So Tired of All That Winning

The New England Patriots are back in the Super Bowl, so it’s time to ask again if we’re tired yet of all that winning. The question is mostly a punchline until it’s applied to the Patriots when it becomes dead serious and reasonable people who believe it would be preposterous to ever complain about winning suddenly find themselves asking, “Yeah, why is this team always winning and isn’t there something we should be doing about it?”
Was there such grousing about success when I was growing up and the New York Yankees were winning in similarly routine fashion, smothering the expectations for every American League pennant race in the birds’ nests of spring? Perhaps if social media had existed at the time much more attention would’ve been paid to the Yankees suspicious relationship with the Kansas City A’s, and miserable fans of other teams (me included) would’ve taken to calling them the "New York Cheatees", or something equally juvenile.
Do people carp about Wall-Mart’s position at the top of the Fortune 500, which mostly parallels the Patriots run at the top of the NFL, except for being far more dominant? Well, surely the Bernie Sanders Revolution would like to do something about that and force Wal-Mart to provide better wages, healthcare and working conditions for its employees, but for the most part Americans accept that we live in a capitalist system. That often doesn’t look so pretty, TV commercials aside, but surely Wal-Mart’s long running reign at the top proves Americans value cheap prices over aesthetics.  
And how about the USA where “We’re #1” is practically our national motto (take that, E Pluribus Unum)? We shout about it loud and proud, even when it’s manifestly untrue (HEALTHCARE!). As a nation we’ve really never shown a hint of fatigue from winning, real or imaginary. So the promise of our Con Man-in-Chief to deliver a Springsteen concert presidency in which we’re all begging him at the end to stop making us so happy and fulfilled is as empty and ludicrous as most everything else to emit from his mouth.
Yet, sports media this past week leading up to the Super Bowl has been filled with serious discussions as whether all this Patriots winning is good for us…not just football fans, but America in general. I must say, having followed some of these discussions, they’ve been remarkably thoughtful for football talk…and highly refreshing in contrast to past lead-ups to the Super Bowls featuring New England, which feverishly examined the nefarious means the Patriots used to make their way to the top. (For the record, I’ve already taken a cynical eye to address the mischaracterization of “the Cheatriots” in an earlier post. There I point out, among other things, that tsk…tsk…tsking a football team trying to get an edge on its opponent is high hilarity and utter hypocrisy in a nation built on stealing land from Indians, spying on both friend and foe, and delighting in popular cultural entertainments that mythologize deception.)
It’s been a welcome change this year to see and hear football analysts actually discuss the Patriots’ winning culture…and what makes it so (and not so for others); there’s been rare but plentiful praise for the sheer aesthetics of doing a job well and consistently, with particular attention to the fact that the Patriots’ sustained excellence occurs in a sport created pretty much designed along a Bernie Sanders socialist model, where parity is enforced by rules that are specifically implemented to level the playing field. 
I’ve recently had my complaints about the Patriots too, but they’ve been confined to off-field issues. On the field they have been a marvel of teamwork of near Swiss watch level precision. I’ve come to genuinely feeling sorry for those who’ve become so jaded and jealous that the resulting resentment, bitterness, and hatred have blinded them to the uplifting pleasure of seeing a difficult job well done. It’s like turning your back on the wonders of evolution because it conflicts with your notion of God.  
Is that zap of hyperbole warranted? If this were just about football, the Super Bowl and the New England Patriots it probably would be. But I detect something at work with far broader implications. I detect an insidious bias against winning…against success…that has a larger cultural impact. Shortly after the Super Bowl, we’ll move on to the Academy Awards at the next table of America’s all-you-can-eat buffet of amusements. It’s been a quarter century since the Oscars banned the expression “And the winner is” from its ceremony (with one failed attempt to resurrect it in 2010). On the first occasion of its banishment in 2001, Oscar host Steve Martin quipped, “You’ll notice they changed ‘the winner is’ to ‘and the Oscar goes to’ because God forbid anyone should think of this as a competition.” The line was not enough to embarrass the Academy of Arts and Sciences from abandoning what is essentially an elementary school policy entitling every child to a cupcake and being named student of the month. Worse, the change…the new policy…was not enough to save Hollywood from remaining a culture where the work of women and racial minorities would continue to be marginalized and its screen depictions of heroism, triumph and success would get progressively cartoonish and preposterous so as to totally obliterate the very real hard work, patience, skill and sacrifice that actually go into high achievement. So much for another cheap and easy political correctness "win". 
There’s an exhilarating exchange between comedians Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld during one of Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episodes. It’s exhilarating because both guys are emblematic of allegedly liberal Hollywood (Jerry’s "But I’m a New Yorker" demur aside). And Rock is born of a race constantly discredited by racists as dependent on affirmative action to succeed. The punchline to the exchange is when Rock--sounding very much like Bill “Do Your Job” Belichick--answered his daughter’s complaint about being relegated to the bench on her school basketball team this way: "Hey, honey, there's a way too get in the game. I'm just saying. There is a way. Some kids actually got in the game." (If taunting the opposition weren't so verboten to the Patriot Way, I'd say Tom Brady could lift that line next time he's asked how much more winning he plans on doing in his life.) The 1-minute+ exchange between Seinfeld and Rock is highly relevant to this discussion and worth viewing here.
I don’t think it’s at all hyperbolic to point out that our society’s war on winning has already had a profoundly negative effect on our national mental health. The liberal inclination to dismiss, deflate, and denigrate genuine excellence and high achievement has laid the nation open to be fooled by faux excellence and achievement.  Shrinking from acknowledging, rewarding, and extolling success allows gold-plated frauds to step forward and claim the mantel of winner for themselves. Turning the word winning into a shameful “W-word” gives the demagogue free reign to define winners and losers and divide the nation according to his warped, unchallenged vision. As a nation, we’re spiraling out of control now not just because we can’t tell fake news from real news any longer, but we can’t tell fake winners from the real thing.   
The Patriots are the real thing...Pats 27 Eagles 17.