The NFL is Perfect! The NFL is Doomed!

April 9, 2026April 9, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

Chuck Klosterman and I grew up on football, the Notre Americano, the United States, and NFL version. As such, the two of us are about as far from objective as two people can be on a discussion about football. Chuck Klosterman spends a majority of his book Football celebrating the NFL’s era of almost uncontested dominance, and I smiled and nodded throughout his walk down memory lane. The NFL was and is so dominant that most of us thought their reign would pretty much last forever, but as Football points out, nothing lasts forever.

We both grew up thinking the NFL was the perfect league running the perfect sport, but I did that comparing it to baseball in the Major Leagues and basketball in the NBA. Klosterman takes his thesis in another direction, comparing it to the other most prominent football league in North America, the Canadian Football League (CFL).

My obsession with the NFL is so myopic that I never even considered the idea that someone might think there is a better professional football league out there. If we were to make the argument that the NFL is perfect though, we would have to use some comparative analysis, and there is only one other league of professional football worth including in such an argument, the CFL. Before we attempt to compare the two, I must confess that I’ve never made it through an entire CFL game. I’ve watched it for the novelty and to watch some of my favorite college football stars who didn’t make it to the NFL. Once the novelty wore off, and I watched those players a couple of times, I flipped the channel. I did not watch enough CFL to establish an informed opinion of the league. Thus, it’s impossible for me to imagine the flip side: a Canadian watching enough NFL to develop an informed opinion on the NFL and walking away with the thought that the CFL game is superior. My myopia on this is the very definition of subjectivity though.

There are BIG reasons that I think the NFL is superior. The iconography the NFL game, its teams, and its players have achieved is not only nationwide, intercontinental, and worldwide. The CFL has never and will never match the NFL in popularity, and I don’t think I need to qualify that statement. What percentage of Parisians are aware of the Cowboys, the Chiefs, or the Jets? That number might be lower than I think, but number would be so much higher than those aware of the Argonauts, the Alouettes, and the Stampeders that it wouldn’t be an interesting survey. How many Londoners know the names Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, and Peyton Manning when compared to Nathan Rourke, Andrew Harris and Justin McInnis? Some could characterize my opinion as subjective, as I watched those elite college athletes mature into NFL stars, but I don’t think it’s subjective to say that the NFL is the go-to place for elite athletes in football. If you argue that point, you’ll have to provide me a ratio of elite college athletes in football who chose to play in the CFL over the NFL, when the NFL wanted them. After that argument is over, you’ll also have to give me a ratio for the number of elite athletes, in their prime, who have left the NFL for the CFL, and when you come up with that insignificant number, I’ll provide the number of CFL stars who have left the CFL for the NFL, when they NFL decided to give them a shot at making an NFL roster. Even if we include suspended NFL players, those in contract disputes, or the attempts aging players have made to revive their career in the CFL, the number of elite athletes who want to play and stay in the NFL for as long as they can is an argument no CFL fan would enter with a straight face.

Even with all that, the primary reason to watch the NFL over the CFL is that to get a first down in football, the NFL provides its teams four downs (chances or tries) and the CFL provides three, and four downs provides more drama.

“Ok,” you, the dispassionate observer might say, “if four is more dramatic than three, wouldn’t five downs be more dramatic?” To paraphrase Klosterman, five downs would probably feel like too many and three feels like it’s not enough. “Four just feels perfect,” Klosterman writes. I agree, because four downs allows for more incremental progressions, or a running game. The CFL’s three-down pass-oriented game almost makes the running game unnecessary and even strategically unwise.

Casual football fans routinely complain that the running game “Is the boring part.” Those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s, heard this from our friends in Nebraska who hated the Cornhuskers in college football and loved the Joe Montana-led 49ers.

Those who didn’t grow up in Nebraska have no idea how tough it was to maintain allegiance to the Huskers in the 80s and 90s. We were teenagers and early twenty-somethings during this era, and when you’re in that demographic, you don’t like what everyone else does. My teenage friends, and the kids I wanted to befriend, loathed the Huskers, because their dads, teachers, uncles, and everyone else they knew loved the Huskers. It was deemed “uncool” to like the Huskers. We had a teacher ask the class “Who is a Husker fan?” I was the only one who raised his hand.

