Rivalry & Ressentiment
by WatersDemos on Sep 15, 2011 8:31 AM CDT
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PrintNietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality describes two moral positions:
- Slave morality: the morality of the weak (plebeian). It has as its basis ressentiment, or resentment for the strong – a deep feeling of bitterness that one gets while looking up at those (presumably) better than them. The efforts of the weak are futile, stagnant, and mostly helpless. The weak are always preoccupied with the strong. The weak’s preoccupation manifests itself in hatred. Hate is always for the weak.
- Master morality: the morality of the strong (noble). The strong hate no one, for no one is worth their hate. They go about their lives at the top without a care in the world for those beneath them. However, the strong do have contempt for these lesser beings. Contempt is marked not by deep feelings of bitterness or loathing, but instead by laughing indifference.
Nietzsche was not one for talismanic theories of morality/ethics. (*) While other of his ideas can be pretty obscure, his moral categories are pretty darn intuitive IMHE, and perhaps even more so when examining attitudes between fan bases. Support for how intuitive it is can be found in Mr. Hart’s “little bro” comment, and the MSU fan base’s general reaction to it.
Our Relationship with the University of Michigan
I see too often in my fellow Spartans the first type of morality, an inferior morality. (See lesmanalim’s post for at least one prominent example of things to avoid). But what basis is there for this disposition?
We have fine academic institutions, great athletics programs, and plenty of tradition. All of us chose Michigan State because, for whatever reason, it was the best situation for us. Perhaps it was our famous horticultural/agricultural programs, education program, our business program, our top notch study abroad program, or our strong international student program. Maybe it was our beautiful, expansive land grant campus. Maybe it was to work with a certain professor or group of professors. Maybe it was to follow in the footsteps of a parent or grandparent. Maybe it was some combination of these.
Maybe it was our basketball program, which within the past few years has been acknowledged as the best overall program in the country. Maybe it was our hockey program, which won the NCAA championship in 2007. Maybe it was our football program, with strong traditions and pedigree, a recent B1G championship, 10 wins out of 14 games against Notre Dame, and 3 straight wins against Michigan – two programs at the top of college football’s list of most successful (“winningest”) programs. Maybe it was one of our many other varsity sports, the many accomplishments for which can be seen here.
Whatever the case, we can proudly affirm our accomplishments and our experiences at Michigan State University.
No Looking Up
In other words, none of us should be looking up at anyone. If anything, we should see our peers – whether at Michigan or Notre Dame or any other school – as equals or inferiors. The most proactive and arrogant (not a pejorative use of the word, BTW) of us will lean more towards the latter view, while the more diplomatic of us will lean towards the former view. Whatever the case, we do not look up.
UM should be the center of our attention only on the weeks before and days our teams play them. When we win, we should move on to the next opponent. When we lose, we should congratulate and act with class. Moreover, we should not celebrate UM’s losses, and certainly not more so than our wins.
We should respect UM as a good school with a good athletic program. We should not be constantly preoccupied with them, as this only manifests ressentiment. We do not resent – we have pride and respect. If you can’t muster respect, then try laughing indifference/contempt, not hatred and preoccupation. (**)
Without a Care in the World
In this light, I cannot find any reason to care at all about Mr. Hart's comments. I didn't care at the time (why should I?); a fortiori, I don't care 4 years and 3 wins later. (***)
--------------------------
(*) I’m lookin’ at you Kant, with all your categorical imperative nonsense.
(**) They are fundamentally different. Contempt is quiet and thoughtful; it never picks fights but always finishes them (and then laughs, though with reserve). Hatred is loud, abrasive, inconsequential, and careless; it picks fights but can’t finish them.
(***) Note that it wouldn't matter even if it was instead 4 years and 3 losses later. The man has achieved no relevance or authority beyond being some running back who played for some MSU opponent.
This is a FanPost, written by a member of the TOC community. It does not represent the official positions of The Only Colors, Inc.--largely because we have no official positions.
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I'm betting Madison College
We all went crazy with that Nietzschean genealogy of morals stuff.
The point, laudable though it may be, is betrayed by the article itself. We do care, and we write footnoted articles to deny it.
I have to agree.
