Have you ever looked at a Wikipedia page for a specific calendar year? Not only is it a very poor way to get a sense of what happened in a given year, but it’s also depressing as hell — it’s essentially a more-morbid-than-average local news broadcast for the entire world, only with the odd chance that some joker plugs “CHAD IS A FAG!!1!” in for a few minutes before it gets corrected. I found this out when I made the mistake of looking up the Wiki page for the year 2007 before writing this column. I did this because I wanted to see if there was a reason why I remember ’07 as being a singularly shitty part of the low, dishonest and just-concluded decade. And it turns out, per Wikipedia, that 2007 was pretty freaking terrible — a succession of mine disasters and suicide bombings and cyclones, punctuated by puzzling, faintly bummerish mundanities like Vladimir Putin being named Time’s Person of the Year (really) and the UN declaring “The International Year of Languages.”

But looking at a few other years reveals that this is just the way Wikipedia’s year-recaps work — I don’t remember 1995 being especially terrible, as junior years of high school go, but yikes: from an avalanche in Iceland (January 15) to Taiwan’s deadliest fire (a month later) and sadly onward, that year apparently super-sucked, too. I imagine any year, chosen at random, would yield a similar result. But those of us who lived through 2007, which would be the entirety of The Awl’s non-toddler readership, remember that it was characterized by more than cyclones and rampant Putin-mania, and awful for reasons that were notably more diffuse. In reality, 2007 was probably in an eight-way tie for Shittiest of Bush Era honors, but that doesn’t in any way diminish how bad it felt in the moment — awash in the acid entropy of Bush’s last two lame-duck years; unfolding in the twilit gloom of an increasingly obese and sadistic popular culture (thankfully we’ve turned that one around); haunted by the first signs that the various rots accompanying the fake economic boom would require a gut renovation instead of another coat of paint. And while all this was happening, I was obsessed with something else.

Something ridiculous and sports-related, naturally. Something I was convinced — perhaps because I was writing about the NFL on a weekly basis for the first time, and perhaps because I am a goofball generally so-inclined — represented everything wrong with America circa-then. I remember 2007 as a bad year among bad years not because of the European heatwave — heatwaves happen, after all, cyclones happen — but because of the rise of the ulcerously, pitilessly and unstintingly loathsome 2007 New England Patriots. At the time, the Patriots seemed to me to be both symptomatic of and causal to everything that was wrong with the culture in 2007. In retrospect, they were just an unlikable but extraordinary football team en route to the NFL’s only 16–0 regular season. At the time, though, they seemed indescribably worse, and their miserable, implacable dominance seemed somehow everyone’s fault — something we should and could have prevented, but did not.

That the Patriots wrapped up 2007 by losing in the Super Bowl to the New York Giants diminished their record-book legacy somewhat, but it takes nothing away from that team’s truest achievement — making unprecedented success look like the most unpleasant thing in the world. Presumably your more vicious Patriots fans (and certainly a large number of sports bettors) enjoyed the way in which the Pats brutalized the NFL during the first three-quarters of the regular season — they won their first eight games by an average of 25.5 points, and beat Buffalo by 46 points in Week 11 — but it wasn’t much fun for the rest of us. That’s because, as easy as it was to marvel at the brutal beauty of New England’s play, it was clear that all that winning was no fun for them, and thus no fun to watch. Blowout after blowout, the Patriots unsmilingly went through their merciless motions, then peevishly delivered themselves of dead-eyed post-game quotes that suggested they couldn’t believe anyone could be so ridiculous as to ask them about the game they’d just finished playing. It’s not just that it wasn’t fun to watch. In its button-down savagery and singularly pissy excellence, it was actually pretty Patrick Bateman-ish, and kind of chilling.

Chilling because, as rough as it was playing against the Patriots that year — New England scored seven more touchdowns than Buffalo in that Week 11 win — it somehow seemed even more unpleasant to be playing for them. The players fumed relentlessly at strictly notional haters with a blinkered, raging vanity that could coax a reproachful “Dude, relax” from Kanye West. Quarterback Tom Brady, in the middle of one of the greatest seasons a quarterback has ever had, answered perfectly reasonable post-game questions with a prickly, plu-peevish condescension that was only otherwise available, at that time, from members of the Bush White House’s press team. But the source of all this, the great melting bile-glacier that fed this pure joylessness, was head coach and now-GM Bill Belichick.

