a tale of two Aarons

big dumb bummer

I’m going to start out with my personal shame. I have had the type of crush on Aaron Rodgers for the past few years that teenagers have on celebrities. Like, some part of me DID believe that if we met we would hook up and/or fall in love. Idk, I think I have this thing called fantasy-prone personality disorder, it’s not as active as it used to be now that I have like a life and friends and my world is its own fantasy, but I am just more prone than others to believe the slightly impossible.

This is not a picture of me and Aaron Rodgers,. It’s worse. It is a picture of Aaron Rodgers that two of my friends photoshopped my face onto maybe seven years ago for my birthday, which is....perhaps more embarrassing. (One of the friends, Natasha, is the person who coined ‘big dumb bummer’ as a name for this snafu after my habit of referring to men like Aaron Rodgers as having a ‘big dumb face’)

Other than self-flagellation, I say this to contextualize that I really cared about Aaron Rodgers. I am not taking this opportunity to laugh at a dumb football guy, or to posture morality over a dumb football guy. I’m from Wisconsin. I loved him. You don’t purposefully hurt someone you love.

But you do comment when they are a massive idiot. You try to pull them back from the brink. You talk to them. And since I don’t actually know Aaron Rodgers, instead of talking to him, I will talk to my Substack about media drama. (sorry if you came here for the literary media drama, this also qualifies as media so here we are)

As I’m sure everyone knows by now, even the people who claimed they ‘didn’t know who Aaron Rodgers was before last week’ (ok, congrats lady, you’re better than sports, here’s your trophy) Aaron Rodgers went on ‘The Pat McAfee Show,’ where he is apparently a regular. (I actually do not know what this is, I, of course, heard about all of this through Twitter, my one true home) He told the host and his former teammate, who was also there, that he was ‘doing well’ since being placed on the ‘COVID reserve list’ on Wednesday, November 3rd. He was placed on the list after a positive COVID test, and, per NFL policy, the regular testing is only done on unvaccinated players. Obviously, this raised more questions than it answered. 

Through various run-arounds (Rodgers claiming previously that he was ‘immunized,’ which, apparently, no one had questioned…) (Rodgers had petitioning the NFL to be considered vaccinated when he...wasn’t vaccinated) etc, we arrived at Rodgers attempting to explain all of this on the McAffee show by saying that he’s allergic to an ingredient in Pfizer and Moderna, and didn’t want to get Johnson/Johnson because of, among other things, ‘physical abnormalities’ reported by friends of his, and the blood clotting issue. 

Honestly, there is a world where I could have been with him up until that point. Despite him being my husband, I don’t know his medical issues, and I guess it’s plausible that he is allergic to something in Pfizer/Moderna, and I know he wasn’t the only person to not want Johnson/Johnson because of blood clotting stuff. Although, I would be remiss not to mention, as NPR noted,  “Rodgers, who turns 38 in December, did not say what ingredient he was allergic to, or how he knows he is allergic.” Obviously I don’t know if the allergy is real or fake. But if it is real, again, I could have been with him up till that point. But, since idiots continue, of course it did not stop there. 

He went on to ‘do his own research’ with ‘medical individuals and professionals’ and ‘discovered’ that there was an immunization protocol he could use to protect himself and his teammates, or so he claimed. He also said, in a nutshell, that he was worried that the vaccines would sterilize him. (His actual explanation was: “The next great chapter in my life is being a father and it’s something I care about a lot. To my knowledge, there’s zero long-term studies around sterility or fertility issues around the vaccines, so that was definitely something I was worried about.”)

Ok, are there long term studies about the sterility and fertility issues of being a huge dumbass??? I rest my case. Also, as I’m sure my lovely and intelligent readers know, there are papers citing that there’s no reason to believe the vaccine would cause sterility. I’m gonna read between the lines here and say that this is Aaron Rodgers being a worried man-baby about his virility, as men love to be! 