We definitely care, and I for one am not ashamed of it. I agree that we can be proud and strong, carry ourselves with class, and look at other teams across the league as our peers, but pretending to be aloof just takes a lot of the fun out of it.
It would certainly be pathetic to value oneself and one’s allegiances as a reaction to the acts or attitudes of others.
But Kant was 10 times the philosopher that Nietzsche was.
Agree with you as to the first statement; and Kant certainly captures that when he advocates autonomy instead of heteronomy.
However, your second statement is speculative and impossible to quantify. It seems as though it would become a subjective matter. FN has a lot more to say that resonates with me than EK does; if it’s the reverse to you, can you support the statement that EK is “10x” the philosopher FN was? I’m not sure how.
Well, Kant is far more influential
and has a far more developed and coherent view in virtually every branch of philosophy. I doubt you could find many philosophers who would place Nietzsche in the class of Kant. I know that I can’t and I know literally hundreds of philosophers—I’m a professor of philosophy!
Don’t get me wrong, I like Nietzsche fine (pace the rampant sexism and anti-Semitism) and I think he had some good ideas. But ideas alone don’t make a good philosopher. Nietzsche’s strength as a philosopher is large ideas (that tend toward the psychological) rather than serious development of them. Perhaps if he had lived longer, that development would have occurred.
Anyway, perhaps it would be best to simply say—’Don’t dismiss the categorical imperative or Kant’s thought out of hand. Kant is a superstar in the field.’
You’re pretty loose with the term “philosopher,” of which only a handful have ever lived. There’s a big difference between a philosopher and a professor of philosophy. Also, agreement by many “philosophers” cannot support the statement that Kant was “ten times the philosopher Nietzsche was.” First, agreement cannot establish support for the absolute truth of things that are subjective. Second, why not 9 times, or 11 times? Why give an unsupportable quantification that is inherently subjective?
Also, Nietzsche was anything but an anti-semite. He quarreled with his sister over her choice of husband because, among other things, the guy was anti-semitic. He also broke with Wagner in part because of the latter’s anti-semitism (read Nietzsche Contra Wagner, where FN himself makes clear that he was not anti-semitic, and in fact states that he despised anti-semitism; also he mentioned his stance against, and even mocked, anti-semitism to his friends in letters [e.g., Theodor Fritsch]. If you’re a prof of philosophy, you may want to brush up on FN so you don’t teach your students falsehoods).
It’s somewhat inevitable in a forum like this, but I try not to make general statements like “Kant is far more influential and has far more developed and coherent view in virtually every branch of philosophy.” Defense of that claim would require many volumes. I try to be more limited FWIW.
Also, I acknowledge Kant’s importance to ethics, etc…, but find that his ideas on ethics just don’t resonate with me at all. I don’t dismiss him out of hand, however.
Ha!
Ok, contemporary thinkers who publish original work in places like the Journal of Philosophy aren’t philosophers. Ordinary language users must be mistaken.
Stuff like “the youthful Jew of the stock exchange is the most repugnant invention of the whole human race” or “their souls have never known chivalrous noble sentiments” isn’t at all anti-Semitic or uncomfortable and no one would want qualify their appreciation for Nietzsche (that is—Nietzsche’s writing) with a rejection of the stuff that looks like prejudice. (Agreed though, Nietzsche later criticizes anti-semitism quite forcefully. Kudos to him on that and it’s good to point that out.)
Quality of philosophical writing is subjective. Experts (not me—scholars who study history of philosophy) can’t make sensible distinctions among philosophers based on influence and completeness of thought.
And “I’m lookin’ at you Kant, with all your categorical imperative nonsense” isn’t dismissing the work of Kant out of hand.
If I had known all this in advance, I wouldn’t have wasted my time. I won’t waste it any further.
Nietzsche as philosopher?
I’m not sure I would call him one. I’m not even sure he’d call himself one. Of course in general parlance that’s how he is categorized, but he really seems like a cross between an art historian and a theologian. A moralist, maybe. As for Kant, don’t overlook his epistemological contributions (the antinomies) identifying the fallacy of human “knowledge.” It’s a nightmare to read him, but he’s of the first rank philosophically.
