So...Nightline does .....footballl???

[SoCalDem]

I tuned into nightline, hoping for a half hour of in depth probing into the Wilson story, and what are they showing???? FOOTBALL???

wtf... I mean really, it;s not like there is not at least 5 channels that cover sports nonstop..


It still annoys me that that stupid Kimmel guy has an hour show, and nightline is squeezed into 1/2 hr..

[Cush]

1. well..

Due to Monday Night FOotball, it would have been on late here on the east coast, so many would miss it.

Maybe tomorrow?

[Submariner]

2. My guess is that Nightline did not want to "waste" any

juicy political story when that bullshit Monday night foot-a-balla makes Nightline air at 1 to 1:30 am here in the east. Most of the target audience is in bed. But hey, whadda I know?

[Lexingtonian]

3. Go to the blogs, SoCalDem....

Lord knows the political blogs are pretty much All Plame All The Time these past 2-3 days.

I didn't watch Nightline either after figuring out the topic. But it was cultural politics, after all. Vanderbilt tossing its football program says something about changes in The Heartland/Flyover Country. It's not the all the virtuousness that the Vanderbilt guy claimed during the minute or two that I watched- after all, they were closer to outhouse than powerhouse as far as "sports" go.

"Sports" is a phenomenon of the Industrial Age. It gives people who work in factories, in mill towns, a focus on a kind of glory and is something on which they can peg themselves emotionally that doesn't endanger their employment or fail them as their varieties of organized religion tend to. (In The Devil's Dictionary of 1890, Ambrose Bierce defines Monday as "MONDAY, n. In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game.") It allows them to misbehave (in certain ways) and to be ironically provincial without materially affecting their situations. The mill owners have always encouraged 'sports', as the old wry joke says, to keep the workers from rioting.

Pro sports franchises have been moving into the Red States and leaving the Blue States, just as certain kinds of industries (manufacturing, 'defense') and for much the same reason(s). Basically, Blue States are to significant degrees post-Industrial economically and Red States are still at heart Industrial (heavily blue collar, run by a few companies in turn run by the present set of robber barons, etc) or even pre-Industrial/agrarian economies. That's how you get pro hockey teams in Tampa Bay and Dallas and Atlanta and successful pro football teams in Buffalo and Kansas City. And in turn pro sports teams are slowly drifting away from California, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest west of the Pecos, Canada/Upper Great Lakes, New England, and to some degree now the Washington-New York City corridor.

So, as silly as the Nightline show probably was, it does document something changing culturally. Which is that Industrial Age American cultural norms are starting to break down a bit in the Red States. Sort of like the diminishing number of NRA members. And somewhere in the distance you hear the sounds of manufacturing jobs being exported and family farms being broken up.

As to the Plame affair, if I understand all I have heard/read about it today it is probably better for Koppel to wait a few more days to see how it develops. (He does seem tired of the 3 nights per week expended on the dismal mismanagement of Iraq and the misgovernment surrounding the whole thing.) Novak tried retracting and changing his story today, Joe Wilson had to admit to going too far in fingering Rove, and the White House obviously doesn't want to go on camera without having sent out every possible trial balloon first. In short, Nightline wasn't going to get any of the prime actors or important defenders on camera at all and the attackers are also unready, needing to readjust after Wilson's admission and Novak deciding to muddy the waters in order to help any White House cover story and McClellan covering for Rove. It's not ripe for the cameras yet- the suspects have to do more talking until obvious contradictions and rifts arise.

There is already a kind of Plame fatigue on the blogs, though. The real story is that there are no other stories competing with it.