Worshipping a brand

Among the many traits with which I was not born is Enjoying, Understanding, and Tolerating Organized Sport. I really cannot think of a single analogous phenomenon I actually like, either. The lengths to which people will go to support their preferred sports teams boggles me, especially since individual players can move from team to team and therefore the actual makeup of any given team is not guaranteed. People seem to like [the idea of] team X rather than the specific members of team X.

Reduced to its essentials, pretty much all team sport can be defined as "a group of people, typically male, who get paid obscene amounts of money for running around after an object of no intrinsic value." Step back several centuries and instead of this definition we have "a group of males engaged in mock warfare with one another," which is a lot more entertaining. I'd so watch jousting on ESPN, or single combat with claymore, mace, or shortsword. It's the very real danger of being killed that makes these activities a) interesting and b) worth doing in the first place, unlike running around after a ball. It's perhaps worth noting that I would totally watch American football if the ball exploded on touching the ground, or if the losing team didn't get paid. That'd be a lot more fun, and I'd mind a great deal less about the utter traffic clusterfuck caused by people attending the games.

On the telly this morning I saw the apotheosis of all sports-team obsessions. Perky Anchorperson Joel D. Smith was on location at the home of a family who have apparently taken the Baltimore Ravens as their lord and savior. Not only were the rooms of their house painted lurid purple with white and black trim, their furniture was dyed to match, their curtains were made of Ravens-logo print cotton, and the remote for their massive wall-mounted Ravens-watching television had been spraypainted purple and plastered with Ravens logo stickers. It didn't end there, either. Outside the house was parked a white Hummer with purple Ravens vinyl cling decals all over the bodywork and windows. The center brake light had been hidden behind another cling decal of the Ravens logo's eyeballs, so that when the brake was pressed, these eyes lit up red. The alloy rims had also been customized with Ravens logos. It was without a doubt the second most revolting assault on the concept of taste I've ever seen (the first being the house close to my parents' home whose owners think neon orange plastic palm trees are the height of sophistication).

What astonishes me is not so much the determination and the money that had gone into ruining an otherwise acceptable house and a godawful vehicle, but the absolute and slavish devotion to [concept of team] over all else. These people had committed their lives to the worship and magnification of a logo.

We can, of course, take the lateral step of pointing out that worship of a symbol is basically what Christianity is all about, but that can of worms is for a different blog. But it got me thinking about the power of symbols to transcend the medium in which they are portrayed: it didn't matter that the purple-painted walls and logo-print curtains looked hideous, what mattered was that they referenced that holy symbol in the first place. I do not doubt that if a sports team were to have a logo depicting a naked mole-rat there would be families who insisted on plastering naked-mole-rat logos all over their house, car, kids, and dog.

Can anyone who doesn't lack the Appreciating Organized Sport gene explain to me why it's so important to tell everyone that you like [concept of] Team X? Does it confer benefits other than the pride of having spent money on making everybody know you really, really, really, really, really like the Ravens?