And Nietszche wasn’t an anti-Semite. His sister and her husband absolutely were, and when Nietzsche went catatonic they stole and perverted his work in a despicable way. Plus he was badly mistranslated into English until Walter Kaufmann came along.
Agree with just about everything here
Except Nietzsche’s own self-estimation. For Nietzsche, a “philosopher” was, by definition, one one creates values, pronouncing “thus it shall be!” (BGE 206 I believe, or around there, anyway).
His theology (which you hint at) was certainly an attempt at creating new values based on life affirmation, as opposed to life denial. BGE’s subtitle is “Prelude to the Philosophy of the Future,” and IMHE, there is no question that he was laying the table for the creation of new values.
Thus, I don’t agree that he didn’t consider himself to be a philosopher; I think he conceived of himself as a philosopher par excellence. Also, he referred to Kant and Hegel as philosophical laborers (a very worthy distinction in FN’s own way) and not “philosophers.” (Again, see BGE [can’t recall precise aphorism at the moment, perhaps I’ll edit this post to give you a specific citation if I find the time]). While Kant and Hegel were brilliant thinkers, ultimately for Nietzsche they were not creators of new values, but at best justifiers of existing values.
Napolee-Ann-verines...
Whatever their station in the Wolverine Nation, each one has an inferiority complex: some "peonic" (slave) others "napoleonic" (master). Examples:
The Walmart Shopper Deep-Core Fanbase Walmart Wal-verine
Dearborn-Flint Non-Ann Arbor Walmart Wal-verines
Low-Curve Wait-List-Clinger Napolee-Ann-verines
Mid-Curve In-State-Token Napolee-Ann-verines
Top-Curve Ivy League-Reject Napolee-Ann-verines
Psychologists would agree that "neurotic projection" would best explain the Wolverine Nation’s universal delusion that the Spartan Nation is couched with the same nagging inferiority complex that universally riddles the Wolverine Nation.
Nietzsche’s ideas correctly depict the flip-sides of human nature in its rawest form…this ridiculous duality is the accepted norm in Ann Arbor. That culture of raging envy simply does not exist in East Lansing…it just doesn’t.
The study abroad program
We’re happy enough with our programs but that Study Abroad program at MSU is the shit! Count this Michigan fan in complete slave resentment hate jealousy of that program.
Almost every Spartan I have in my family or close circle of friends started as a Michigan fan and became MSU fans when they didn’t get into Michigan. That’s about 17 people — a very limited sample. The one guy who got into both was offered a full (athletic) ride to State and was to be a preferred walk-on at Michigan, and thus went to State.
Also, not a single one of those people did any worse after college because of losing a few spots in the USA Today list in undergrad prestige. Leaving out specific programs and schools, the difference between one liberal arts degree and the other is infinitesimal.
If you went to Michigan or Michigan State, the biggest difference I’ve ever noticed is in how important the Michigan-Michigan State rivalry is to you.
Michigan is Michigan State’s biggest rival, and for those of us who grew up in Southeast Michigan and have 17+ close family and friends who went to MSU, it ranks just behind Ohio State in dates you plug into Outlook as soon as the schedule is released. Winning 2/2 in basketball last year was a huge deal for us. The hockey rivalry (where there is no doubt Michigan-MSU is the biggest rivalry) is a huge deal for us.
Yet we spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to explain why this is a big rivalry to many of our classmates. Ohio State is the by-far consensus big rival, but I come across lots of people from Chicago, Grand Rapids and the rest of the west side for whom Notre Dame is the next-biggest. Many New Yorkers agree, and then try to slide Penn State (!) in there. We’ve played them, what, 10 times?
Obviously it’s about who’s around you, but I think it’s also about how the rivalry is reciprocated. I don’t accuse all Spartans of this (e.g. the OP, WatersDemos, is one of the more respected contributors on my blog) but many MSU fans denigrate the rivalry not with preoccupation and plebeian resentment, but blithe stupidity. The “Walmart Wolverine” notion is an embarrassment—-name for me a public university whose fans are 100% alumni? Northwestern? Would you accuse Nebraska of the same thing? The contempt that Michigan fans feel for Michigan State increases exponentially when Valenti or Caputo spends a week with the Tigers in the ALCS and the Lions on MNF trying to troll Wolverine listeners.
