I’m writing this with a minute and a half to go in the Packers/Giants game. I have declared Eli Manning a Winner several times this month, and I expect to be vindicated. Of course, in two weeks he will be up against the King of the Winners, Tom Brady. Is there anything that rattles that guy? He can throw three ill-planned interceptions and still stroll into the Super Bowl over the broken bodies of LaDanian Tomlinson and Antonio Gates.

And now it’s off to overtime. Eli will win. I say this with utmost certainty, like I know the man and have looked into his heart. But what the hell? I was advising putting your hard-earned money on John Edwards to win in Nevada just a couple of days ago, and look how that turned out… Granted, my reasoning was more on the basis of the odds, than any real guarantees of John Edwards’ chances to win, but that is an excuse. When you try to talk like you know what will happen, you frequently look foolish. The Packers have the football, and Eli may well let me down. But I doubt it.

Yeah, talking about what will happen, you sound goofy sometimes, like an aged goth in New Orleans who fucked Marilyn Manson one time in 1997 and refers to him as brian whenever she works that tidbit into a casual conversation now. You have to assume a familiarity that you haven’t earned.

But look at that- a 49 yard field goal, and I suddenly look prescient. Brett Favre returns home tonight a Loser, and he may well never play a professional football game again… But I wouldn’t try to pass that off as inside information.

And so suddenly Eli Manning, the John Edwards of the NFL, goes to the big stage against New England.

All told, the Giants’ unsurprising victory tonight notwithstanding, the weekend has had little to celebrate. Hillary Clinton wins in Nevada and the New England Patriots win in Foxborough. Both of these events were mastermind by smug-looking dickheads named Bill, a fact that seems especially significant on a night like tonight, when the only other people who look like winners have names like Eli and Palexico and Ahmad. Do not trust men named Bill. Write that down.

I’ll admit to being confused and disappointed by the amount of face-time Bill Clinton has been getting in the Hillary campaign. I thought once that her branding of herself as hillary for president was a folksy way to warm her way into the hearts of America- she seems like an Aunt you might have had, or maybe a mother-in-law you wouldn’t mind having if she lived a few hours a way, and hillary is a good brand for that. Certainly more effective than trying to re-brand a full-fledged Fascist like Giuliani as everyone’s favorite uncle-who-molested-you, Rudy. But given the way Nevada has played out, maybe that’s not what it’s about at all- maybe she’s just not running as clinton because everybody knows that means the Big Guy.

And isn’t that shitty? Her rhetoric about how she is going to be an historic woman President seems empty if she needs to put her husband’s face on her campaign. I have watched her closely since she announced her candidacy, and I think that there are very few things she wouldn’t do to her campaign to make her chances of winning the nomination more likely, but this one is depressing, almost as sad in its way as supressing the turnout of Obama supporters in Nevada or having her supporters question whether or not he might have been a drug dealer in a parallel universe. It’s the sort of sad desperation that is unbecoming of a Winner, like the Cowboys fan I watched the game with last week in the Staubach jersey who stared longingly at Troy Aikman after Romo’s second-to-last interception. It doesn’t bode well, if you are trying to make history, to succeed largely because your husband, who is both symbolically and very, very literally a thing that belongs to the Past, is becoming the emblem of your campaign.

I don’t like Bill Clinton very much lately, but I never really did. When he was President, I was too much of a teenage radical to have any use for a President even a half-degree to the right of Jello Biafra. But now, watching him berate reporters, he really does seem almost indistinguishable from Bill Belichik. But they are both successful men, and if Belichik can lead a team whose star quarterback is fond of impregnating and abandoning his girlfriends and whose star receiver is more interested in beating women up than knocking them up, then I suppose Clinton can run for President a third time, with the de facto promise being that he wouldn’t really let his wife go out into the big, scary world all on her own…

It’s a good time to have very little respect for women in America, but then, it always is.

Oh, my heart bleeds- for Hillary, yeah, and for Bridget Moynihan and Rachelle Washington, and probably even that aged goth I was making fun of in the third paragraph. I am a paragon of sensitivity and respect, I know.

My heart bleeds for Britney Spears, too, but I’m not about to make any YouTube videos about it. Can you imagine what it feels like, at twenty-something years old, to learn that the Associated Press has already written your obituary?

People don’t like to talk about Britney, except the ones who don’t like to talk about much else, and both of them are missing the point. I know plenty of people who claim to have bigger, more important things to be concerned with, and who find the whole farce disgusting, who refer to their ignorance of the young woman’s life as a badge of pride. But that is silly, and ignores the culture in which we live. There are important things to learn from the plight of poor Britney, especially this latest tidbit, about how her death is already being anticipated.

People have an innate need to build heroes and myths, to elevate one of the rabble to heightened proportions. Once that’s been achieved, and we have basked in the glory we have bestowed upon them, we destroy them. It’s a common, very old tale, and Britney Spears is another example of that need manifesting. She did not earn her position of fame and interest- it was given to her, by Us. We have enjoyed the benefits of sharing a world with people who are larger and more interesting than we are, and now, in order to prove that we are actually not inferior to this myth that we have created, we must destroy her. The impatience with which everyone waits for that AP obituary to run is emblemetic of this goal. All of the photographs, and the headlines, and the crying boy on YouTube and the embarassing spectacle of her stoned performance on MTV- these things are designed to hasten her fall, which is why we look.

And if you have never been interested in her, if you resent the attention that people have spent worrying about the goings-on in Britney’s life, rather than focusing on their own squalid conditions or, you know, Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, you are still a part of this process, of rejecting those chosen to be this season’s elevated King. Your indifference is fuel for this process, too. It is a thing that people do, like thinking about an afterlife or constructing myths about people who are already dead and therefore immune from this process. You can’t choose not to participate- it’s like not thinking about an elephant. People must sacrifice one of their own every so often, so we are reminded of how lucky we are to not be the one thrown into the maw.

So I feel for Britney Spears, because I think she’s not likely to last much longer, and it will be the fault of a society that needs to create people like Britney Spears, which is our society. If you are disinterested in Britney Spears, you are probably still interested in another actor or musician or artist or writer or athlete or politician, and so you are not innocent here- even if you’re ignorant of her entirely, it’s mostly just a matter of taste. The culture is ours, and every so often it has to drive an innocent person who believed that they were loved to their death.

Hell, that’s how they got Jesus. And I don’t mean to compare the two, except it is an old story. There will be no religions based around Britney, and if you believe that he was the son of god and all of that, I don’t mean to insinuate that a similar belief about Britney is rational. Just that, you know, he was elevated by the masses before they turned, and they did it for the same damn reason. We all want to believe that these people, the elevated Kings, are no better than we are, and sometimes that requires watching them die.

And that’s all kinda heavy, I know, but what can you do? America’s a heavy place, especially from over here. Bill Clinton and Bill Belichik and Britney Spears and everybody else, they all represent some of the worst in all of us, and the rest of the world can see it. They have the same flaws with a different accent, or a different language, maybe, but we mustn’t fool ourselves.