Cult Appeal

"Cults often gather around powerful works of the second class. Fans feel that they have to root for them." -- 3/10/09 New YorkerThis was from a piece about the history of scholarship on vampires, which just goes to show you how I smoke crack in coming up with things to fill the bloghole. But you knew that already, right?Sports are the largest non-religious cult on the planet. They exist in a netherworld between entertainment and news, reality and artifice, and have whatever meaning the user chooses to put on them. They are almost certainly a vice on a personal level and a significant virtue on a community level. The uninterested and the passionate have equal amounts of befuddlement as to how one could possibly choose that level of interest.But what happens when the cult, as it were, becomes the majority? The Super Bowl is just about the only telecast that has held its mass audience in our ever-fragmenting media marketplace. Every other event -- even something as meaningful...