Every state, county, city, neighbourhood and household has its demographics of age, socioeconomic status, religion, race and gender. But for Americans, politics is just another sport: a long, drawn-out and essentially boring game puffed up to importance with pomp and pageantry and a maddening ocean of statistics. Thompson originally made his journalistic name as a sportswriter which, at first glance, makes him a curious candidate for political coverage. Thompson, an account of George McGovern’s hopeless defeat by Richard Nixon in the 1972 U.S. I recently finished reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 by Hunter S. When I see men dutifully gazing at the screens in some bar, I think of them as doing their “man homework.” Maybe there’s a vague sense of comfort having it on in the background, if you grew up with it. Personally, I can’t see much joy in the act of sitting around all day watching baseball and its attendant hours of corporate sponsorship. I have heard men with little or no real interest in sports suddenly begin spouting detailed statistics about some obscure linebacker’s performance on grass versus turf. Groups of men with nothing to talk about - say, at a mediocre party - will find common ground in sports statistics. To my mind, free-flowing sports like soccer and rugby are far more entertaining to watch, but the lack of trackable statistics make them suspicious to the American mind.įor men across this country, the lingua franca is sports statistics. TV screens in my coworking space are eternally fixed on these channels, featuring wide men in suits lined up behind desks, endlessly talking about a single play. Entire TV channels devote their 24 hours of air time to the discussion of sports. To watch either of them on television is to track seven or eight different scorecards at the same time - how many points each team has, how many yards until the next “down,” how many yards has that running back covered this season, how many hits has that batter made this year and how does it compare with a similar batter who last played 30 years ago, how often has that quarterback been “sacked,” how will that last innings affect that pitcher’s shutout average.Īnd despite those hours and hours of waiting around for seven seconds of mildly exciting activity, the Yanks can’t get enough of it. Just take a look at their two most popular sports: baseball and American football. No country is more obsessed with statistics than the United States.

Fear and loathing in the campaign trail