The metrosexualization of Texas football
Friday August 15, 2008
Categories: Ah, Texas, Decline and fall
Oh, this is tragic, people. While I await the judgment of Rawlins Gilliland, this don't look good a-tall: The Southlake Carroll Dragons, the state's premier high school football team, are nationally renowned for college-level offenses, suffocating defenses and talented athletes....
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Caroll is already stigmatized in the minds of many opponents as a bunch of spoiled rich white kids and their overindulgent parents. Now opposing coaches will have another epithet to toss, "those sushi-eating Caroll Dragons. How tough can they be?"
I'm adding "football stadium sushi" to the list of things I absolutely will not eat.
While sushi and Texas high school football seems like an odd combination, I'm not getting the "metrosexual" angle here. Is there something effeminately unseemly about sushi I'm not aware of?
Perhaps someone should write them and suggest that they simply eat the fish alive like wild men; just take a grizzly bear bite into the side of that sucker as it writhes.
Is there something effeminately unseemly about sushi I'm not aware of?
Hell yes! In this context, that is. It's like people who eat fried chicken with a knife and fork.
Wait, so what do you have against sushi? I love the stuff, as do all my manly man friends. Seriously, this is a silly take on this issue (if serious).
I agree with Lancelot: Southlake Carroll will be castigated for this, though they may relish the part.
On the other hand, this brings to light an issue that is not unimportant; that is, the quality of foods available to us and our children at school sporting events and other common venues. Why should we expect anyone to subsist on corndogs, nachos, pizza, candy, and soda? The Crunchy Revolution should insist upon healthy alternatives! How about grilled chicken shish-kabobs instead of sausage-on-a-stick, apples instead of candy, water instead of soda (sensibly priced water, that is)?
While eating any food intended to be raw and fresh in a hot stadium doesn't sound very appealing to me, I figure that most of those rough, macho types aren't thinking, secretly, that it is girly, but 'yuck, raw fish'.
Should view it as a dare. On the other hand, something a little healthier than deep fried fat on a stick might be nice at a stadium.
Hell yes! In this context, that is. It's like people who eat fried chicken with a knife and fork.
Hey! I only did that once, and only because it was my cousin's wedding reception and do you know how hard it would have been to get chicken grease out of that suit?
Careful Rod -- this is clearly a sign that the International Homosocialist Conspiracy is advancing!
It's the Crunch Con-ization of Texas football. What's next? Organic soap making at half-time?
Hehe.
Wait til they play Trinity High School with their Tongan linemen. I'd rather watch their pre-gam Haka ritual dance, than eat Southlake Carroll's sushi. :-)
Sushi at a football game! My God! There are people in Texas with human blood!
One of the ways I know that, after living in Texas for four years, I'm nowhere close to assimilating: it isn't the sushi I object to; it's the football.
Hey, I love sushi. Nothing inherently unmanly about sushi. But it's pretty funny to imagine Texas high school football fans eating sushi in the bleachers. This is Texas, after all.
Oh come on Rod. Southlake Carroll is Highland Park for people who wanted to be able to keep their horses nearby. Would you freak if HP served sushi at football games? Cause this is the same group of people. Oh, except, it's all new money, whereas HP has a mix of both.
Can't you run these things past Julie before you blog them? ;)
You ask for the society to become more crunchy con. The society becomes more crunchy con. You mock them for it.
Holy squid au gratin! If God had wanted us to eat raw fish in the Texas heat, he would have given us ptomaine or salmonella gratis with every ‘booster’ season ticket purchase. What next? Cheese Wiz nachos at mass?
This indigestible news is what happens after meat-eaters begin après-carnal carnivore capers with mermaid wannabe mammalian defectors. FURTHER proof that the Ripple Whine effect of John Edwards’ fishy tails have tongues wagging far and wide.
You ask for the society to become more crunchy con. The society becomes more crunchy con. You mock them for it.
Crunchy sushi??? Ack! Thbbbt!
Meh. The mistaken treatment of -Texas- high school football as somehow being the be all end all of high school football has grown tiresome. Come on up to the birth-state of football to see how it's really done. O-H-I-O!
You ask for the society to become more crunchy con. The society becomes more crunchy con. You mock them for it.
What is either crunchy or con about sushi at a high school football game? I mean, look, if this was West Coast, that'd be one thing. But THIS IS TEXAS!! Listen to your Cud'n Rawlins. Hell, if I showed up at the Southlake football game, I'd probably be the one twerp in the crowd who'd actually eat the sushi, and prefer it to the other crap they'd be serving. But it still wouldn't be right. I mean, it would be metaphysically wrong. I would have to call the Rangers and turn myself in, or something. Make a pilgrimage to Willie Nelson's ranch and apologize for sins against Texas. Something.