The kids I knew also hated them, even after they won national championships, because running the ball was so boring. I watched the same 49er games they did, and I knew that a twelve-yard pass play was sexier than a twelve-yard running play, but I never made the leap with them to the 49ers. I never considered the running game boring, and I still don’t.

Their the type who say that if the NFL wants to be more popular, they should do everything they can to create a climate in which NFL teams pass more, if not all the time. As a football fanatic, I disagree that running plays are boring, but if I am going to provide an objective perspective, I must admit that a twelve-yard pass play is sexier than a twelve-yard running play. Also, the NFL’s Competition Committee (NFLCC) has made strides in various rules to try to make the passing game more prominent.

As I wrote, I haven’t watch a CFL game, but I attended an Arena Football League (AFL) game. The AFL passes the ball 70% of the time, and the NFL passes the ball 53.3% of the time. I didn’t know that stat when I attended this game, and I didn’t spot the huge difference for the first couple of quarters. I just considered it a fast paced game that was actually pretty exciting to watch at first. As the game progressed, the game lost some of its sex appeal, and I didn’t know why, because I wasn’t looking for it. Somewhere around the fourth quarter, it dawned on me that exciting, sexy plays lose their definition when they occur an overwhelming percentage of the time. The running game is the ebb to the flow of the passing game. Their relationship is intertwined with one another, as one strategically sets up the other and vice versa. When I attended the AFL game, I was excited to attend an AFL game, and I was bored about 50% of the way through it. There was just too much passing involved. The CFL is a passing game, largely because they only have three downs to secure a first down, and that, in my opinion, is the primary reason it will never be as popular as the NFL.

Klosterman’s book also illustrates the NFL provides the superior game, because the CFL has the rouge. I must confess ignorance here, as I never heard of the CFL’s rouge before reading this section in Klosterman’s Football. The rationale behind the rouge, in my humble opinion, is to give the most boring play in football, the punt, some excitement. The rouge allows for a point to be awarded if a punt, field goal attempt, or kickoff ends up with the ball landing in the touchdown area with no return by the opposing team. The rule discourages teams from simply kneeling or letting the ball fall into the end zone. The CFL believes this promotes excitement, strategy, and field position battles, especially in close games. I must award some theoretical points in this scenario, because I imagine that it might add some small parcel of anticipation amid the otherwise depressing fact that my team is conceding that they cannot secure a first down by punting. Other than that, the rouge just feels like a gimmick that the CFL developed to compete with the NFL, even though it was first implemented over 160 years ago. In my independent research on the rouge, I learned that there have been regular season games decided by a last-second, walk-off rouge, and I also learned that there was a rouge-only game in which Montreal beat Ottawa 1-0. To try to achieve some level of objectivity, I must admit that it’s an interesting quirk, but if my favorite team won a game by a rouge, I can’t imagine it providing so much satisfaction that I would celebrate it. I would categorize it as a win for my team and never talk about the details of it ever again.

Another distinction is that while the NFL only allows eleven players on either side of the line of scrimmage, the CFL has twelve. My initial reaction is that this would lead to a crowded appearance, but the CFL adopted a wider and longer field. If it’s wider, longer, and more populated with players, does that make it better or more popular? The NFL draws more viewers within the nation of Canada than the CFL does.

The only rule I see that favors the CFL is motion toward the line of scrimmage before the snap. The NFL’s Competition Committee states that it provides too much advantage to the offense, and I understand that, but they’ve passed so many rules that favor the offense that I don’t understand why they never passed this one. I’m sure if I dug deep, I could find other reasons, but this is the only CFL rule I wish the NFL would adopt.

The CFL’s play clock is 20 seconds as opposed to the NFL’s 40 on most plays. This allows for a quicker pace, of course, but again, we go to the drama. Whether the typical fan sees it or not, there’s a lot of pre-snap drama that affects the pace of the game. Watching AFL, CFL, and NFL, you see the drama and the pace that favors the NFL game.