Which I know is a pretty standard way of looking at a football team, and one I generally reject — the idea that a team’s personality comes from its coach, as if the grown-ass adult millionaires under that coach’s command were somehow also infants awaiting behavioral imprinting. Some of that storyline’s persistence obviously owes to the perspective and biases of those covering the sport — NFL coaches tend to be closer in age, appearance and background to those covering and watching NFL games than are, say, punt returners — but much of it seems a function of no one really knowing exactly what it is that NFL coaches actually do besides make speeches, wear headsets and model team-logo windbreakers on Sundays.

This isn’t to say that coaches can’t or don’t actually do things to improve the players in their charge, or make choices that win or lose games, but it’s easy to see how the importance of a coach — that one unfashionable middle-aged white dude who makes all those implausibly powerful young athletes into winners — might appeal a bit too easily to people in that coach’s broader cohort, be they in the press box or on some suburban couch. But even bearing that in mind, those 2007 Patriots — and every Patriots team during his tenure there, before or since — has mirrored Belichick’s unique state of perpetual aggrievement. Which is also to say that they have also reflected the similarly sour approach of Belichick’s coaching mentor and modern football’s ur-jerk, Bill Parcells. Which is in turn all kind of a long way of saying that Belichick’s decision to trade Randy Moss — New England’s best receiver and a future Hall of Famer — to the Minnesota Vikings this week was not at all out of character.

A third-round pick is not a bad return in the NFL, especially for a 33-year-old receiver grumbling about his contract situation. But the basic strangeness of trading a team’s best receiver during the season — and leaving a receiving corps comprised solely of smurfy, underrated-from-day-one types to sustain a team that, if the last month means anything, will need to score 35 points per game to win — is mitigated by the fact that this sort of thing is a familiar move for Belichick and the other Parcells-ites. Belichick — like both his mentor and his own NFL acolytes, from Denver’s Josh McDaniels to Kansas City’s Todd Haley to the currently and inexplicably employed Browns coach Eric Mangini — seems peculiarly intent on the assertion and performance of his own dominance.

It doesn’t matter, finally, whether it’s strategic insight, gnawing first-day-in-prison insecurity — Parcells was drafted by a NFL team out of college, but Belichick and the rest are small-college grinds whose intelligence and pathological appetite for late-night film sessions have erased negligible football bona fides — or plain dickishness that leads these guys to pick fights with their star players, cavalierly fire special teams personnel or trade a sure-thing Hall of Famer because he wants a team of good listeners or whatever. The point is that they all do it, and do it with variations on the same snarl on their faces and shades of the same disdain in their voices. That all that nastiness has resulted in enhanced reputations and not-even-grudging praise for these Tough-Minded Strategists — if years of negging and relentless cocksure cockery can somehow get a Donald Rumsfeld leadership manual into print, it should also buy a three-time Super Bowl winner some slack on a baffling trade.

So it’s not hard to see what’s so 2007 — and so uniquely loathsome — about all this. In the same way that Donald Rumsfeld always seemed faintly annoyed at having to lie into open mics, Belichick and the other neo-Parcellsians mouth their bullying dishonesties, needless secrecies and what-the-hell obfuscations — Belichick is famous for listing all his players as “probable” in New England’s weekly injury reports — in a way that suggests the general public should really work on better appreciating all of the above. If one had never seen Belichick’s affect, or didn’t know about his heroic grudge-carrying abilities, all this could almost seem kind of punk — a too-smart Wesleyan grad fucking with football’s myriad brain-dead traditions for the sake of the fucking-with.

And maybe it is, although Belichick’s well-known love for Bon Jovi — apart from a long-running affair with a married New Jersey woman, it’s one of the few public bits of knowledge about this very famous person — suggests that “punk” is the wrong word here. And anyway there is no joy of performance, let alone whimsy, in Belichick’s brilliance. Belichick’s NFL resume ranks among the NFL’s all-time greats, but when I think of his New England tenure I just see acres of middle fingers, hedgerow to poisonous hedgerow. All those handshakes refused, all those needless margin of victory-widening touchdowns punched in by various “high-character” Caucasian human victory cigars (my favorite being this prince), the barely restrained fuck-you of Belichick’s every public utterance — even for Belichick, who wins all the time and gets what he wants even when he chooses to build a roster seemingly designed to prove that he can go 12–4 with any old humps, there doesn’t seem to be any life in it.

