Americans love sports far more than they do politics. There’s a good line attributed to linguist and activist Noam Chomsky that if Americans loved politics as much as they love sports, there would be a revolution tomorrow.

I didn’t put that in quotation marks because Chomsky apparently never said it. But it neatly sums up his thoughts about the bread and circuses aspect of sports and how many people use a lot of intelligence — citing history and statistics — when they talk about sports, but defer too much to so-called experts when it comes to politics.

This past weekend, I watched a college football game in which “my” team lost. It was a tight, defensive game, during which all the calls on the field were clearly correct, even the ones that didn’t serve the team I was rooting for. Every r

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