In the next in a series of events that suggest 2013 is going to be a combination of exceedingly dispiriting and highly entertaining for me, Dr. Keith Ablow, the Fox News contributor who regularly comes on the network’s shows to put his psychiatrist training to absolutely ludicrous use, is considering running for the Massachusetts Senate seat that John Kerry will vacate if he is confirmed as the next Secretary of State.

It’s easy to get enraged about the causes in which Ablow enlists his medical credentials. This is a man, after all, who wished that Newtown teachers had been armed, who thinks working mothers are self-hating, thinks some adopted children are power-mad, gets viscerally disgusted at mentions of transgender people, thinks letting men veto abortions would solve a so-called absentee father crisis, and keeps alive the worst remnants of his profession, endorsing thoroughly debunked science about changing gay people’s sexual orientations. And that’s not even to mention his views, of particular interest to this blog, on the impact of violent media on children. These views are vile and in some cases actively damaging, and it’s shameful that Ablow would lend his psychiatric expertise to validating them.

But there’s an element of brilliant performance art to Ablow’s work, as upsetting as it may be. His role on the network is in keeping with Fox’s tendency to bait its opponents by hiring extreme figures like Mark Fuhrman, the former Los Angeles detective who plead no contest to charges he perjured himself during the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, to comment on criminal justice issues. There’s a double audacity to those assignments. It’s not just what people like Ablow and Fuhrman say. It’s that Fox treats them as credible experts at all, credentialing them through contracts and frequent airtime. And that’s exactly why I’d love to see Ablow run for Senate, and primary former Senator Scott Brown, who’s started his third attempt at getting or holding on to a Massachusetts Senate seat by calling into question Democratic contender Rep. Ed Markey’s residency eligibility to compete for the seat.
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At this point, you’ve probably seen the demolishing hit South Carolina defensive end Jadeveon Clowney, one of college football’s best players, laid on Michigan running back Vincent Smith in the Outback Bowl on New Year’s Day. Clowney, who would be a top five pick in the NFL Draft this year if only an arbitrary age limit didn’t force him to remain in college for another season, burst off the line and laid waste to Davis almost immediately, causing Davis to fumble and sending his helmet 10 yards backward in the process:

That hit, in short, is absolute football perfection, a combination of size, speed, strength, and total athletic dominance that, when brought together in one perfect moment, leads to the type of play that leaves fans, coaches, teammates, opponents, and announcers alike stunned beyond comprehension. It was clean, it was smart, it was beautiful. The two seconds between the snap of the ball and Clowney’s devastation were football at its absolute purest, as Dave Kindred pointed out at Sports On Earth:

I have no use for football’s jack-‘em-up fetish. I loathe the mentality that cheers a blindside block on a helpless defender whose eyes are locked on a kick returner. I have seen cheap shots and I have seen Darryl Stingley in a wheelchair. But what Jadeveon Clowney did to Vincent Smith was none of that. The old Michigan State coach, Duffy Daugherty, once said, “Football’s not a contact sport, it’s a collision sport.” By that definition, Clowney’s tackle was as pure a demonstration of the game’s truest nature as we’re likely to see.

The very fact that the hit was a “pure demonstration” football’s “truest nature,” though, illustrates exactly what is so scary about the future of football: we’ve spent the last year focused on the threat concussions pose to the future of the game, but the real threat may be the game itself, the risk routine hits even less powerful than Clowney’s pose to the brains of the young men who step on the field each weekend. That, as Bloomberg’s Jonathan Mahler argued last month, “Football doesn’t have a concussion problem. It has an existential one.”

Clowney’s hit didn’t cause a concussion, and so it seems just a routine part of the game. But focusing on concussions as the major source of brain injuries in football, as Mahler argued, makes us think the problem can be fixed relatively easily. It makes it seem as if improving how we monitor concussions when they happen and eliminating head-to-head hits will reduce the amount of concussions and thus mitigate the risk of long-term brain trauma for the athletes who take the field. But recent research shows that it doesn’t necessarily take a career full of concussions to lead to the long-term cognitive problems many football players experience after retirement. Rather, chronic traumatic encepholopathy, dementia, depression, and other serious cognitive damage can result from the constant repetition of seemingly minor hits to the head — the kind that happen hundreds of times every game from the NFL level down to youth football.

“Calling the head-injury crisis a concussion crisis made it sound as if it stemmed from how the game is played, not from the game itself,” Mahler continued. It doesn’t take a concussion to damage the brain. It doesn’t even take a hit as devastating as Clowney’s. The routine plays, the beautiful plays, the most purely football plays — they all could be causing brain damage too. That’s a reality nobody wants to acknowledge, because if football’s problem is indeed existential, if the game doesn’t have a crisis but is the crisis, the future of football is in more peril than anyone thinks.