Daniel Jones brings us all together with less threatening incompetence than debate

There wasn’t much to choose from on Thursday night, that is if you didn’t opt to stream a show you hadn’t gotten to or finished yet to shut out reality. I hear the new season of Fargo is good. If you were looking for live entertainment, your choices boiled down to which version of two balloon-handed sides that you weren’t convinced could remain standing the entire time, and even less convinced they’d remain continent. One was the debate, and one was Giants-Eagles.

It could be said that at least the NFC East cycle of confusion doesn’t portend utter doom for our society, or illustrate the way it’s already collapsed. But in a way...doesn’t it? Next to the debate, that game is probably the most-watched program of the week. People still sought out, maybe even planned their night, around Philadelphia and New York running in various directions around a football field with only a vague plan or sense of purpose. Fox paid the GDP of at least half of Europe (which one candidate called “a country” early in the other event) for the right to show you these two teams go through some strange form of human testing. What does that really say about us?

If you chose the debate, and heaven help you if you did because honestly, what did you think you’d learn, the only moment you need to know about the game tonight is this.

And really, isn’t that the perfect metaphor for everything? A perfectly well designed system that looked destined for success, or at least found enough of a crack in a completely helpless opponent, until it essentially tripped over itself and landed face first in the dirt. It says everything about this football game, and really where we are as a whole, on the night two doddering old men either trying to actively send the country deeper into the toilet or merely clap incoherently and smile while it slides there itself, Daffy Duck’d at each other for over an hour. This is who we are. We are Daniel Jones sprinting to a seemingly reachable and open yet unattainable end zone until we realize we don’t belong there and simply stumble to the ground. The end zone must be the ideals we pretend, at various times, we hold ourselves to. Jones failing to reach them is exactly where and what we are. It’s too far, too hard, and we’ve run enough. We’ll just fall here, thanks, while we bleat on about how much that end zone means to us.