A very American imperative

Ron DeSantis is only the governor of the nation's looniest state, but he channels the wisdom of the emperors during Rome's gasping last.

The people, Florida's guv declared in so many words the other day, need their gladiators.

And so he's declared the WWE, and also professional sports, "essential services" amid the Bastard Plague. People are "starved for content" in these trying times, the Guv said. Why, even Our Only Available Impeached President, descending into madness daily now on national TV, says he's tired of watching old games.

So let's re-start 'Murica!

And that includes football and baseball and basketball and steroidal entertainers in tights, their hockey hair fluttering in the breeze as they fly off the top rope to crush other steroidal entertainers.

"People are chomping at the bit," the Guv declared to reporters, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Well, of course they are. Particularly in a nation as addicted to bread and circus as this one.

We are the country of micro attention spans, forever flitting from one distraction to the next until the distractions become an end in themselves. It's why professional sports are their own economy now, employing thousands and sustaining thousands more whose livelihood depends on their continued existence. It's why college athletics are no longer sis-boom-bah here's-to-dear-old-Whatsamatta-U., but an economy itself -- driven by the imperatives of any economy, and desperately trying to maintain the laughable fiction that their employees are not employees but "student-athletes."

And all because we are "starved for content." All because we are "chomping at the bit," and have come to regard our diversions as a sacred American right, like the vote and 2-for-1 sales.

Thus all the harebrained schemes to start baseball and finish the NBA and NHL seasons and, yes, to declare Vince McMahon's WWE empire an "essential service." OOAIP, in between gnashing his teeth and howling at the moon, therefore added Vince, plus all the major sports commishes, to his Committee to Put America Back To Work (And Also To Re-Elect Me, Because I'm Doing Such A Great Job.)

This makes a certain amount of sense, given that OOAIP and Vince have so much in common. Both have presided over failed professional football leagues, after all.

Where the wicket gets sticky is how willing we are as a nation to put lives at risk just to keep us from being bored, which essentially is what all this boils down to. The evidence suggests we would be pretty willing; as quarantining and shelter-in-place orders continue, people are becoming increasingly restless.

Thousands may be sickening and dying, but they want their jobs back. They want their normal back, whatever that is now. And so the more desperate among them have abandoned their senses and taken to the streets in Michigan and Ohio, begging to be thrown into the maw of the Bastard Plague. And they are egged on, as they always are, by demagogues like our very own Tennessee Trey Hollingsworth, who thinks a few dead bodies here and there are worth it if it gets the Great American Money Machine up and humming again.

This notion has always had legs in America, but few have been so witless as to give it such a clear voice. Which perhaps suggests there's some desperation at work there, too.

Hard telling where all this desperation ends. But I do know one thing.

We can live without LeBron and Alex Ovechkin and Mike Trout driving one into the gap for awhile yet. And without whoever that is flying off the top rope, hockey hair fluttering in the breeze.