by Jordan Mark Sandvig
It is hard for me to put into words how much I love the feature length Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021).
It is an instant classic, a masterpiece; the capstone of Jenny Slate’s career to this point, the project it was all leading up to.
The 89-minute mockumentary is a perfect balance of comedy and heart, in an era where every comedy is trying to balance its comedy and heart (thanks, Apatow). Right out of the gate Marcel races, as fast as a roman chariot pulled by a shell can race, into a first act packed with bits (if you guffawed at the 2010 youtube short, you will guffaw even more voluminously to the 2021 iteration), and then, almost imperceptibly, pulls the reigns back, giving its story room to branch out out into wistful, zen-like introspection on what it means to be alive, to appreciate beauty, and to be really small in a very big world.
It is in this mixture of pathos and cathartic laughter, that Marcel goes searching for their family.
At one point Marcel is driven to a hilltop.
Looking out on the city of Los Angeles they ask their documentary-making human friend, “is this it?” (to laughs). Meaning, literally, is this the entire world? “No” the human friend tells Marcel, there’s like, a lot more.
The bit is both perfectly punchy and wrap-your-arms-around-them heartbreaking. Marcel doesn’t know how unfathomably large the world is.
But the laugh is on us.
Though we’ve seen pictures of Earth (from space!), though most of the world has been mapped, and though Google has put it all in our palms, I’m not sure we can actually hold its size in our imagination.
From NBA players to Trump supporters in Arizona, from snails to air travelers, we all have the same problem: we have no idea how large America is, much less the world.
The NBA is Really Small
There were 540 players in the NBA who registered playtime in at least 1 game in the 2020-2021 season. That amount (540) was tied for the highest number of players entering an NBA game in any of the league’s last 6 seasons.
The MLS – American major sports’ most minor sport – has 28 teams with up to 30 players on a roster, for a maximum of 840 players on a league roster at any given moment.
The NFL’s 32 teams allow for a maximum 53 players per roster (up to 55, with 2 temp spots created since Covid), allowing for at least 1,696 players being officially rostered through the course of a season.
Of course Baseball had to make it weird. The MLB has a 40-man roster but only 26 are on a smaller, core roster. Listen to this convoluted malarkey (or just skip ahead honestly):
The 40-man roster includes a combination of players on the 26-man roster, the 7-, 10-, and 15-day injured lists, the bereavement/family medical emergency list and the paternity leave list, as well as some Minor Leaguers
In order for a club to add a player to the 26-man roster, the player must be on the 40-man roster. If a club with a full 40-man roster wishes to promote a Minor League player that is not on the 40-man roster, it must first remove a player from the 40-man roster — either by designating a player’s contract for assignment, trading a player, releasing a player or transferring a player to the 60-day injured list.
A player who is on the 40-man roster but does not open the season on the 26-man roster must be optioned to the Minor Leagues.
from MLB Glossary
With 30 teams, that gives the MLB 780 players on their main, 26-man rosters and a some-of-these-guys-are-in-the-minors? count of 1,200 players across the league’s 40-man rosters.
The NHL is even weirder with 4 rosters per team: 23 maximum on the main roster, and 3 other tiers giving any team the ability to reserve up to 90 total ice-hockeyers. Since no team can have less than 20 ice-hockeyers on their main roster, the NHLs league minimum is (32 teams * 20 per team minimum) 640 players per season.
Ok, I’m not entirely comparing apples to apples. I’m only citing NBA players who entered games, and for every other league I’m talking about theoretical roster sizes which could include players who never see game time. But the NBA’s theoretical maximum roster size? 450. 90 players less than the amount of players to enter at least 1 game in a given a season.
The point? Every league besides the NBA starts with a minimum amount of players larger than the NBA’s maximum amount.
It’s a long way to say there are very few NBA players.
Why does that matter?
Because it seems like there are a lot of them.
Basketball Was Made For the Screen
Basketball has characteristics, native to it as a sport, that give it an advantage over other sports when watched on a screen. (Watching on a screen being the way 99.9% of sports viewers watch any given game.)