NFL purists still complain about the relatively recent rules the NFL Competition Committee put in place to promote more offense and more passing in the game. The rules committee also inserted rules for player protection, particularly the QB, and most NFL fanatics loathe them, but when comparing them to CFL rules, the NFL still provides the superior product. As I wrote, I’ve never watched a CFL game, but I imagine that watching one would tell me how perfect the allowances and limitations the NFL rules are.

The NFL is Doomed

“The NFL is doomed!” was author Chuck Klosterman’s pitch to get us to buy his book Football. It worked on me, but I am such a Klosterman fan that I would probably purchase a cook book from him. He writes that the NFL’s implosion will not happen today, tomorrow, or within a couple of years. It will happen decades from now, long after our generation goes down.

The sociopolitical theory Klosterman posits for the NFL’s downfall is that there are so many elements of football that we do not want for our culture. He lists a variety of elements of football that we could label political in nature, and he concludes each element with the sentence, “This is not what we want.” We apparently do not want a violent sport, a sport exclusive to male participants that is only loved in the U.S. He also writes that football does not reject toxic masculinity, celebrates the ability to ignore pain and injury, rewards domination of the weak, shuns individuality and identity, and it is authoritarian and militaristic, and hierarchically controlled, with objective outcomes.

“This is not what we want,” Mr. Klosterman asks after listing each characteristic of football. My question to Mr. Klosterman apes a question my uncle used to ask us when we’d say “we” when talking about sports, politics, or any other element of life for which we developed an affiliation of some sort.

“We really need a touchdown here,” we’d whisper while watching our favorite NFL team on TV, for example.

“Who’s we?” my uncle would ask with a mischievous smile on his face. “What do you have a mouse in your pocket?” That joke wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny when he first said it, and it grew exceedingly less funny the more often he said it. We could classify it as somewhat, sort of clever, in an excessively obnoxious vein, but it was never, ever funny. I think a few of us may have smiled when we first heard him say it, but I don’t think anyone ever laughed. Check that, he laughed. Based on the fact that he said it so often, he obviously considered it one of the most successful rhetorical parries ever created, but if he learned how to read focused groups, he might have discontinued this line of questioning. I don’t think anyone ever thought it was as poignant or provocative as he did either, but his decades-long replies did have one unfunny point, ‘Who do you think you are when you’re dropping your we on us? Who do you claim to represent here?’

When I ask who is we, some might guess that I’m accusing Klosterman of political proselytizing, but I’m not necessarily doing so. I’m suggesting that Klosterman is citing group thought when he says ‘we’, but it’s his group’s thought, or the group he knows. Without putting extensive thought into it, I can come up with three ‘we’s of group thought. My we and Klosterman’s we might parallel each other for some distance, but we perpendicular at a certain point. The difference between our similarities and differences are nowhere near the definitions of the ‘we’s that exists within the two sides of my extended family. I realize that’s anecdotal evidence, but that’s kind of the point. If we travel outside my family into the greater variations of we known throughout the country, we find that the country is not only bifurcated on ‘we’s, or trifurcated, it’s absolutely balkanized on so many topics. As one of my friends who was born and raised abroad, and has lived in several states throughout his adult life said, “The United States is almost, almost fifty different countries.” The country is so balkanized on so many subjects Klosterman discusses that I can’t believe he has the confidence, the temerity, and some might say the audacity to write ‘we’ in this manner. Time will bear this out, but Klosterman’s suggestion that his definition of we is more in touch than mine, or the two sides of my family, or those living in this balkanized country just wreaks of subjectivity.

The much stronger argument Chuck Klosterman should’ve made is that the young ‘uns just aren’t watching football anymore. When I first heard his doomsayer “The NFL is doomed!” marketing pitch for Football, I thought this would be the crux of his argument. And I dreaded reading it, because I didn’t want to read that viewpoint backed or bolstered by analysis, data, and other facts. I read through Football, the book, as I would a horror novel, thinking that that big bad monster was coming, but it never did. If I wrote this book, this argument would be my final death knell, if I thought the end of the NFL was coming. I would approach my analysis from a ‘they’ viewpoint, as opposed to the ‘we’ however. My anecdotal information comes from the young adults around me defining my ‘they’, and the theys I know are very close to entering that key demographic, aged 25-49 that Klosterman admits set trends even though they don’t have any money. When they watch the NFL, or college football, and they don’t very often, they do so with passing interest and little in the way of “we-like” loyalties. They’re in and out of even the most crucial games, and they don’t even bother watching what they consider irrelevant regular season games. When they do watch anything under the football heading, it’s typically a YouTube broadcast that focuses on highlight packages.

