Is boredom really 'public enemy No. 1?'

This column is about the Super Bowl but it isn't. It's really about our collective embrace of the trivial. We embrace it because we have to talk to each other about something, don't we?

The only explanation that makes sense to me to account for why "Deflategate" has endured in the public mind for two solid weeks is that we're bored. And when we're bored, we cleave to the nonessential, to trivia.

In 1969, Charles DeGaulle, the great and personally difficult World War II-era general of the French resistance movement, resigned as French president. He said he was bored with the job of managing government bureaucracy, tired of administering what he called "the macaroni ration." Boredom kills, he said -- and just over a year later, deGaulle himself was dead. He failed to find anything worthy of his considerable intellect.

A fellow Frenchman, Pierre Teilhard deChardin, once wrote that boredom is "public enemy No. 1." There was a time in which people invested all their time just to survive to the next day. There are still some places in the world where survival pushes away all of boredom's cobwebs. In Jordan, for example, refugees from Syria's brutal civil war pick tomatoes for the equivalent of $11 per day in the village of As Safi, near the Dead Sea. Those folks are just trying to make it to tomorrow. I feel certain in suggesting that none would find anything remotely interesting about the proper air pressure of an American football.

But we don't live in the Middle East. We reside in the land of plenty. That abundance includes an excess of leisure. deChardin died 60 years ago but his words are more relevant now than when he originally wrote them. To wit: "Thanks to the mechanical devices which we increasingly charge with the burden not only of production but also of calculation, the quantity of unused human energy is growing at a disturbing rate both within and around us. ... mankind is bored. Perhaps this is the underlying cause of all our troubles. We no longer know what to do with ourselves." ("The Future of Man." Posthumously published, 1959.)

I'm not going down Jimmy Carter's road, the president who famously suggested in 1979 that Americans were suffering from a "malaise." To be in a malaise suggests a number of things -- one of them, a lack of energy. Mr. Carter was wrong about that. We're plenty energetic. But an obsessive fascination with the truly trivial matter of football inflation suggests our energy needs a higher focus. As one old radio preacher used to put it, "Look up and live."

If you've gotten this far in the column, you're intelligent and have energy. Elevate your mind above nonsense. Choose something worthy of your considerable smarts and focus on it. Work for something that elevates you and the community in which you live.

Sermon over. Enjoy the spectacle; enjoy the game. Nobody asked me, but my prediction is Patriots 35, Seahawks 27.