WatersDemos is absolutely right that Michigan State is a school to be proud of in its own right, its athletics equally so. If the recent excellence on the football field can be sustained for a few more years, it would go a long way toward convincing Michigan’s sizeable out-of-state and west-side contingents that the MSU game and “Hate Week” are vastly important traditions. But I believe it’s also up to the fans to self-patrol the more trollish tendencies within the fanbase that took root in the JLS years. This rivalry could swing toward Auburn-Alabama, or it could be Cy-Hawk, and much of the difference is in whether the Morrill Act school approaches the rivalry from a perspective of pride in its own, or obsession with its other. You’re not Iowa State; you’re MICHIGAN State (fergodsakes).
www.mgoblog.com
Thanks for the comment
I imagine that if every M fan was like you and every MSU fan was like me, there would only be respect and good natured ribbing between the fanbases.
Some people would find that boring (as one poster points out above, though I’m not sure how this would be “aloof”), but I see it less as boring interactions and more as strong, prideful, and respectful adults. Our own small, metaphorical “community of the virtuous,” if you will.
By now you know my take on the Walmart Wolverine issue, so I won’t rehash it. Suffice it to say there’s about 95% agreement on that issue as well.
But I’ll also say this: the contingent of people tagged with “WW” are often as bad or worse than the types of MSU fans neither of us can tolerate. And just as MSU fans should self-patrol (I agree with you on that point as well – hell, I even advocated for a Geaux-Blue type mod at RCMB), I think there could be more patrolling among the Michigan community of fans (I’m not talking about MGB in particular – I’ve already applauded Brian’s, yours and ZL’s efforts, and implicitly all the other mods as well). Quite frankly, I think the trollish tendencies you noted are, on the M side, overwhelmingly the product of that contingent of your fanbase that has no connection to the university. Maybe that’s true of MSU as well (though I doubt it’s to the same extent as with M – many of our students and alums are pretty darn resentful, etc…). Also, I see as much obsession, “ressentiment” and all out hatred for MSU on MGB from many posters as well. (Hell, how often do they need to talk about how Dantonio is a douchebag, say “fuck state,” and root for asteroids while at the same time claim that MSU is irrelevant before the inconsistencies become commonly apparent ? [OMG Shirtless is the only poster I’ve seen who is honest about this inconsistency]. Again, I sense it’s largely not the students and alums who say these contradictory things). And the railing against MSU fans (e.g., we’re all preoccupied “brahs” or “juggalos,” and spell “State” as “staee” [FWIW, I laugh at this every time]) would come off as more authentic (IMHE) if the proponents would be honest about these more embarrassing parts of the M fanbase.
Finally, I’ve never listened to this Valenti character (I don’t live in the area) and never even heard of Cavuto, but from what is said about him/them on MGB, I’m perplexed as to how he has any audience at all, and even more so that such audience consists of M fans.
Rivalry & Ressentiment (http://www.theonlycolors.com/2011/9/15/2426897/rivalry-ressentiment)
WWs are a Spartan Myth, but A-Holes we has them.
I used the Northwestern example above so I’ll stick with it — here’s a fanbase that is by and large alumni, and also by and large pretty agreeable as fanbases go. Maybe they’re the nicest fanbase out there. Does Northwestern have douchebag fans? Yes. Lots.
Are there trollish, shitty Michigan fans? Absolutely. I bet it’s more than 1 in 5, simply because we are talking about sports fans. Any fanbase, alumni or not, is going to be filled with assholes. Fanbases are huge enough to be inclusive of pretty much every type of person. Sports fandom in our society is our war outlet/stand-in. Thus it encourages antisocial behavior among rivals. It brings out the douche.
So anything said about fans of this team or that is going to be necessarily marginal. I mean if 20% of Michigan State are one thing and 10% of Michigan fans are that thing, that thing is a huge, fanbase-defining characteristic.
I have sat in almost every section of Michigan Stadium, and within 2 of most of the rows. I’ve met all kinds of Michigan fans. Let me tell you now: there’s no difference between the alums and non-alums except we alumni have that sense of privilege. Michigan has for a generation now given preferential treatment in admissions to people from tougher backgrounds. For all the UofM khaki brigade* portrays this as Detroit/Pontiac/Flint, it’s more rural hicks from all over the state. The girl in the kid seat of the shopping cart:
…could well one day write a killer essay about growing up in a house of abuse and how this made her dream of becoming a therapist. Maybe her uncle already did just that, and all of his family are thus Michigan fans.
