#cultural-criticism

There is a particular kind of athlete who has existed for much longer in fiction than he has probably existed in anything resembling pure form in real life. He is enormous. He plays football, wrestles, lifts weights, or does all three. He is not especially troubled by abstract questions. If somebody uses a four-syllable word around him, there is a reasonable chance that the joke will be that he does not understand it. He may be good-natured or he may be a bully, but either way his body seems to have consumed most of the resources that otherwise might have gone toward interiority. In the old cartoon version of the archetype, he may literally begin a sentence with “duh.”

Archie Comics has given us perhaps the purest specimen in Moose Mason, officially described by Archie itself as Riverdale High's star athlete and also its worst student, a boy whose listed dislikes include both math and “big words.” (Archie Comics) Moose is exaggerated because he is supposed to be. He belongs to an old cultural taxonomy in which the body and the mind are different territories, and excellence in one raises suspicions about what happened to the other. There is the nerd, who thinks. There is the jock, who acts. Everyone knows which one should be asked about existentialism and which one should be asked to move the couch.

Somewhere very far away from Moose Mason, apparently, is the athlete who runs in search of enlightenment.