On one more big
question about football in 2014 America.
I’ve used
football to engage with some very big American and human questions this week—racism
and rape, historical hypocrisy and mythic success—and I don’t mean in my title
to suggest that today’s question is bigger than (or even as big as) any of
them. Instead, I mean that this is a bigger question about football itself—or rather
sports themselves, although by any almost any measure football
is the most popular sport in 2014 America—rather than about those related
but certainly more all-encompassing issues. And the question, to put it bluntly
and somewhat hyperbolically, is this: has football become what Karl Marx called
religion, “the opium
of the people,” a pleasant
distraction from the huge problems plaguing our society, nation, and world?
As the week’s
posts have indicated, football is of course far from free of those social and
cultural problems; moreover, as Dave Zirin argues in the piece hyperlinked
under “a pleasant distraction,” it’s insulting to sports fans to insinuate that
they turn off their brains or broader social engagement as a result of (or even
during) their sportswatching. But those conditions and caveats notwithstanding,
I think it’s still entirely fair to ask whether something like the NFL doesn’t
serve (just as entertainment mediums such as Hollywood films and television
can) as an escape from the
inequalities, the crises, the looming
disasters that define so much of the world around us in the early 21st
century. Isn’t that, after all, the core of what NFL Commissioner Roger
Goodell means by “the shield,” the layer of insulation separating the NFL’s
image from the complexities and messiness of the world beyond?
To be clear, such
escapes are entirely necessary and beneficial—I’m not sure anybody could spend
all day every day thinking about the hardest challenges facing us and our
world, and I know it wouldn’t be healthy to try (there’s a reason why President
Obama is such a big sports fan). But if and when the escapes get so big and
become such central focal points, it is important to take a step back and
consider whether they’ve become in at least some ways part of the problem,
whether specifically because of the investment they require (see: those
ticket prices) or broadly because of the collective focus and energy they
swallow up. Football might not be opium, but it’s hard to deny that it can be a
circus (as in “bread
and circuses”), and that it wouldn’t hurt for us to find ways to step
outside of the tent a bit more often than we tend to these days.
January recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
In all of those ways you mention here (and I am a big sports fan myself) football is absolutely a distraction from the, let's say, 'less exciting' things happening in society. Think about it this way: if all of the people who dedicate countless hours to watching, listening to, and reading about football took approximately 1/10th of that time and oriented it toward volunteerism or problem-solving on a community level, it would make a gigantic impact. However, it has become Marx's 'religion'.
ReplyDeleteRetired Redskins coach Joe Gibbs was on The Colbert Report Tuesday night. Stephen Colbert conducted the interview in his normal, wacky style, trying to throw Gibbs off, asking silly and irreverent questions, etc. Yet, for all of the absurdity and ridiculousness of Colbert, Gibbs managed to come up with easily the craziest quote of the entire interview--"I think it (the Super Bowl) is probably the greatest thing Man can create." Tell me this is not as fervent an adherence to some ideology of an all-powerful entity as any religion. (After Gibbs said this, Colbert responded, "Movable type, the pyramids at Giza, and the Super Bowl." Greatest non-comeback comeback ever?)
Well said, Ian!
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