I’ve sat at Tiger games near a family I was 99% sure were trashy-ass downriver meth-heads, except not the three young children with them. Nothing about the Tigers says anything about that family. Likewise there’s nothing about the University of Michigan that attracts out-of-shape superstore shoppers except that because it’s the top university in the state and one of the historically apex programs in the country, Michigan just has lots of fans period. Theoretically (not applying this to M-MSU), 10% of four times the fanbase = the same number of douchebags as 40% of a 1/4 size fanbase. Conversely, there’s nothing about attending the University of Michigan that would make you less of an asshole.
Last night the family with the Cranbrook mansion and the family with mullets and meth-caused tooth decay were both at Comerica Park because the Tigers are good at baseball and this is their local team. The M-MSU difference is nowhere near this but I will use an ultra-extreme example to drive home the effect: If we went to an MSU baseball game next spring, the Cranbrook family might be there but not so the downriver family. All this says is that Tiger fandom is more universal. If we were actually making comparisons between a college baseball team and a team that’s a 3-game winning streak away from the AL pennant, and didn’t want to acknowledge that college ball<<<MLB, we might well settle on the distinct lack of downriver meth heads at Spartan baseball games. It wouldn’t make it at all true.
Speaking still with the marginal caveat from above, Michigan fandom is different from most others. Like other sports teams that have a long history of success, there’s a thread of entitlement in our fanbase. Am I a bandwagon Red Wings fan because I started seriously following hockey with the Russian Five? That was 20 years ago, but 20 years of winning: as well call every Izzo-era Spartan basketball fan a bandwagonner. WRT Michigan football, other than a .500-ish injury year per decade, since 1969 there has been only 2008 and the second halfs of ‘09 and ’10 to knock folks off a 40+ year bandwagon (not to mention those carried through the ’60s by the momentum of Yost, Crisler and Kipke)— the fans of winning now have seats with their names engraved on them, and the wagon has become a doubledecker bus of people singing "Anything less than 9 wins isn’t good enough!"
There is also the expectation (NW, Notre Dame, Penn State fans have this too, and Stanford but their program actually lives up to it) that the program maintain moral superiority to its opponents at all times and in all ways. That moral superiority works for Michigan because it plays to our advantages — if all NCAA football players had to have legit 3.5 GPAs in high school Michigan gets the creme de la creme because legit student-athletes are the program’s forte; if NCAA football had no scholastic requirements whatsoever we’d be marginalized because Michigan can’t get guys like Cam Newton through admissions. MSU has this too because we’re all Big Ten snobs like that for the same reason; Michigan has it in spades.
We also tend to focus on the moral superiority part without thinking too hard about why. Hey, we’re sports fans: biases are part of the deal. However this has an effect on the fanbase in other ways. In our efforts to self-justify our self-proclaimed “good guys” label, the society of Michigan fandom is tougher on trolls within the ranks. Dissing rivals is expected as with any other fan group, but we weirdly expect it to be clever and backed up by irrefutable data. It’s what makes something like MGoBlog possible: come all ye who seek holiness, we shall make thee holier than thou. Duke basketball functions like this as well, and their rivals have the same reaction to it that Michigan’s rivals have to us. In this way it’s like a major religion, easy to disparage because of the hypocrisy but theologically/conceptually good.
Michigan State fandom, I think, is closer to what I would consider the baseline for college fandom, closer to Penn State/Michigan than an SEC team but closer to Ohio State than Penn State/Michigan. It is “This is My Team,” full stop. When I asterisked my column to say “not you Stunt” it was referencing my brother in law who is what I would consider your model Michigan State fan. He has season tickets. He tailgates with a great group of friends. He travels once a year to away games. He knows every great Spartan legend, can recognize 2,000 former Spartan football/basketball athletes in street clothes after 10 years, and has a closet full of green jerseys. He was a Michigan fan until he (didn’t get into Michigan and…) went to State, and this is a sore spot. If Michigan didn’t exist at all, or if Michigan became an Ivy League I-AA program, or even if Michigan just dropped down to Northwestern level and let MSU be the big state program, this would be the most perfect scenario.