Then comes lé worst part: instead of like, just sitting at home or whatever someone who legitimately couldn’t get vaccinated must do, he listed what he’s done to ““immunize”” himself: “I have been taking monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin, zinc, vitamin C and D, and HCQ.”

This is really what got me: the ivermectin. Horses are far more tied up in my Wisconsinite identity than even the Packers and Aaron Rodgers are, so this is what threw me all the way off the cliff. It’s just…….soooo stupid to take a medicine for horses! Have you seen them! They’re gigantic! I’ve medicated horses! Why would you do this! It’s scary!

Other than upsetting me personally, the statement of his ‘alternative’ therapies ruined any ounce of credibility he could have claimed re: his allergies or the J/J blood clots. Vitamins, zinc, fine! Lots of people those on normal days! I have spent enough time on this big dumb saga already to not want to do research on the rest of the things on his list other than the horse paste, (yes it’s literally a paste that you use on horses w/ parasites) so that’s one I’m going to focus on.

If he was so busy doing research this whole time, did he not figure otu hat ivermectin has sent people to the hospital? Or, according to the literal FDA, overdosing on it (which again is easy to do when your’e taking a medicine FOR HORSES, WHICH WEIGH 2000 POUNDS,  “can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, hypotension (low blood pressure), allergic reactions (itching and hives), dizziness, ataxia (problems with balance), seizures, coma and even death.” 

Ivermectin has been approved by the FDA in small doses to treat worms and head lice….but...idk has anyone noticed that COVID isn’t worms or head lice? Or that buying the horse-version of the medication isn’t the same as getting prescribed the human for-lice version?

Rodgers went on to compare himself to Martin Luther King, question the NFL’s COVID-precautions (can’t believe I’m taking hte side of the NFL,) and generally just go on a rant about how he’s been prejudiced against as an unvaccinated person. LOL. It’s all just so, so stupid.

After my initial sorrow that my would-be husband is an idiot, I did revel in some of the social media hijinks that ensued: 

Tag yourself, I’m this tweet :( And yes, I’m sorry, I feel compelled to be honest, I already followed the ‘Aaron Rodgers’ subject before this debacle. 

This one isn’t funny, just a true and tragic point! Not going to touch on this whole other thing in this post, but if you haven’t read about it, here it is.

Here’s my big dumb replacement face.

As you can see, this eventually ended with me ‘so-true-bestie-ing’ my own father. 

I texted my ex about this (lol this entire post is just a series of self-owns for ol’ Becca…) because he’s a football fan and I wanted to get the opinion of someone who cared mostly about sports instead of caring mostly about Twitter jokes. This was our convo: 

While he’s technically right that Aaron didn’t come out as adamantly anti-vax….idk, I actually don’t think he’s right, Aaron Rodgers basically did come out as antivax! The reason why I disagree with him gets at the heart of why this whole thing is not just silly and a bit depressing but actually a symptom of a larger problem.

It would be one thing if Aaron Rodgers couldn’t get the vaccine b/c of the allergens and whatever and simply...shut up about it.

But by talking about it in the way he did, he’s not only, as he correctly assessed (when he said that everyone was going to cancel culture woke mob him,) making himself a laughingstock, he’s also fueling legions of uninformed people who don’t know better and don’t have access to the doctors that he does, and they will believe him because…

He’s a celebrity!

He may not consider himself to be a celebrity on the level of Beyonce or Leonardo DiCaprio, but….he is!!! Possibly, he’s become conditioned to the ‘athletes are dumb’ narrative, and therefore thinks no one listesns to him, and is using this little soapbox moment as a one-two punch: prove that he’s a smart independent thinker and also hide behind the fallacy that ‘no one listens to those dumb sports guys.’ Unfortunately for, well, everyone, he’s wrong on both counts. Nobody thinks he’s a smart independent thinker, and many, many people listen to the dumb sports guys.  

