He is a fabulous athlete. Sure his passes sometime look like dying ducks or knuckle balls on steroids, but he is a fine physical specimen who can run the football and lead a team down the field.
So why does the name Tim Tebow evoke groans, moans, disdain and outright hatred?
Besides the fact he might have just beaten your team there are a lot of intangibles simmering in this cauldron. It is an odd toxic mix that speaks more to the current American psyche than it does to Tim Tebow himself. The fact is Americans are quickly becoming a people best defined not by what we've accomplished, or who, or what we love, but by our phobias.
The golden age of the ALL AMERICAN HERO is over. It died a gruesome death, having been run to ground by that nebulous monster known as the media and reduced to so much gory chum. Everyone has weaknesses, many of them fatal, but never have so many had so much fun exposing them, or made more profit off the seedy disclosures.
The public which has been bombarded by the foibles, follies, philandering, and out right criminality of the famous time and time again for decades now has become jaded to the extreme.
Yeah, he can hit the ball, but his head is as big as a watermelon and his testicles have shrunk to the size of almonds. Yeah, he's fast, but he is also a serial adulterer who has a strange fascination with whips and chains. Yeah, yeah, yeah, if he hadn't been drunk all the time he could have broke every record in the book that he didn't break.
The list of names and offenses goes on and on and it numbs some and makes complete cynics out of many.
Enter Mr. Tebow. He of the extreme emotional outbursts, which half a century ago would have been taken for intensity and now is looked at by not just a few as self serving, self promoting, and utterly fake. He of the quite public and frequent prayer which is not only suspect, but considered out of place and down right embarrassing by huge throngs of people.
Indeed, with the collapse of the mainstream protestant sects and the rise of the evangelicals and their television hucksters, Christianity is now considered a refuge for rubes and frauds by huge segments of the population. And they don't mind letting everyone know it.
These are the same people who, if they don't dislike Tim Tebow, keep waiting for him to be exposed as the opposite of what he plays to be on camera. They keep waiting for that dirty shoe to fall and his pious image to shatter like so much stained glass thrown down from a high place.
We have become a nation of anti worshippers. We've been so disappointed, so disgusted so many times we not only expect, but we enjoy seeing mega stars and the powerful go down in flames. Every time we do it is a reaffirmation that in ways they are no better than those of us grinding at it in the shadows, far away from the bright lights and glory. It is a reaffirmation of our agnosticism when it comes to all things heaven and earth.
The fact is now days we don't like anyone very much. We're just rooting for Tim Tebow to prove to us we're right.
12-15-11
Dead on and I still don't understand why.
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