Seeing his fandom up close has done a lot for me in reassessing my understanding of Spartan fandom, because what Michigan sees from MSU and the whole of MSU fandom are entirely different things.
What keeps Michigan from becoming the academic footnote is the non-alums, folks who might have no other ties to the university but got on the Bo bandwagon and have been part of the tour ever since. Michigan State has plenty of its own non-alums, but they’re more ancillary — Michigan State is about alumni and connections to the school and passing those connections down. A few (Spartan Bob is one) fans of the underdog hop on as they go. It’s a state school, a Morrill Act school, a great school. But it cannot become more, as did Ohio State and Penn State did, because of its proximity to a singularity. MSU has to fight for recruits and fans against this singularity on an un-level playing field. This I think is the basis for most of the resentment of “Walmart Wolverines.”
The rest: Michigan State exists among throngs of holier than thou Michigan fans—the good and the bad—and as a result, still marginally speaking, ends up with strong impressions of hypocrisy from personal experience. This in turn engenders a general disdain for the theology, and a greater appreciation for slander, its deservedness or cleverness irrelevant. When Magic Johnson gave his paraphrasingly "you will make great McDonalds workers) graduation speech that moment was made worse for MSU fans because there were obvious Michigan folks like me in audience, identifiable because we were laughing in the aisles as opposed to pinching the bridges of noses. A thousand Magic Johnson graduation speeches later the resentment is eternally etched. We Michigan fans — even the more rational ones — in turn use these moments to feel better about ourselves, to revel in the tiny distinctions between the schools that really make little difference.
This is what makes RCMB possible. It’s what makes filling the Detroit airwaves with Spartan trolls a better business plan than three local pro teams in the national spotlight. It’s why I felt the need to explain to the large number of Michigan fans who don’t live in Michigan why the Michigan – Michigan State rivalry is so important to us.
This:
And the railing against MSU fans (e.g., we’re all preoccupied "brahs" or "juggalos," and spell "State" as "staee" [FWIW, I laugh at this every time]) would come off as more authentic (IMHE) if the proponents would be honest about these more embarrassing parts of the M fanbase.
…is true except for your implied definition of the “more embarrassing parts of the M fanbase.” It’s not Michigan who’s embarrassed by the generally greater allegiance to M than MSU in the home state by people with no connection to either. It’s Michigan State, avoiding the implication that all things being equal, most people choose to root for Michigan.
Does state have a greater meat-head quotient than Michigan really? Doubtful—maybe a little in the way Michigan has a slightly greater snob %. Juggalos? I know juggalos—Detroit pro teams are more their thing than college but if you happen to meet two of them on the train tracks after a train wreck I get the metaphor (it’s an extremist example btw). I could totally picture you walking past the perfect ‘WW’ in the same spot in 2004 and having the same reaction.
Where there’s a difference is in the general tolerance of the trolls, wherever they come from.
- These folks complain bitterly about the unfairness but the university seems to be on to something, since the groups they target end up more successful, and attribute more of that success to the university, ie more donations.
also been to a few other college stadiums and lots of baseball stadiums.
www.mgoblog.com
There’s a lot here that I like, particularly what you say regarding the potential for people like the girl in the shopping cart, among other things (the universal appeal of M, which I’ve never held as a strike against it – far from it, I actually admire it). There’s also some stuff here that I can’t understand even after several readings (mostly the very end).
As for your argument about MSU fans’ views of “WWs”: I’ve seen a few eerily similar iterations of this argument that MSU fans are somehow jealous that people who went to neither school choose to root for M. I can only speak for myself, but I have two problems with this argument:
1) It’s speculative and ad hominem – basically saying what is going on in someone else’s head (i.e., importing the emotion of jealousy) as a personal way of attacking their argument (which is by definition separate from them – message and messenger are different), which, of course, none of us can ever do. Hell, my personal view is that most people don’t understand what’s going on in their own heads, much less other people’s.