To bolster my point that the NFL is doomed, I would cite a story on a news program that had a 60 Minutes format. It had three separate and distinct stories in the manner that news program does, and one of the stories focused on the Super Bowl of gamers. I considered the story relatively irrelevant, but I asked my twenty something nephew about it, and he lit up. He began talking about the game they played in this Super Bowl of gamers, and he spoke about the individual who led his team to victory in the manner I would Peyton Manning and John Elway. I listened to my nephew’s extensive knowledge and enthusiasm for the game and the individual gamer with a lump in my throat, knowing that my beloved NFL was doomed.

My nephew also reinforced the idea I had that we’re not only bifurcated or trifurcated, but balkanized, almost as balkanized as we were back in the Theodore Roosevelt administration 1901-1909, when there was no TV, no movies, about 9,000 motor cars in the country, and an overwhelming majority of the American public never traveled thirty miles away from their homes throughout their entire life. Citizens who called Roosevelt president, in their present tense, had print if they could afford books, newspapers, and various other periodicals in common, but that was about it. We had Buggs Bunny, Happy Days, Cheers, Frasier and Seinfeld, and we had the NFL throughout. Some of us say we watched the same shows, because we had three channels, but we had cable. The distinction we know now is that almost every show on cable sucked. We watched major broadcast shows, because they had all of the talented writers and stars, and when we went to work the next day, we talked about those shows with everyone else who watched them. We referred to these conversations as water cooler talk, and the generation that Klosterman and I share can now look back on that era as a very special time. We all shared a cultural zeitgeist, a collective consciousness, a shared cultural literacy, or to put it simply ‘a shared cultural common ground’. However we phrase it, we had those very special connections with a wide swath of the people we talked to for a long time in our lives, and now that it appears over, it almost feels like an hourglass type of timeline that will never be duplicated. The citizens in the Roosevelt administration had little-to-nothing in common in the early 20th century, because they had little in the way of travel or technology, and at the beginning of the 21st century we have little-to-nothing in common because, it could be argued, that we have so much technology that our definitions of entertainment are so fractured or splintered that we’re not reading, watching, or listening to any of the same things anymore.

This spells doom for the NFL in the sense that it will no longer be the King Kong/Godzilla cultural behemoth of ratings dominance in future generations. When I write that, your next logical question would be, ‘Ok, well, what’s going to replace it?’ Nothing and everything. I know that’s a cop-out answer, but when we talk to those nearing the key demo, we learn that they don’t watch something. They watch everything. ‘Who’s your favorite influencer on YouTube?’ we ask them. They tell us that they don’t really have one. ‘Ok. What’s your favorite type of program, theme, or subject matter that you watch?’ First off, they’ll tell you that they don’t necessarily watch things on YouTube, Netflix, or any other streaming service. They have no loyalties in that regard. They also don’t have a type of program, theme or subject matter. Some of them will come up with something in the face of our disbelief, but if we ask them the same question a month later that will likely change. The final answer we walk away with is they don’t have a focus, and they never really thought about that fact until we asked that question.