None of the following 3 advantages are advantages in-and-of themselves, but when compiled together, and in the context of a television or smart phone, they become incredibly advantageous to the stardom of NBA players, in comparison to the stars of other sports leagues.
The first advantage is not obvious, but as mentioned above, in my 400+-word attempt at a single sentence: the NBA has fewer players on its playing field than any other major American sport.
Advantage 2: unlike the NFL – a much more popular sport than basketball based on per-game viewership – you can see NBA players’ faces. Even baseball players wear hats, which wouldn’t really be an obstacle to seeing player’s faces, except that the entire game is filmed from above.
Lastly, of all the major sports (soccer, hockey, baseball, football, basketball), the NBA has the smallest field of play.
Is Tennis a major sport? Ah well, too late.
Even if Tennis is a major sport, the theory holds: small field of play + small number of players + faces easily visible to cameras = stars that arguably outsize the popularity of the sport itself.
By measure of TV ratings, NFL stars should be far more popular than NBA players.
But what does Johnathan Taylor look like? Nick Chubb? Joe Mixon? Najee Harris? Dalvin Cook? By total yardage, those were the top 5 running backs last season, and no one knows what they look like (I asked everyone in the world).
If there weren’t so many memes of Kirk Cousins, I promise you wouldn’t know what Kirk Cousins looks like.
By comparison I already know what Victor Wembanyama looks like and he isn’t even in the NBA…yet. He looks kind of like if you took Trae Young on his best hair day and stretched his face out in an aesthetically pleasing manner.
It is because NBA stars are so visible, that it seems there are so many of them. It’s why kids think they can be in the league to begin with: they – and we – can’t see the arenas full of high school prospects who never made the league.
In some ways, the kids are right.
540 people – the number of players with playing time in an NBA game last season – is a lot of people. It would fill most middle school auditoriums.
But compared to the absolutely mind-numbing amount of people in America? NBA players are less than a drop in a bucket.
The Reason It Seems Like There are so Many NBA Players is The Same Reason That I Can’t Understand How Many Wealthy People are in America
I’ll explain.
My wife and I love walking our dog around the Summit Hill neighborhood in St. Paul. It’s particularly beautiful if you’re even a mild fan of home architecture, as it hosts the largest collection of Victorian homes in the United States. “In a mere 4.5 miles on Summit Avenue, you’ll find an astounding 373 of the street’s originally 400 homes”, boasts the Visit Saint Paul website.
“How?”, I think to myself as we walk past another beautifully manicured lawn leading to another breathtaking home.
“How can so many people afford to live in this neighborhood?”
440 homes. And that’s just on Summit Avenue itself. The area of incredibly expensive, unforgettably beautiful homes has the 4.5 mile stretch of Summit Avenue at its center but is nearly 2 miles wide, stretching from St. Clair to Selby.
Regardless of the insane cost of housing today (the fact “affordable housing” is even a phrase is an indictment on our entire economic system), or which generation was able to buy what property at what time and stay put as prices soared beyond the rate of inflation (it was boomers), I still can’t wrap my mind around how many rich people there are.
But what do rich people have in common with NBA players?
Well, the obvious of course: any NBA player worth knowing is rich at some point. But more specifically, both groups have a societal presence that outsizes their population.
NBA clips on instagram and reddit get hundreds of thousands-to-millions of views at a clip. NBA highlights play around the clock on Sportscenter and anytime-you-want on Youtube.
Rich people’s homes are large and memorable. They take up a lot of space, in locations that are often the most prized by a society.
It seems like there are a lot of rich people and a lot of NBA players both because they are more visible than your average person, but also because there actually are a lot of rich people and NBA players, we’re just unable to grasp how small of a percentage they make up of the entire American populace because we can’t wrap our minds around what 335 million people is supposed to look like.
Courtesy twitter user @karim_doueib via blogs.berkely.edu
Airports Aren’t Real
This meme, though perhaps unintentional, comically sums up this phenomenon of misunderstanding the immensity of our country.
