Stir-crazy in Dairyland

by David Benjamin

 

“Conspiracy is a term which gets slighted. Conspiracy theories have been right about a lot of things.”  —Aaron Rodgers

 

PARIS—Maybe Wisconsin makes you stir-crazy. I mean, if you’re not from Wisconsin in the first place, and you’re not used to all the men in Wisconsin mumbling, so you have to keep asking “What? Wha’d you say?” All the women are zoftig by the time they’re thirty and they talk about their grandchildren while their kids are still teenagers. Everybody’s eerily polite and they all seem to know what “Ooftah” means. And what the hell is a cheese curd?

So, yeah, this could drive you crazy, if you’re from, say, Kiln, Mississippi … or anywhere in California. Maybe this is why Green Bay Packers quarterbacks seem to slip off the rails. I mean, this is a theory. But the thing is, the symptoms don’t really show until they’re gone, off to New York, Kiln, California, or across the border to Costa Rica to ingest a few gallons of psychedelic tea. 

I mean, most famous quarterbacks either slip into swift obscurity—“Where have you gone, Randall Cunningham? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you…”

Or they go on TV—Steve Young, Tony Romo, Terry Bradshaw, all those cute Peyton Manning spots where he sells sell pizza and insurance. I mean, okay, Romo seems a little crazy, too—two years of Jessica Simpson?—but has a good excuse. He’s from Wisconsin. 

Romo, however, hasn’t reached a level of toxic flakiness close to the Packers’ two latest Hall of Famers. I mean, Brett Favre did some squirrelly stuff while he was still with the Packers … the Vicodin habit and that mess with Chmura and the teenage girls in the hot tub, not to mention retiring and then unretiring, then retiring all over again, only to unretire again. But that’s all normal jock mischief. After leaving Wisconsin, Brett went all white-guy Trumpy and then stained his escutcheon pretty much forever by getting involved in a $77 million good ‘ol boy fraud that funneled $5 million—meant to feed hungry kids in Mississippi—to build a volleyball court for his volleyball-playing daughter at his alma mater, Southern Miss. U. And he took a million bucks from the same needy families’ account for speeches that he never made. I mean, Brett Favre, orator?

I mean, in Wisconsin, we all know what the Packers paid Brett. He could’ve taken the six million out of his Christmas Club account. I mean, why’d you do it, Brett? It’s crazy! 

But maybe it’s Wisconsin—all that friendliness and boredom and dairy products—that warped his sanity. Maybe it’s some sort of mad cow disease, seeping into the air from the pastures around Little Chute and Suamico, gnawing into his brain. 

I mean, it’s only a theory. But now we have Aaron Rodgers, going beyond Trumpy and all the way over the edge, courting the VP spot alongside RFK, Jr.. the candidate who came from outer space. I mean, since he blew a game against Kansas City by faking his Covid-19 vaccination, Rodgers has briefly embraced Alex Jones’ vicious claim that the murder of twenty little kids at Sandy Hook was a deep-state hoax perpetrated by the black usurper from Kenya. I mean, Favre only took food from little kids. They were hungrier than ever, but alive. 

Rodgers has spouted theories, abetted by Joe Rogan and fellow NFL conspiracist Pat McAfee, that would strain the credulity of a ten-year-old. He told podcaster Eddie Bravo that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the U.S. response to the HIV epidemic, had killed people by promoting AZT, which was for years the only effective antiretroviral drug available. Rodgers’ lie about Fauci got 13 million views.

Rodgers spent a week floating in a sensory deprivation chamber. He regularly heads to Central America to toke up on a hallucinogen called ayahuasca with a shaman from the Yawanawa tribe. And he accused Jimmy Kimmel of consorting with America’s most notorious child molester, the late, unlamented Jeffrey Epstein—which brings us back around to Donald Trump, Epstein’s party bro. 

Kimmel’s reaction to the nudge-wink slur was far more eloquent—and fun—than Rodgers’s innuendo. “When you hear a guy who won a Super Bowl and did all those State Farm commercials say something like this, a lot of delusional people honestly think that I am meeting up with Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey at Shakey’s once a week  to eat pizza and drink the blood of children,” said Kimmel. “He put on a magic helmet and that ‘G’ made him a genius. Aaron got two A’s on his report card and they were both in the word ‘Aaron’. Can you imagine that this hamster-brained man thinks he knows what the government is up to because he’s doing research on YouTube and listening to podcasts?”

I have a more tolerant take on Rodgers’ descent into the deep end. I mean, I know he’s bright because quarterback is the most cerebral position in all of sports and, for more than a decade, Rodgers’ was the cleverest quarterback in the NFL. Kimmel said of Rodgers, “He genuinely believes that since God gave him the ability to throw a ball, he’s smarter than everyone else.”

I suspect the opposite, that Rodgers feels insecure about his intellect. He went to an average high school and spent a year at an obscure commuter college. He attended the University of California to play football but never graduated. Not once in his education was he ever challenged. His faculties were diverted into football. Now, he’s forty, aging swiftly out of the game and feeling inferior to a whole bunch of forty-year-old peers who got their degrees and excelled in intellectual pursuits that are held in far greater public esteem than throwing a ball. 

Rodgers wanted to host “Jeopardy,” a sort of poor man’s intellectual validation. But he got beat out by Ken Jennings—who actually seems to be smart. Rodgers toyed with politics and was vetted as RFK’s VP. But he got beat out out by a girl. He thrust himself into the national conversation about epidemiology despite knowing nothing in the field beyond his high-school chemistry class.  

Rodgers has spent two-thirds of his life playing games and hanging around with jocks—most of them products of football factories like Ohio State and Alabama, where they never had to attend class or crack a textbook. He’s 22 years behind all the kids with whom he graduated from Pleasant Valley High in Chico. I mean, I’m from Tomah, which pretty much precludes me from making fun of anyone else’s hayseed origins. 

But Chico? Followed by two semesters at Butte? Tee hee.

Rodgers is the most famous college dropout in New York City and he senses the peril of being deemed the dumbest. And then Jimmy Kimmel comes along and calls him—with a measure of justification—a hamster-brain. Aaron is desperate to catch up and he’s working too hard at it while trying to project an image of being way cool, maybe even a little avant garde. I mean, ayahuasca cocktails. Really?

Some day, in Green Bay, there will be a gala halftime ceremony, during which Rodgers will be inducted into the Packers Hall of Fame, alongside Brett Favre, Bart Starr and Reggie White. His name will be mounted on the facade inside Lambeau Field. Fans will stand and cheer for him, regardless of his intellectual groping, his political naïveté, his hallucinogenic slander-mongering, even his failed dalliances with Hollywood starlets and his absconding to New York City. They will shower him with applause, with wild, prolonged cheering and unsophisticated Wisconsin love, honoring him rapturously for the one thing he could really do better than anyone.

Throw a ball.