Anytime we deal with high-minded questions such as is the NFL doomed, we feel compelled to come up with high-minded answers that lead our loyal readers to the notion that they got their money’s worth. I loved the first half of Football, as I loved the walk down memory lane, but I didn’t really connect with the ‘we’ answers in the second half. I write that, because I remember when the ‘they’s wanted to be a ‘we’ with me. They cared what I thought, wanted to learn from me, and they copied much of what I did, because they used me to define what adulthood meant, and if I might go bold, I think they considered me so cool that they thought it would be cool if I considered them a ‘we’. They tried to watch the shows I watched, they watched the sports I watched, and they even cheered on the NFL teams I cheered on. Those days are over, all of them. They now have their own identities, and their free will. They don’t care what my ‘we’s think, what Chuck Klosterman’s ‘we’s think, or anyone else’s from our generation. They’re going to do what we did and form their own ‘we’. I don’t think their definition of “we” will spell doom for the NFL, but I do think the NFL’s seemingly permanent engraving atop the highest peak of the Mount Olympus of the entertainment world will start to chink, decay and rot away when they take over, as they watch nothing and everything. And if the NFL were to call me and hire me as a consultant on the future that’s what I would tell them they should fear the most. If they then asked me how they could combat that, I would have to confess that I have no idea.

Shouting at Smart Systems

February 2, 2026February 2, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“It’s not an unquestionable and indisputable fact that Jim Brown was the greatest running back of all time,” I shouted at the people in my Smart TV. “I think it was Walter Payton, but at least I recognize that’s an opinion. You only think Jim Brown was better, because he was the first greatest running back of all time, and we all bow to the tyranny of firsts, and most of the time we do so because we don’t know any better.”

If we compare George Washington to any president who followed, GW almost always wins, because he set a whole bunch of templates and precedents that most of the presidents who followed, followed. But he had an unfair advantage of setting precedents and precedents, because there were no official U.S. presidents before him. By that logic, if either James Buchanan or Chester A. Arthur were the first U.S. president, they would be considered the best president of all time.

Similarly, those who saw Jim Brown play saw the first great running back of all time, and there was no one to compare him to for about a decade. He set the template for great running backs, and he set all the precedents. Yet, the difference between Jim Brown and the next great running back narrowed over time. I never saw Jim Brown play live –so go ahead and dismiss me from this argument if that is required– but from what few highlights I’ve seen of Jim Brown’s runs, he was one of the greatest running backs who ever played the game, but he was mostly a bruising back in the mold of the great 70s back Earl Campbell. Both of them were historical anomalies and dominant in their respective eras, but were they that much better at gaining yards and scoring touchdowns from the running back position than Eric Dickerson, Tony Dorsett, Marshall Faulk, Barry Sanders, or Emmit Smith? Of course it’s impossible to compare men from their eras, and we can never remove them from their era and place them in another for a solid debate, but I believe the one man who could match all five of those men and outdo them in their respective primes was Walter Payton.

“Okay,” my TV shouted back at me, “but is your argument based on objective reasoning, or was Walter Payton the first, great running back you saw?

I said, “Huh?” and I hate to say huh in any setting, because I think it makes us sound unintelligent, but even though I knew my new TV was a Smart TV, I was not prepared for it to shout back at me.

“You were too young to witness the great Jim Brown in his prime,” my Smart TV explained. “So, Walter Payton was essentially your first entrant into the greatest running back of all time argument for you, which nullifies your argument by making you as guilty of bowing to the tyranny of firsts from your own perspective.”

“I never thought of that before,” I said. I didn’t want a Smart TV, and I told my dog that. I just wanted a television set to watch programs on. Now that it is in my living room, reminding me how intellectually inconsistent I can be, I resent it. I got used to the neighborhood kids outsmarting me, and then the raccoons and squirrels, but I never considered how humiliating it would be when one of my appliances began outsmarting me.

*******

They call it a Smart TV, but its intelligent design does not respond to the initial physical commands I give it from its remote control. I push those buttons and nothing happens. The message between the button and the primary mechanism fails in a way that obnoxiously requires me to push that button again. The tyranny of firsts applies here too, as the relative and relatively arbitrary definition of intelligence between humans is usually reserved for the guy who gets the answer first. Those of us who need to process a question, and often come up with a better, more creative answer than the first guy, usually get left in the dust. We’re forced to live in this land of unrealistic expectations for smart, but Smart TVs apparently are not. They require a second level of processing that requires a second push of a button to process the commands we initiate on our remote controls. It’s not limited to TVs either, Smart ovens, fridges, and cars all have buttons, and they never execute their functions on the first push of a button.