Ast yourself: would Tom Landry eat sushi within five miles of a football field? I mean, the question answers itself.
The travesty is not the metrosexualization aspect, but the fact that so much money is spent on such crap in the name of "edumacation."
When I was in the Army (not so very long ago) one of our favorite meals that me and my group of buddies habitually went out for was mass quantities of sushi, washed down with copious quantities of plum wine and the best sake.
Couple of my friends were from Texas, too. I recall we even ate sushi in Huston, once.
Granted, we weren't 11B's (infantry) - No, we were all linguists in intell MOS's.. Still, I doubt very much any of us would have been mistaken for metrosexuals. Or effete cosmopolitans.
I instead argue that eating raw (and fermented- nothing better than Korean kimchee and soju) food is a mark of psychological fortitude and flexibility.
For just as Strausser, the SS officer says in Casablanca, Germans as conquerers must become used to any weather in the world.. Similarly, If we Americans are to be effective imperialists, we too must learn to eat any and everything.
No better place to start acclimating than at a Texan football game, I say.
Yes, let's continue the idea that your masculinity is linked to how much gravy-sopping meat you can eat, and how much you spurn "sissy" foods like fish and salad.
I mean, it's not like Texas has a problem with obesity or anything.
"But it still wouldn't be right. I mean, it would be metaphysically wrong."
Like your babying of those chickens? A real man would ring their necks with his bare hands, bite of their heads and then teach his kids to barbeque like a real man.
On a purely pragmatic level, I am against it. Raw fish + 110 degree Texas heat = some TRULY scary restroom action
Then again, I'm a New England girl with a sensitive stomach. Perhaps the manly men of Texas can withstand food poisoning better than me.
Yes, let's continue the idea that your masculinity is linked to how much gravy-sopping meat you can eat, and how much you spurn "sissy" foods like fish and salad. I mean, it's not like Texas has a problem with obesity or anything.
If this website filtered out comments from people who utterly lacked a sense of humor, I wonder how different one's reading experience would be.
Well, there is a bit of a point there, Rod.
How much 'manly' food is even.. not unhealthy? And the idea that eating healthy is 'sissy' is so prevalent that a recent, yes, Hummer commercial had a man in a grocery line with healthy food, following a man whose entire grocery budget, it seemed, involved some form of dead cow.
Being worried by this impression of wimpiness that eating a plant seemed to convey, he had to immediately go out and buy, of course, a Hummer.
Of course, the funny thing is, always heard that cars like that were about compensating. Never expected the COMPANY to agree.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4ZkYPLN38
>>>> But THIS IS TEXAS!!
NO, Rod, Southlake IS NOT TEXAS. Ok, geographically, yes it's in Texas. But the new money I told you about earlier? They have all moved here from out of state. Trust me - I grew up less than 5 miles away. When I was a freshman in high school (1987), they had 5,000 people and a Dairy Queen. Today -- 25,000 people and they have a Pottery Barn, Williams Sonoma, Anthropologie, & everything else. Those extra 20,000 people did not come from Dime Box or Cuervo or even Grapevine. They came from up north. They don't know any better than to serve sushi at football games.
Can't you get worked up about Condoleeza Rice's trip to Georgia or something?
Meh. The mistaken treatment of -Texas- high school football as somehow being the be all end all of high school football has grown tiresome. Come on up to the birth-state of football to see how it's really done. O-H-I-O!
As someone who grew up in Ohio, lived for awhile in Philadelphia, and now lives in Texas, I have really come to understand the truth of the saying: In the Northeast, football is a cultural event; in the Midwest, it's war; and in the South, it's religion.
Blech.
***
How much 'manly' food is even.. not unhealthy?
Um ... yeah. Isn't that the point? ;-)
Go to Sodalak's in Snook, Texas, a little way outside College Station, for the ultimate artery clogger: chicken-fried bacon. ;-)
Aww, and here I thought the deep fried mars bar, or the 'baconator' was bad enough. Eww. (And I am NOT a health nut, takes a lot for that.)
At Sodalak's, an order of chicken-fried bacon even comes with a side of cream gravy!
As a junior high student in the late 80's, my high school lost an area playoff game in the final seconds to this never heard of Dallas area school. That was when they were in 3A (we have 5 here in TX). I think I had about 3 orders of nachos at that game. Time have changed.
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