PATIENTLY HATING #2: March Madness

Dress it up and make it real for me

A spectre is haunting criticism – the spectre of Poptimism. Whether or not poptimism as it’s currently understood is responsible for the decline of popular culture into a sort of soulless, algorithmically-generated slop is incidental to the fact that it has become the default critical posture during the exact moment that all culture became pop and all nearly pop became bland and uninspiring. The once-radical instinct to identify, uplift, and take seriously strains of the outré or the transcendent in pop culture has morphed into a sort of widespread knee-bend of the critical class at the sword of PR firms. If you can’t ignore event albums, at least you can gawk at them. Where “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is a fundamentally true insight that has also enabled hedonistic solipsism, so too has poptimism’s mantra: “let people enjoy things.”

There is spiritual and critical value in hating. Haters are often tarred as misanthropes, philistines, snobs; there is some truth in every smear. But haters also provide a certain public service: they are friction, cynical or not, in a world dedicated to becoming frictionless. Still, a toxicity and stigma overpowers hating in the moment. Criticism, whether serious or reflexive, threatens to be interpreted as close-mindedness or contrarianism. It’s safer to hold on to your hate. To let it mature, ferment. PATIENTLY HATING is a space dedicated to this kind of hate: the hate that, with time, has taken on a life of its own.

The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament begins today; you likely already know this because your coworker told you. It is high time, yet again, to participate: to fill out your bracket, to watch games on company time, to revel in the patented unpredictability made inevitable by asking a host of underdeveloped 19 year olds play single elimination games on the biggest stage of their lives.

March Madness, as the dutifully trademarked tournament takes pain after pain to remind you, is an event worthy of your attention. The why of it all may not reveal itself as obvious. March Madness has reached the kind of cultural purchase of an entertainment event meant to be understood as universal. You don’t need to watch college basketball to be made to watch the Tournament, just as you needn’t follow football to revel in the Super Bowl or movies to tune into the Academy Awards. These are the witching hours, when winter crawls whimpering into spring, and American Entertainment creates our holidays and rituals for us.

The NCAA Tournament has obtained a cultural universality that necessarily transforms its promise into stale obligation. It is, in that sense, the American Entertainment experience that best encapsulates the contemporary American mode: namely, that of submission to the Entertainment. March Madness beats you over the head with its obviousness. You will, as you come to understand, cheer for Cinderellas, root lustfully for Upsets, revel in Passion, cheer, cheer, Cheer! You will experience the emotions you have been taught to crave, and you will do so through the generosity of AT&T, Coca-Cola, and Capital One. For three weeks, you become your bracket, that ticket to office pools and polite ribbing. You submit, ultimately, to be Busted.

Surely, March Madness can be experienced as an exhilarating moment in sports fandom (for the wayward souls or committed racists who prefer the painfully brutalist ‘amateur’ sport to its professional equivalent) or cultural participation. The narrative tropes so dutifully worn by the tournament’s marketing are, of course, mirrored to an extent in reality. It is a season of high emotion, narrative shock, and occasionally bolstered New Jersey pride. But it is hard to escape the feeling that the Tournament’s only genuine assets have been totally subsumed by the expectation and aesthetic it so carefully cultivates. What is emotion when it has been turned into a slogan; what is the value in unpredictability rendered predictable?

Underneath the superstructural marketing apparatus rests a limpid homage to ritualized, forced fun and High Cringe. March Madness is sold as a rebellion against the cult of productivity that comes with a readymade, tongue-in-cheek “Boss Button”.¹ For three weeks, we will be stimulated, wowed, shocked by game after game, moment after moment. You will have something about which to talk to the people around you. You will not see high level basketball, but you will see young men cry. Money - a lot of it - will change hands, but not, of course, between the university athletic departments and the purported amatuers rendered grist for the bacchanalia. You will gamble, if all goes according to plan, but either way you will watch.

March Madness, considered thusly, is the high-water mark of the 21st century Entertainment experience. It invites total submission, a hollowing-out of the self, the transformation into a vessel so that you may simulate the experience of emotion, fulfillment, and stakes. It is time, once more, to let the exploitative cabal of the National Collegiate Athletic Association feel for you.

1. This year, the Boss Button links to a cheeky mockup of ChatGPT, which as a tribute to lowest-common-denominator culture is almost brilliantly ironic.