“It’s not us,” my Smart Oven replied. “You’re just a two-push-button guy.”

I had no idea what that meant, until I began to see how our world has progressed from switches to buttons, and I found myself “two-pushing” every button around me. I never chose to be this way, and when I see people one-pushing their way into a room, I’m like, “What the hell is going on here?” I’m guessing my two-push relationship with buttons was set upon me as a result of who I was, or what I did, in a former life. I don’t know if I was so successful pushing buttons the first time through, in that former life, that I obnoxiously held it over everyone’s head in an arrogant manner that defined my existence, and the forces that be exacted existential retribution on my current life. I say life, because I’ve never been a one button pusher, and this isn’t something that we wake up in the morning with. It takes an outside force, be it a family member or Smart appliance to recognize.

If it happened sooner, and a friend told me that I was probably doomed to pushing a button twice my whole life, I would’ve called them foolish. “I’ll only have to push buttons once when I get older. I’ll eventually get this all figured out.” It hasn’t happened yet. If you told me this when I was younger, I probably would’ve assumed that it was the quick-twitch of youth that led me to carelessly miss the button in some way, and as I grew older, I’d slow down enough to push that button more carefully that first time through. It hasn’t happened yet, and I have to say that kind of shocks me, figuratively. So, either I haven’t slowed down, or I’m just going to have to get used to pushing every button twice now, because someone monkeyed with my soul somewhere along the line.

*******

I know I should be using Smart tags at this point in history, but I just can’t pull the trigger on that purchase yet. I already have enough Smart things in my life, and I can’t imagine having one on my keys, on my wallet, or in my pocket in anyway. Until I’m brave enough to put Smart things in close proximity to my precious things, I’m going to lose things that are precious to me.

When we lost things, some say, “They’re always in the last place you look.” To which, the more clever say, “Of course they’re always the last place you look, because once you find it, you’re not going to look in any other places.” I’ve lived the former line so often that I appreciate the humor of the latter line, but my question is “How come they’re never in the first place I look?” The tyranny of firsts does not apply here, as the items I lose are never, and I do mean NEVER, in the first place I look? They’re never in the car, which is the first place I look, and they’re not in the bathroom, the first place I went when I returned home, and they’re never in the first pocket I check in my ensemble? Now, I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say something about circumstance, chance, and whatever rationale you point to that suggests it’s not a product of some otherworldly design. All I can say is, “You aren’t there. You don’t see how it has to be someone, something, or some otherworldly force messing with my mind.” I can’t hear these Smart devices laughing when you tell me it’s not logical to blame intangible forces, but I know they enjoy watching my struggle.

Cynically Yours

January 8, 2026January 13, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“Hi. My name is Rilaly, and I’m a cynic.”

I’m in recovery, which as any alcoholic will tell you is a stage in a process of trying to deprive ourselves of something we used to really enjoy. I never set out to enjoy ruining someone’s optimistic joy, but it felt so right to blast someone out of the water for saying something so nice about a person, place, or thing that I felt sophisticated and intelligent when I wiped that stupid and sanctimonious grin off their face. It wasn’t an emotional compulsion that drove me to do it, or medical, it was rhetorical.

**“Don’t you just hate happy people?”**

Very few people actually drop that line, but how many of us think it? Being right and wrong isn’t the primary driver of the cynic. We just want to put a chink in the silly narratives naive people have believed for so long.

Most cynics would tell you that’s a bunch of bilge. “It’s all about facts, and if you can’t see that, you’re naive. Science and Math. That’s what we rely on.” But what if we’re wrong? What if the optimists could provide incontrovertible evidence of our errors, what would we say? We’d smile a chagrined smile and walk away, saving our ammunition for another day, because if we learn how to sing the song, we can never be truly wrong.

“Cynicism is not necessarily equal to or greater than intelligence,” is the mantra we cynics use in our sessions. “It’s camouflage we use to conceal what we don’t know.”

I loved that phrase until fellow cynic, Julie Anne, obnoxiously argued that, “We need to remember that just because it’s negative doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.”