In 2007, when the world seemed to belong to feckless neocon incompetents, spooky-eyed true believers and churlish bankers, the bleak dominance of the Patriots was plainly depressing. In 2010, with the Potemkin empire those goofs made in ruins around us, the fact that Belichick is still pissily proving the same points about his own blazing brilliance — and engaging in the scowling dissimilation and territorial pissing and strategic shanking of the scariest dudes in the commissary — might be more depressing still.

You know how good Belichick is at coaching games and pissing me off? Well, that’s how bad I am at picking winners against the spread. I continue to trail the coin — which, at least, kind of came back to earth last week — and continue to feel pretty shitty about it. This may or may not be the week things turn around for me. They may or may not ever turn around, honestly. But the fact remains that I know a great many more ways to call Bill Belichick a dickhole than this silly Canadian coin does. That’s something, right? Wait, it’s not? You’re sure? (As always, the coin flips are courtesy of Garey G. Ris, and the betting lines are from Sportsbook.com)

Week 4 (and overall): David Roth: 5–9 (23–36–3); Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin: 6–8 (35–24–3)

Sunday, October 9
• Denver Broncos at Baltimore Ravens (-7), 1pm — DR: Baltimore ; ATTLCTDC: Denver
• Jacksonville Jaguars (-1) at Buffalo Bills, 1pm — DR: Jacksonville; ATTLCTDC: Jacksonville
• Kansas City Chiefs at Indianapolis Colts (-8.5), 1pm — DR: Kansas City ; ATTLCTDC: Indianapolis
• St. Louis Rams at Detroit Lions (-3), 1pm — DR: St. Louis; ATTLCTDC: St. Louis
• Atlanta Falcons (-3) at Cleveland Browns, 1pm — DR: Atlanta; ATTLCTDC: Cleveland
• Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Cincinnati Bengals (-6.5), 1pm — DR: Tampa Bay; ATTLCTDC: Cincinnati
• Chicago Bears (-3) at Carolina Panthers, 1pm — DR: Carolina; ATTLCTDC: Carolina
• Green Bay Packers (-2.5) at Washington Redskins, 1pm — DR: Green Bay; ATTLCTDC: Green Bay
• New York Giants at Houston Texans (-3), 1pm — DR: Houston; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey G
• New Orleans Saints (-7) at Arizona Cardinals, 4:05pm — DR: New Orleans; ATTLCTDC: Arizona
• San Diego Chargers (-6.5) at Oakland Raiders, 4:15pm — DR: San Diego; ATTLCTDC: San Diego
• Tennessee Titans at Dallas Cowboys (-6.5), 4:15pm — DR: Tennessee; ATTLCTDC: Dallas
• Philadelphia Eagles at San Francisco 49ers (-3.5), 8:20pm — DR: Philadelphia; ATTLCTDC: Philadelphia

Monday, October 10
• Minnesota Vikings at New York Jets (-4), 8:30pm — DR: Minnesota; ATTLCTDC: Minnesota

David Roth is a writer from New Jersey who lives in New York. He co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. His favorite Van Halen song is “Hot For Teacher.”

Photo by Steve Glass, from Flickr.

“Annual HIV infection rates could be halved by the year 2031, but expenses could reach upwards of $722 billion, researchers are announcing in tomorrow’s edition of The Lancet.”

“I could tell you that during a 36-hour period in July of 2006, I lost $18,000 in Las Vegas. Or I could tell you I once picked through every corner of my car, including the grating underneath the spare tire, for five dollars of spare change so that I could make the minimum bet at a blackjack table (a bet I lost). And my interest in divulging these details would not be to instruct or to edify, or even to elicit empathy from fellow addicts. My interest would be to rip open my suffering heart and show you its beautiful beating, and in this way, I might think of myself as having been more alive than you, my hopefully horrified reader, were at a similar age and time.”
-Awl diva expert Jay Kang on gambling addiction, where “the narrative of losing is, in every important way, just as fantastic as the spectacle of winning.”

75% of the editorial staffers whose careers at the New York Observer predate the current editor that have since departed the paper are women or gay men. The current editor, Kyle Pope, was hired eleven months ago. As of this week, there are zero women editors at the paper, excluding the managing editor, Una La Marche. There are two women on the masthead’s list of ten “writers” and two women on the masthead’s list of 14 “contributing writers.”

A timeline.

