NYT’s reporting on the dangers of football offers a revealing look at the American psyche

On Tuesday, after a three-day run, football knocked trade war off the top of the New York Times’ web stack.

The big story: brain injury. The Times broke this story and has owned it ever since. The newest wrinkle – that many more pros than had previously been thought end up developing serious cognitive issues.

The headline on that main story: “Study’s Alarming Finding: At Least 1 in 4 N.F.L. Players Gets Brain Disease.”

And then, tucked in just below that, a second headline: “How to Minimize Risk if Your Child Plays Football.”

I think it’s fair to say that the New York Times employs some of the smarter Americans. So why are they so stupid? How does anyone with the sense God gave a goat get from ‘Bullets kill’ to ‘Here’s how your kids can still have fun with bullets’?

Opinion: The U.S. isn’t negotiating trade with Canada. This is a shakedown

It’s not that they’re stupid. It’s that they’re American.

Everybody’s looking for a lesson out of the last few days, preferably one that U-turns us back in the direction of the pre-2016 status quo. That’s when Canada liked to think it was America, minus the woo-hoo’ing.

That’s what’s made the last 10 years so psychically uncomfortable. We thought that was us in the mirror at the border, but it’s someone else. How did we get it so wrong?

These two schizophrenic headlines, paired by the fantastically well-educated, Democrat-voting, pussyhat-wearing, upper-middle-class cream of our neighbouring crop, are as close as you’re going to get to an explanation.

They strongly suggest that America is just not like us. I’m talking deep down. They don’t think like us. They don’t share our vision of how the world is, or how it should be. Despite all the superficial similarities, we are different peoples.

If someone says to Canadians that guns kill people, or that a faulty drug made people sick, we all stop. Then we go into fix-it mode.

This is not to say we get it right, but that negative actions create collective reactions. We have internalized and institutionalized empathy.

Hockey has the same problem as football. So what did we do? We changed hockey. The game that was played 30 years ago bears little resemblance to the one played now. Zero fighting at the lower levels, and much less at the top. No tolerance for hits to the head. Equipment that looks more suited to an astronaut than an athlete. It’s a work of generations, but it’s work that’s being done.

It’s certainly better than the house organ of the reasonable left announcing that football kills, along with some tips on how to let it kill your kids in a less aggressive way. One of the subheadlines in that story is, “What if my son is knocked unconscious?”

Opinion: Canadians are fighting for their sovereignty. Americans don’t even realize they’re in a war

Given everything we know now, I, a Canadian who played football and was knocked unconscious while doing so, would say, ‘Maybe try soccer instead’.

The conclusion the Times comes to is to make sure he gets “independent medical care” before getting back out there.

You don’t want to take too much out of one story in one newspaper, but it’s knee-jerk reactions, not big think pieces, that are most revealing of anyone’s outlook. It is not conceivable to the New York Times that any tailgate-loving American would read the first story and think, ‘Time to stop doing that’.

A Scandinavian or a Finn would do so. That’s the part of the world we probably have the most in common with. Like us, they are pragmatic, collective-minded, poor at parties and good at driving in snow.

Americans grew up different. John Wayne may be out of fashion, but his ethos continues to define them. They are go-it-alone people. They are live-fast-and-die-young types.

I don’t mean that they think they will die young. The Americans you see on Instagram all think they’ll live forever. This is only to say that they’ve accepted that their fellow citizens – ones they don’t know – will probably die young, and that there’s nothing that can be done about that. It’s kind of their own fault for not being rich.

This outlook has created their zero-sum politics and their vapid preoccupations. Solving collective problems is complicated, expensive and boring. Americans are allergic to all three, but the third thing is torture. What they want most of all is to be entertained. Unfortunately for us, we’ve just become the entertainment.

There has never been a people more preoccupied with putting on, being in or crashing out in front of a show. This is how they took over the world. It wasn’t battlecruisers. It was razzmatazz.

It’s why no one cared the first time they heard that football kills its practitioners, and why they’re even less likely to care now that it’s worse than everyone thought. Because is someone seriously suggesting they change football? I sure hope not. That would leave Sundays wide open.

Why Trump’s trade war against Canada won’t Make America Great Again

Of all the great one-liners the Prime Minister Mark Carney has come out with in the last little while, one strikes me as the most defining: “[Canada] is the greatest country in the world to be a regular person.”

A Canadian hears that and thinks, ‘Right on’.

An American, of whatever political stripe, does the same and thinks, ‘What a loser.’ The nice ones won’t say it, but they’re thinking it.

Americans want to risk it all, and see how things turn out. If they make it out in one piece, they will leave everyone who didn’t behind. Their eyes are pointed upward, always. It’s an outlook that produces a lot of success, as well as a good deal of misery.

Canadian eyes are pointed around, at each other. We’re either all going to make it together, or we’re not. Nobody’s getting left behind if the rest of us can help it. If thinking so means we’re less likely to become the biggest, the best, or the richest, then that’s okay.

This is a spat between old friends that’s been a long time coming, but it’s more than a function of one regime. Canada and the U.S. share a geography and a culture (theirs), but not a language.

When we’re talking, they don’t hear what we’re saying, and vice versa. The difference is that we know it.