Did you have to reread that line? I know I did, rather I had to ask Julie Anne to repeat it as if I didn’t hear it the first time. It’s one of those down-the-stairs comments that doesn’t land until we’re walking away from it and into someone with that stupid grin on their face. When we run into that happy person who believes in things, they say things like, “I believe most people are good, until they prove me wrong.” Yow! Kabang! We hit them with our best shot, and we hit them with something negative that isn’t “necessarily true.” The argument about whether people are generally good or evil is difficult to prove, of course, but our certitude often relies on what appeals to us most, which basically proves Julie Anne’s line of thought.

We all start out naive. We believe our parents are good people and excellent stewards and beacons, until they prove us wrong. We believe our teachers have our best interests in mind, until our tweed and elbow patches professor opens his lecture with, “Everything they taught us in school was wrong!” Cynicism almost feels like evolution at a certain point, until even the most optimistic learn to frame their optimistic beliefs with proper qualifiers, like, “I’m not saying the world doesn’t suck, but …” It’s their way of trying to express themselves without everyone dogpiling them with synonyms of naive, and there’s nothing worse than being called naive.

Several individuals saved us from the dreadful indignity of that embarrassing label by introducing us to the comfy confines of cynicism. Once we gave the ‘everyone is awful’ idea a test drive, we discovered no one would call us a fool ever again. It’s foolproof. It might not necessarily be true, as Julie Anne would remind us, but being wrong is far better than being foolish.

We reserve the term fool for people who believe in people, places, and things. Once we became cynical, we joined in on the laughter, “How could they actually believe in that?” we asked our fellow cynics. We felt like we finally belonged. We found it much safer to believe most people are full of crud, and everyone from our parents to religious people to world leaders, and the most virtuous and honorable are probably a bunch of hypocrites who go home and beat their wives … when they aren’t our cheating on them (cue the laughter). “Imagine being them,” we say to conclude our laughter with the laughers, “believing that most people have the best intentions.” The comfy confines of cynicism aren’t limited to laughter and a sense of belonging, as it can provide a compelling sense of spiritual fulfillment when we learn how the world works, the real world.

The way the world works is so overwhelming and confusing when we’re young that it becomes our life’s mission to try to understand it. Our friends, and our unsafe, adult entertainment comedies taught us all of these delicious decoders that we couldn’t wait to use on those who don’t know. When we eventually crossed the sootstone arch (as opposed to the pearly gates of the optimistic believers) into the real world, we realized that if donned cynical camouflage it concealed what we don’t know, and we couldn’t wait for our peers to recognize how prepared we were. Our curtain raiser was directed at The Big Guys, because The Big Guys are honored, respected, and admirable, and their teardown is much more valuable to those in the know.

**“I heard the rumors, Danny,” Andrew Wood once wrote in a song called Mr. Danny Boy.**

After hearing that song, I did some research on Mr. Danny Boy, and I discovered it was about a man named Mr. Danny Thomas, who was considered one of the most honorable, admirable, and virtuous men who ever lived. I believed those rumors, because who wouldn’t? The naive didn’t. They thought he was honorable, admirable, and virtuous.

As with every characteristic, we strive to be the most. We want to be the funniest person in the room, the richest, the strongest, and the best-looking. We may not strive to be the most cynical in the same vein, but we strive for the most sophisticated in our knowledge. And what do cynics do when we encounter their competition? We don’t strive to be more cynical, we call our fellow cynic out.

When we relentlessly go after the Big Guys, for example, there will always be some guy who seeks to diminish our “Most cynical” crown with the joke, “You just hate that guy, just admit it. The guy could cure cancer, and you’d still have a problem with him.” That guy, in this particular scenario, is Amos Muzyad Yaqoob Kairouz, (aka Mr. Danny Thomas). All right, he didn’t cure cancer, but the incredible strides this man made during his life were largely unimaginable before he started in. He founded St. Jude’s Hospital, which has a documented history of making a significant dent in the number of children who suffer from, and die, from cancer.