Originally posted by @chandlerchase_ on instagram, and aggregated by @circleofidiots, it sums up the stupefying “how is this flight fully booked” experience of airplane travel in modern America.
If you’ve ever flown in America, be it off-hours, or off-season, off-brand (*cough*, Sun Country, *cough*) or to-and-from 2 cities that are not major hubs (like say, from Fort Lauderdale to Minneapolis, a flight I took last year), you know very well that it doesn’t matter: there will be no empty seats on your flight.
Well by this point we know the reason why.
But it is surprisingly the same reason that Trump fans will lose their shit if he loses in the next election.
MAGAzonans: The Trumpeteers of Tempe
So what does any of this have to do with Trump supporters in Arizona?
“A place that some MAGA people like to call Magazona” as Ira Glass explains in the intro to This American Life’s 781st episode, “Watching the Watchers”?
Turns out Trump supporters in America’s 48th state have no idea how large their state is.
Like a lot of people I talked to, the radicalizing moment for Peggy was the moment that Fox called the election for Biden so early. Like, it just seems so obvious to her that the fix was in. There must be more Trump voters than Biden ones in Arizona, long car caravans of them, rallies with thousands and thousands of people.
Zoe Chase from “Watching the Watchers”
Thinking that someone was robbed of a nation’s highest elected office because you know, like, a lot of people support them is dumb.
But it is not abnormally dumb.
It is, rather, a painfully normal level of ignorance. A person over-valuing their personal experience, putting trust in an anecdote instead of any kind of outside expertise or information, is classically human.
An argument from anecdote is an informal logical fallacy, where anecdotal evidence is presented as an argument; without any other contributory evidence or reasoning.
Wikipedia
And before we non-trumpet players cast too much judgment (emphasis on “too” much judgment), we must remember that we are all, for the most part, incapable of judging just how enormous America is.
There are a lot of people in the United States, and we, like Marcel the Shell on the hill, are unable to understand this idea with anything more than an “oh” response.
Since the ignorance these fascistic groups exploit is not exceptional, but rather, very average, the ease with which whole swaths of our society can be herded into increasingly authoritarian viewpoints, is as startling on a macro-, as it is nearly imperceptible, on a micro-level.
And that’s not even the scariest thing about the rise of the extremist Right over the last decade.
The scariest thing about the rise of the ultra-right in the time of social media, isn’t that they prey on some very basic human fallacies of judgment, or even that there are more people than ever for them to prey on (Earth just hit 8 billion humans), it’s that it takes so few people to enact a seditious level of violence.
Osama bin-Laden was able to convince 19 people to hijack 4 planes. And not all of those 19 were aware that the planes wouldn’t land.
FBI investigators have officially concluded that 11 of the 19 terrorists who hijacked the aircraft on 11 September did not know they were on .
The Guardian
In 1940, as “The Day” episode of Rachel Maddows presents: Ultra explains, fascists were organizing nationally divisive violence in cells of 13 people.
This group expected that President Franklin D. Roosevelt would win re-election comfortably in 1940, but they knew that critics of Roosevelt on the right would be angry and dissatisfied with that result. So right after the election, they planned to channel that dissatisfaction into violent action. It would be led by armed cells of 13 men each that they had set up all over the country.
“The Day”
That same year, as “The Brooklyn Boys” episode of Maddow’s must-listen podcast explains, 17 ringleaders of The Christian Front led a plot to steal “a dozen cans of cordite [an explosive]. About 1500 rounds of ammunition” from the New York national guard.
The majority of those arrested were either actively serving in the New York National Guard or they’d served in other branches of the military. All of them were charged with sedition, with a plot to overthrow the U.S. government by force.
Those explosives and that ammo went missing because the commander of a New York National Guard machine gun company took the stuff and gave it to the Christian Front.
“The Boys”
If we can fight one human blind spot by learning about another, then the lesson is this: do not underestimate the potential amount of fascistic supporters in our country, for there are many, many people in America, and to divide us, it takes so very few.