The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [89]
Still, as an opportunity to talk to other human beings, sports talk works wonders. The fan of a team is included in a group, and the fan’s team allegiance might be of use at any time. A expatriate Canadian might be kinder on the road to a car festooned with Blue Jays paraphernalia. Sociability at the office is supposed to be secular and apolitical—to ensure enough peace to get work done. The office, meanwhile, is often considered off-limits for conversation with friends, since it represents toil for many, and competition for many others. Sports provides a safe conversation topic with strangers, acquaintances, colleagues, friends, and family members. A fan gets to take part in a mood, an identity, created by the win-loss history and highlights of the team. Even a losing streak can make you feel chosen. When the Red Sox beat the eighty-six-year “curse of the Bambino” and took the pennant, they were elated, but within days newspapers and talk shows revealed that some Red Sox fans felt lost and bereft!2 (Apparently Sisyphus, unchained, would be angry that his rock and his mountain have been stolen from him, and would weep for his lost identity.) Fandom can be a prodigious force.
Television shows are the other safe subject of choice at the office and among friends and family. People in sales may feel a responsibility to keep up on television shows in order to have the means to interact in this anodyne yet intimate way. Television, then, destroys community by giving people something else to do with their free time, but it also creates a specialized common subject matter for an extremely heterodox culture. Sometimes our attention to television breaks into a more fully social fandom. People used to gather around the radio, and later it became a social event to crowd together and watch Your Show of Shows, I Love Lucy, and The Ed Sullivan Show. In the seventies, people held weekly Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman parties. Today there are groups of people who get together to watch weekly shows like Project Runway, and before that Sex and the City, and as a more distant antecedent, the annual Academy Awards broadcast. With American Idol, average people began to take part in determining the show’s course, calling in to vote on which contestant receives a recording contract from the producers of the show. Viewers can vote as many times as they like: this is not about democracy; it is about dedication. The producers do not care if the most people like a particular contestant. What is of essence, what “counts,” is that the contestant’s fans be dedicated enough to buy a lot of merch: concert tickets, music, and images. Those of us who are not in deep enough to phone in a vote, or buy the music, still talk about shows with friends and colleagues. Television shows and sports have a lot of ways of bringing us together in the great swath of human interaction that takes place from the national level all the way to the familial.
Television sports and shows are material to talk about when we are together, but they do not usually draw us out of our private homes and engage us in public behaviors. Leisure activities, the things we do because they make us happy, are often private. Our central public pleasure is shopping. People don’t say I love owning. They do, however, say I love shopping. Drive into the medium-sized cities in this country on a weekend, and you see deserted streets. The people are not all at home watching television. Go to the mall, and you find everyone. Human beings have never had such opportunities for shopping. The growth of department stores was shocking to the men and women at the time it happened. Every step followed every step, literally, when the escalator changed all the rules for shopping, but, of course, I mean steps figuratively, too: First