November 5, 2009: Kyle Pope named editor of Observer.
December, 2009: Christopher S. Stewart hired as #2.
December, 2009: Tom McGeveran leaves.
December, 2009: Gillian Reagan quits.
December, 2009: Josh Benson quits.
January, 2010: Hillary Frey leaves.
February, 2010: Meredith Bryan quits.
March, 2010: Joe Pompeo quits.
May, 2010: Katharine Jose quits.
May, 2010: Azi Paybarah quits.
June, 2010: Felix Gillette quits.
August, 2010: Alexandra Jacobs quits.
August, 2010: Eliot Brown quits.
August, 2010: Molly Fischer quits.
September, 2010: Simon Doonan quits.
September, 2010: Nancy Butkus quits.
September, 2010: John Koblin quits.
October, 2010: Sara Vilkomerson quits.

In the last quarter, 100% of staffers leaving the paper have been women and gay men.

One gay editorial staffer remains at the paper. (According to several staffers, that number is one; according to the paper, that number is “more than one.”)

On the business side, an online GM was hired this year, who is a woman. Just recently, a new designer was hired to replace Nancy Butkus; Ivylise Simones, late of the Village Voice and Miami New Times. (Her work for the Voice looks very good, by the way!)

There are five reporters for the paper proper (as opposed to writers for the website). They are: Leon Neyfakh, Irina Aleksander, Dana Rubinstein, Reid Pillifant and Max Abelson.

Abelson is currently the paper’s most senior staffer. A former intern, his first solo byline is dated July 2, 2006. Oh wait! Plus one in June, 2005. Abelson was 20 at the time.

Observer editor Kyle Pope wrote this in an email:

Three things about your post:

To say that all of those people quit or left the Observer is misleading. Some of them were fired.

Other than Una and Ivy, you don’t mention any of our new hires.

Finally, since you seem to care, you’re wrong on the number of gay editorial people remaining; it’s more than one.

Today’s ‘ironic commentary’: “A bar of soap allegedly made of fat removed from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has gone on show in Zurich. It is part of an exhibition at the Migros museum of contemporary art, whose news release explains that the fat was removed when Berlusconi underwent liposuction at a clinic in the southern Swiss canton of Ticino in 2004.”

“It would be a disaster if the government tries to get in to run small businesses. If they run the bars and restaurants, they’ll try to run everything else. This is going down a path which is a terrible, terrible idea and would be disastrous for New York City.”
-Mayor Bloomberg explains why he’s going to veto a bill mandating paid sick leave for all employees in New York City. It’s an excellent point; if you tell bars and restaurants how to run their businesses they will totally shut down.

I had almost forgotten about Sufjan Stevens, but apparently he just released an (hour-long) EP and has a new full-length (compared, I guess, to an hour-long EP) album, The Age of Adz on the way. How is it? “Yet again, this prodigal genius manages to confound expectations, confirming his place as modern music’s most protean artist.” I guess I’ll give it a shot.

Yes, today is the deadline to register to vote in New York State. You can register today at the DMV and at any of these state agencies! As well, Oklahoma, North Carolina, some others. Elsewhere? Ohio is Monday. New Jersey and Oregon and Nevada’s (in-person-only) deadline is October 12. (You REALLY want to vote in Nevada.) Massachusetts is October 13. North Dakota is next week; California is the 18th. If you live in North Dakota, don’t worry about it, you don’t have to register! But if you live in Colorado, you really want to vote in this election, and you’d better have been registered by two days ago or don’t even talk to us when zygotes become members of society.

Our Republican leadership nationwide is doing an awesome job! Federal and local governments cut 159,000 jobs last month alone. They’re finally undoing the vast bloating havoc that was the previous Democrat administration. That’s on top of the 100,000+ jobs we removed from the government over the summer! Thanks to all our efforts, 14 million people are officially unemployed.

Could the Paladino campaign get any more weird? Why, yes! “Republican Carl Paladino — after days of vowing to get back to the issues — returned to slimy innuendo last night, asserting in a televised message that Democratic rival Andrew Cuomo’s ‘prowess is legendary.’ The Tea Party-backed candidate made the bizarre sexually suggestive remark after complaining about media investigations into his own affair and in the same breath insisting he didn’t want his campaign to revolve around his accusations of infidelity against Cuomo.” Republican strategist Ed Rollins weighs in: “This campaign is absurd. The Republican Party will take 10 years to recover from this candidacy.”