NFL Week 2: The Ecstasy of Grief

Once I get off the train in the morning I make my way across a skywalk and then down four flights of concrete steps and across International Boulevard to the bus stop. I climb aboard the bus at a back entry and usually sit near an older man who is always reading the sports pages of the Seattle Times. Lately he has been breakfasting on muffins and danish. Earlier in the summer he was making due with the thin gruel of Mariners box scores. Now, I can tell, he's feeling good; he's riding high in bus seat. Why? People are excited here about the Seahawks.

Though it is still very early in the season, it looks like the team is equal if not superior to last year's wild card squad. During Sunday night's demolition (the second in a row) of Super Bowl runners-up and division rival San Francisco 49ers, the off season acquisitions for the defensive line, Michael Bennett and Cliff Avril, played well and made critical contributions. It was the lack of a pass rush in the fourth quarter on the road that was the undoing of the Seahawks last year. 

So things are looking good and people are beginning to chomp down on the hype. A trip to the Super Bowl might be a legitimate possibility. I am wary though. The pain and suffering I experienced was immense with the playoff loss last January in Atlanta . I don't want to relive that. I was detached for the nail-biting opener in Charlotte against the snake-bitten Panthers. But that all changed at some point in the first half of Sunday night's game. My detachment disappeared. Maybe it was the game delay for the lightning storm. By the time play resumed I was completely enmeshed. And it was an extremely satisfying enmeshment. The Seahawks defense shut down the potent Kaepernick-led San Francsico offense, an offense that had steamrollered Green Bay the previous week. And the Seahawks offense got its running game going.

This is what I want to tell you: To be a Seattle fan and to see Marshawn Lynch snap off a crisp touchdown run complete with sharp cutbacks, to sit enraptured at home in front the television as The Beast swaggers slowly into the end zone, really, truly, this is as good as it gets in terms of a communal, cathartic experience. I know the National Football League is a money-grubbing soul-devouring multi-billion dollar behemoth. But underneath it all, the greatness of heroic athletes manages to shine through.

We're not asked to create anything. We're asked to maintain a preexisting order that is based on hierarchy and exploitation. It's a miserable system, an infernal machine. To know that she is free, the worker is allowed to purchase with script objects she has produced by the sweat of her own brow. Freedom also includes viewing commercially televised images. For the most part, this is what we're left with. When it's good we're transported from our horrible lives to something bigger and better, something shared.