2) It does not resonate with me at all. Quite frankly, I’m glad the woman in the picture you put up is wearing your colors, and not mine. I’m sorry if that sounds bad, but it’s honest. (In saying that BTW, I’ll note that I have never thought that such people have any negative reflection on the University of Michigan – if anything, it speaks to M’s brand power, which you’ve noted in the past, and I agree). I’m proud of the fact that we, as you say, for the most part operate based on connections with the university. I wouldn’t want it any other way. I guess I wouldn’t mind having someone from, e.g., EMU over who rooted for MSU over M, and generally rooted for MSU all the time, even over his own school, but at best I’d be indifferent. I’d wonder why he doesn’t have pride in, and root for, his own school. So this jealousy you speak of is just not a part of my emotional makeup – at least as to M and those fans who choose it over MSU. Similarly, I am not embarrassed that the woman in the photo wears your colors, or that she represents a greater contingent in Michigan that chooses M over MSU (I don’t think you should be either BTW). I can’t imagine what jealousy or embarrassment would feel like in this situation – I guess I just don’t care, and to the extent that I do care, I’d prefer to keep my school’s connections more exclusive (thanks UM). But you could be right about other MSU fans (I kinda doubt it) – I don’t consider myself to be representative of MSU fans generally.
As to your comment about Nebraska and the ubiquity of fans who didn’t attend their teams of choice schools, if a “WW” style Nebraska fan was an obnoxious jerk who initiated, then yep – the “WW” rationale would transfer over to him as well. Here’s an important sentence (IMHE): It’s not about these people’s allegiances (i.e., it’s not about M); it’s about how they carry themselves and interact with others. (At least for me).
Also, you say that we’ll inevitably always be second fiddle to M, which is itself a singularity, and that this is the basis for most of MSU “resentment” of “WWs.” Again, you may be right about the first part (and I agree we’re in a tough spot with M, ND, and OSU in the immediate vicinity), but the second part does not resonate with me at all. Again, speaking for myself I’d say that I would view an obnoxious “WW” with contempt, not resentment (there’s a difference, and I think you understand it as well as I do). On this point, however, I also think that’s probably true of MSU fans generally – I think they laugh at “WWs,” and find them to be ridiculous. They’re an easy and plentiful target, and MSU fans know that most of them feel the sting of that designation pretty deeply. Which of course leads to more laughter. (Please don’t associate me with these MSU fans BTW – that’s not my approach).
I said I wouldn’t rehash, but it appears necessary to me at the moment: my own unique strain of the “WW” argument is that it should only be used reactively, i.e., wait for someone to denigrate your education and/or your team. Just because someone proclaims their allegiance to M does not mean that it’s time to inquire about when they graduated in AA and in what discipline. My position presupposes that everyone can freely root for whomever they choose, and that it’s no one’s business who you root for . . . until you make it their business by denigrating their school, from which they actually graduated. So far as I can see [which is not very far I admit] an argument against my position can only take the form of an argument that, e.g., the douchebag working behind the deli counter can “talk shit” (hate that phrase, but whatever – it works) to me (an example from real life BTW), and he has the right to not have “shit talked” back to him (which may or may not include a “WW” comment). No one has that right – if someone initiates, there is no right to have the other stand by with reticence. Limited intellectually though I may be, I cannot see how that argument could possibly win. Now, we can argue the merits of the “WW” comment (which we already have), and perhaps that’s your inroad to attacking my position. But you can’t possibly think that I’m required to stand idly by while the OCC dropout tells me that MSU’s academics suck and M are the leaders and best. I don’t think that you think this. All your writing suggests you’re a smart and respectable guy.
Finally, I sincerely think it’s great that you embrace fans like the woman in the photo. I wouldn’t personally, and perhaps that makes me an uppity snob (funny BTW that M folk have accused me of this and at the same time are proud of it for themselves). If so, I can’t help it, and I accept all the liability that goes along with it. Notwithstanding my arguably misguided approach, the more we embrace others and reality, the better, and I admire your attitude towards the “methheads” as you say, to the extent that I understand it anyway.
Whatever the case, I appreciate the honest and reasonable back and forth. I think we’re probably closer to agreement than it may seem. Also, nice diary summary post earlier. I’ve always enjoyed your work.
Rivalry & Ressentiment (http://www.theonlycolors.com/2011/9/15/2426897/rivalry-ressentiment)
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