The football pitch has long been seen that way in the UK. It’s just a patch of communal housing for worms.

“… I find by sad Experience how the Towns and Streets are filled with lewd wicked Children, and many Children as they have played about the Streets have been heard to curse and swear and call one another Nick-names, and it would grieve ones Heart to hear what bawdy and filthy Communications proceeds from the Mouths of such…”

“Whither are the manly vigour and athletic appearance of our forefathers flown? Can these be their legitimate heirs? Surely, no; a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles can never have descended in a direct line from the heroes of Potiers and Agincourt…”

“The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth…”

“…a fearful multitude of untutored savages… [boys] with dogs at their heels and other evidence of dissolute habits…[girls who] drive coal-carts, ride astride upon horses, drink, swear, fight, smoke, whistle, and care for nobody…the morals of children are tenfold worse than formerly.”

Even if you were vaguely aware that the dim past was different somehow than the present, you rarely thought of it that way. When you viewed a picture of an event in your mythology or your history the figures depicted in the image were dressed pretty much the same way you were, wore their hair the way you did, lived their lives the same, they spoke the same language (although Grandpa did have some peculiar sayings, sometimes).

With the advent of writing, things began to change. We realized the world did change. The classical Greeks of the Iron Age understood that the heroes who fought in Troy used only bronze weapons, and did not ride horses, but only used them to pull their chariots. And nowhere in Homer is writing mentioned.

The speed of social time is increasing. Our parents knew their world was very different from that of their parents, and they find our world incomprehensible. We can clearly see how much things have changed just in our own lifetime. The speed of time is increasing, and sooner or later, no matter how adaptable human beings may think they are, perhaps there is a point beyond which we simply will no longer be able to keep up. This concept of boomer, gen x, millennials, and other demographic cohorts coexisting and competing in the same society is totally new.

Remember Y2K? Can you recall what it was like before cell phones, the internet, what research was like before Google and Wikipedia? It used to be you could identify an educated man by how much he knew. That is meaningless in a world where you can look up anything in a moment, wherever you are, at any time. The pocket calculator made my computational training obsolete, and pocket calculators themselves are now obsolete! Learning new technologies seems pointless when you know in a few years they will become ancient history. Mastering a new computer language is like learning a dead language. Why bother learning Sanskrit or Assyrian or Demotic Egyptian? They used to teach Latin when I went to high school. No one talks like that any more, except some dusty old scholars. I once considered learning Japanese. Today, its a lot smarter to study Mandarin. How much longer before English starts to fade? Maybe not in our lifetimes, but perhaps in that of our children, certainly in that of our grandchildren.

We have all become strangers in a strange land, exiles in our own country, walking anachronisms, ghosts. We are all soon to be invisible, as well as blind to what is all around us. Even if we bravely try to keep up, every new skill and technology we learn soon becomes old hat.

I have been forced to accept that in spite of my education and experience, I can no longer earn a living except at the most menial of jobs. Who needs a Fortran programmer, a LORAN expert, a celestial navigator, a stereo photogrammetrist, a measuring engine or blink comparator operator, or film photographer?

No, I’m not complaining about how old and useless I’ve become. I’m doing all right, and I think I can hang on until my time comes. But I’m terrified at how many others, many much younger than I am, are realizing the same about themselves and are becoming very angry and very restless.

In Rome Marcus Aureolus lamented to his wife, Apoplexia, that their daughter, Chlamydia, was wearing a toga that was far too revealing to the Colosseum to watch the weekly feeding of christians to the lions…

There was outrage over the Beatles, Elvis, and the hippy free-love culture….

I agree with you- it is all silly, a shameless excessive waste- Other than football games I played in as a kid, I have never seen a full football game, much less a halftime show- the billions of dollars and billions of hours of human time wasted on these things is ridiculous… the manufactured, mass-marketed ‘cultural significance’ of the spectacle confounds me.

The vulgarity of it all is secondary to me, what offends me is the pretense that the event is important, and worthy of such an investment of time, energy, money, and attention.

The artificial importance of it all, slickly sold to the public in order to line the pockets of societal parasites.

Countless breathless stories on how the twerking titillation is ‘empowering’… endless recaps of the commercials… its all alien to me….

I got a bit queasy at the very start when “The Rock” introduced the two teams and welcomed them to the “Hallowed ground” of the football field.

Over the last few years, I find I really don’t care for the game of football.