When I hear that, my cynical side immediately rears its ugly head and says, “Ok, but Danny Thomas was an actor, and a celebrity. He dealt in a world of make-believe, so I’m guessing he didn’t actually found St. Jude’s Hospital. He didn’t found it in the way we normally associate an individual founding a hospital. He was probably a celebrity figurehead who attached his name to a process that was already in place but needed the type of funding a celebrity can attract by attaching his name to the founding. He probably took a photo with a massive pair of scissors, cut some tape, and raised a whole bunch of money for the hospital by doing so.”

Every celebrity seeks to show the public “another side” that displays the idea that they are well-rounded, sympathetic, empathetic, and heroically altruistic. In my humble opinion, that level of cynicism achieves a decent scorecard in most cases, but not here. Records state that Mr. Danny Thomas was actually a hands-on founder of St. Jude’s Hospital. Records state that St. Jude’s came into existence because Danny Thomas willed it into existence through decades of personal labor, fundraising, organizing, and strategic decision‑making. Records also indicate that Mr. Thomas involvement was not just some celebrity endorsement or involving a some sort of superficial or symbolic attachment. Records state that when it came to the founding of St. Jude’s Hospital, Danny Thomas was the man.

Defeating cynical sides, as they rear their ugly heads, is equivalent to that old childhood game Whack-A-Mole, as they help me appear smarter and more sophisticated in the way the real world works, in a way the average joe never will. One little head pops up and says, “Well then he probably found a way to turn this founding into some sort of money-making venture.” Another one pops up and says, “He probably benefitted from it financially in someway we’ll never know.” Again, we might be able to say that about most celebrity-backed ventures, as even the most charitable celebrities get paid administrative fees for handling the various activities of their altruistic venture, they get paid for speaking engagements on behalf of the charity, various appearance, they get their travel to and from paid, and/or some “other expenses” that aren’t illegal, but they’re dubious bullet points that the dubious-minded can recite when that debate arrives. Again, not here. There’s no credible evidence — none — that Danny Thomas ever profited or benefitted financially from St. Jude’s in anyway. Every historical record, nonprofit filing, and investigative report shows the same thing: he founded the hospital, built its fundraising arm, and spent decades raising money for it without ever taking a salary or receiving any financial benefits for those efforts.

Some records suggest St. Jude’s Hospital has helped save or ease the suffering of hundreds of thousands of children through direct treatment, and millions more through research that raised global survival rates. I’ve performed searches through search engines, and AI, asking for holes in this narrative. I’ve asked AI to approach the narrative regarding Danny Thomas founding St. Jude’s Hospital from a cynical perspective and provide for me information that a skeptic could latch onto when they’re seeking to know the real story behind Danny Thomas and St. Jude’s hospital, and AI can find no holes.

Yet, if you were alive during the early 90s after Mr. Danny Thomas died, and commentators were largely immune from character defamation lawsuits, you heard the rumors from standup comedians, shock jocks on the radio, and/or the cynical grapevine that grew from the fertilizer they created. You heard the rumors, and you laughed, because you knew there had to be more to the story. You also loved hearing the rumors, because they validated and vindicated what you thought all along. There had to be something.

Even if those rumors had any basis in fact—which they didn’t, according to every substantial news source, historical document, and/or any source that we might call substantive—the product of those rumors made substantial philanthropic and altruistic efforts and commitments to try to help children survive their fight against cancer.

“He wasn’t all that virtuous, let me tell you something,” those hanging from the cynical grapevine yelled with glee. “Let me tell you something ...”

“But Danny Thomas’s goal,” we should’ve said but didn’t, because we didn’t want to damage our cynical bona fides, “was to help kids suffering from cancer.”

“I know, but I just can’t stand it when someone thinks they’re all high and mighty.”

“Fair enough, but what does it say about you that you prefer to focus on the rumors as opposed to his considerable effort and commitments to help kids fight cancer?”

“I see the world in black and white,” is the preferred mantra of the cynic. “I can’t help it, I’m a facts-oriented person.”

I know that line, because I lived with it for so many decades that I will forever be in remission, but I’m trying. I’m trying to see some light in the darkness of the cozy comfort of cynicism. I’m also trying to learn that “Just because it’s negative doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true,” but it just feels so facts-oriented to believe the worst of humanity, until they prove me wrong.