concerned, all this rhetorical overstatement is fine, of course: reasonable people can disagree, and unreasonable people will always have the comment section. My point is not that it is wrong to argue. My point is that this argument sucks. Big and complicated things are playing out at Missouri, still, and yet somehow the conversation keeps boomeranging back to the extravagantly pampered pet peeves and knee-jerk irks of the people talking about it. The grandiose shittiness with which this story has been covered is almost impossible to convey—Fox Sports' in-house team of seething curdled weirdos has been on it so heavy and so hard that there is now apparently an entry in the Fox Sports guide on how to punctuate the description of an infamous act of dorm desecration at Missouri; one Fox Sports columnist spent multiple columns conjecturing that it never existed in the first place. You write it "poopswastika," no space. A pale and atrophied thing wails fatly in its bed, because its stupid remote control has stopped working.

All this furious changing of the subject and clammy semaphoring and the desperate assertion that this story is *actually* about whatever it is that you're always on about—this is lame, but mostly it is unforgivably boring, and lazy. It's laziness of an unusually active kind—it is striking, always, the strange and unsettling shapes into which the culture will contort itself to avoid discomfort. But it all begins and ends with a refusal to consider a story on any terms but one's own. The world has thrown us an undeniable and unthinkable tragedy, now—real villains and real victims in Paris, actual evil and actual death, and a real abyss opening ahead of us. Already we can see the pull of convenience, here, boomeranging the discourse back towards us: instead of the unthinkable, there is this cynical urge to make it about what we were already thinking about, whatever that was; this childish pull to make it not about our broad shared solidarity in suffering, but about some safe, silly, stupid argument.

"Why isn't this news now, they ask," Jessica Luther wrote at VICE Sports on Friday in a story about the cynical retcon of her 2014 story about the grim and longstanding rape culture in Mizzou's athletic department as just such a But What About gambit. "It wasn't news when I wrote it because many people are not actually interested in addressing problems of sexual violence. It's only news now because some people want to discredit the students', especially the players', desire for an administration that responds to their concerns."

There are bigger things happening in the world, yes, but there is something to talk about happening at Missouri. Student-athletes who are held, in the most glib and convenient way, as both gods and servants, are speaking loudly and in clear English about what they want as people; in doing this, they are continuing a long and complicated legacy. The response to this sort of thing has a legacy of its own, too. We know how it goes: uncomfortable people ask to be allowed some comfort, and to be treated like humans. Comfortable people, with power, change the subject, because they do not want to be implicated or because they do not care or because they do not believe that the uncomfortable people deserve the same comfort they enjoy, or simply because they do not wish to be inconvenienced. Sooner or later, it always winds up being about something else, even though it is always about the same thing—what we all owe each other, and how urgently we owe it.