My own positions on the COVID vaccine are the same as you know, the scientists and the health department, and presumably everyone reading this, so I won’t rehash them here, but the thing I’ll say is this...it’s such a fucking waste of time for people to hem and haw about a vaccine. This vaccine isn’t any different from any of the vaccines we get as children or before we go to foreign countries, or like, why we don’t get polio. When normal people get caught up in anxi-vax conspiracy theories, at least I’m like, well, you probably have a sad pathetic life and are getting lost in an internet rabbit hole because of your tragic boredom and a desperate hope for control. But Aaron Rodgers already has everything!!! Just go sit on a pile of your money and sleep with your actress wife! Why are you wasting your one wild and precious life making a fool of yourself in front of the entire internet!

Although this tweet, like most of the tweets about Rodgersgate, is obviously a joke, I think it gets at something real and important at the heart of this dumb dumb drama: Aaron is masquerading as a public servant, trying to get people ‘unbiased information,’ but this joke tweet incidentally points out that if he really were worried about the public, he could have said something a long-ass time ago, not just now that he has to defend himself because he literally GOT COVID. 

Celebrities should have at least a little responsibility to understand their power. This whole thing supports this thesis I have, called the celebrity-dog thesis, which is that a celebrity’s life is more different from ours than our life is different from a dogs. I shan’t be explaining it more in depth now but it will come back in later newsletters b/c it’s one of my favorite personal theories.

In this case, it seems like Mr. Rodgers (lol) has become so isolated from real life and regular people that he perhaps doesn’t realize that the things he’s saying have a hugely damaging potential. I know, I’m being slightly generous here. But think about it—if he really understood the breadth and depth of his fame, how the things he says can affect people, I think that he would maybe have taken a pause before spreading such absurd non-information.

You know that old US magazine feature, Celebrities —theyre just like us? I think the problem is that too many celebrities think they are jus like us, when in fact, at the level that Aaron Rodgers is at, they’re not. They’re nothing like us at all.

Aaron Rodgers was never going to die from COVID. He can afford to spout his little jokes and self-researched theories precisely because of how rich and insulated he is. But the people listening to what he’s saying, going out and thinking ‘wow, since Aaron said it’s ok to medicate myself with horse paste, I guess I’ll go do it,’ VERY WELL MIGHT DIE. He clearly either doesn’t believe that or doesn't realize it, and in either case, he’s wrong and an idiot.

Maybe a day after all of this went down, I happened upon some tweets and then an article about another Aaron: Aaron Swartz, an internet hacktivist who died by suicide in 2013 while he was being persecuted by the federal government. He was a young genius programmer and an advocate for transparency. He led a campaign to stop the Stop Online Piracy Act from getting passed in congress, (the bill would have legalized certain types of censorship,) pioneered various kinds of open-source technology, and, in the words of Rolling Stone, “Dedicated himself to limiting the amount of power institutions could wield over individuals.”

This tragically departed Aaron exemplifies the exact problem with the for-now still alive Aaron: access to verified information is one of the most important things in the modern world. Hacker Aaron fought for that. Though I’m sure he’d disagree with some long-winded explanation that doesn’t make sense, Throws Balls Aaron did the exact opposite: he used his platform, which gives him the ability to spread information to a huge numer of people in the same time it takes me to walk my dog, to spread misinformation and sow disbelief in an already vulnerable population, i.e. the people who are skeptical of the vaccine because they are not getting accurate information. Aaron Rodgers can throw around words like ‘woke mob’ all he wants, but in this moment he’s no better than a crazy family member posting about QAnon on Facebook, right-wing YouTuber nutjobs, and Fox News itself. 

We’ll find out whether he still has COVID and can go back to ‘throwing balls’ on November 13th.  

A few final notes: I made a twitter for the newsletter since my regular twitter is private now b/c I’m looking for a job. I’m looking for a job because I’m unemployed, so if you are gainfully employed and feel like spreading around some of your gains, feel free to become a paid subscriber. At some point in the future there will be benefits and/or special content, and you will be the first to know what they are. 

Farewell!!!