Posted on 10/03/2017 12:57:35 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
By 2050, the National Football League (NFL) will be like the Barnum and Bailey Circus of today. Bankrupt, closed, irrelevant, morally passe.
In the early 20th century, the circus was all the rage. After a century of the product’s consumption by a culture increasingly sensitive to the abuse of the weak and helpless—in this case, circus animals—the “Greatest Show on Earth” has been relegated to an empty sideshow. It is simply too brutish for sophisticated moderns who wince at the crack of a whip on an elephant’s rump.
Football will soon follow. Its massive billion dollar stadiums and marketing machines seem immortal for now. But these titanic play pens will soon crumble under the same cultural force that killed the circus: our culture’s growing concern for victims.
I am not judging football’s coming demise as a good or bad thing. I see it as simply a symptom of larger social forces that we should understand.
The parallels of football and Roman gladiatorial games have been noted before. In the Colosseum, the Roman emperor would have a grand procession into the arena to the standing ovation of the assembled masses. Today, our U.S. Defense Department-sponsored games begin with the procession of the American flag and anthem. It is often accompanied by dramatic aerial flyovers by jet fighters and fireworks, symbolizing the transcendent might and grandeur of America’s military conquerings. So too, the Roman games often reenacted the empire’s greatest battles.
Today’s latest controversy involves whether football players should stand united in honor of the flag. The sacredness of the flag rests in its long-standing ability to unify even enemies as the opposing teams simulate. Like any symbol, the flag serves as a vessel for people to place powerful emotions: memories of grandpa’s military service, apple pie, cookouts, neighborly support for one another are all wrapped in its colors.
Above all, the one thing the flag represents the most is the unifying power of sacrifice. We are united as one collective family in our reverence for the flag and anthem. The flag is sacred because it represents, as its loudest defenders proclaim, the blood shed by soldiers fighting for our freedoms.
Interestingly, gladiatorial games were first started as sacrificial offerings accompanying funerals. It was thought that the blood spilled by slaves and captives honored the death of state leaders with the transcendent unity of the crowd. With every pitiful animal howl and human cry, citizens felt swept up as one body in collective satisfaction and relief from mundane rivalries and resentments.
Today, governments like to take the suffering and courage of our sons and daughters who enlist and turn it into a marketing ploy for why we all need government coercion controlling our lives—who we hire, what we pay them, permission to cut hair, how big our sodas can be, how much we cook our milk, which drugs we can use to alter our minds, and so on. Governments also like to transmute our goosebumps we feel when the anthem plays into maintaining a trillion dollar annual foreign policy paid by debt created out of thin air and backed by the OPEC oil cartel’s energy markets.
At sporting events, our government captures the nostalgia we feel for neighborhood friendship and family pastimes, associates it with the anthem and flag, and then converts it into passive, numb surrender to perpetual warfare. Even while the nation divides over whether players should kneel or stand for the flag, our government continues to arm expand its military footprint overseas and drop more bombs, all in our name.
But the state, in collusion with powerful corporate allies, uses spectacles like football to distract and pacify the people. Instead of the violent slaughtering of Roman games, our Christianized culture sends players into simulated, padded warfare. We pick teams to unite our personal lives under and forget about the state’s socio- and economic abuses just outside our doorsteps. Studies even suggest that violent crime drops during major televised sporting events.
But now, Trump and his liberal mirror rivals have pierced the veil by injecting the NFL with the profanity of politics: the realm where real factions use real violence of the state to punish their rivals through regulations, mandates, and taxes. When Trump said “fire them” about the protesting players, invoking the specter of both the penal and paternal side of government, forcing people to take sides and not over the gridiron but at either side of the water cooler and dinner table, it did the game no favors.
Eventually, it took a church monk named Telemachus challenging the violent sacrifice of the Roman gladiatorial games to end their carnage. He climbed into the arena and protested until he was summarily slaughtered. His self-sacrifice for the defense of victims led to the public’s loss of appetite for the violence.The last known Roman gladiatorial event was in 404 AD, less than two decades after Telemachus’s death.
Today, myriad scandals serve as a persistent Telemachus threatening to bring the NFL down. Mothers and fathers all around the country are pulling their sons out of football due to the increased revelations of concussions and resulting brain damage caused by the sport. Whereas Roman citizens demanded their fighters stripped of armor to maximize carnage, increased paddings will end up making players look like Michelin men with bobble head-sized helmets.
In Rome, no one cared how gladiators treated their lovers. Today, growing public disgust with widespread reports of spousal abuse is souring the NFL’s mystique.
In college, the NCAA’s state-protected profiteering off of unpaid players’ physical sacrifice is increasingly criticized as well.
Meanwhile, diehard fans once thrilled by simulated violence are losing interest with ever constrained penalty rules and concussion concerns. The suspension of disbelief required to enjoy the game is waning: talks of brain damage, flags no longer able to unify people around soldiers’ sacrificial deaths, spousal abuse, and racial undertones are all exposing football as just a silly game to appease desires for tribalism and aggression—and make fat cat owners fatter. Not worth all the drama.
We should be proud that we do not send hungry lions into arenas with naked prisoners anymore. We have made progress because of Christianity’s leavening of the collective’s history-long abuse against the misfit person. Yet absent such gladiatorial games, our culture must confront our sacrifices of the innocent and nonviolent to appease our love for aggression as the means of keeping peace.
David Gornoski is your neighbor—as well as an entrepreneur, speaker and writer. He recently launched a project called A Neighbor’s Choice, which seeks to introduce Jesus’ culture of nonviolence to both Christians and the broader public. A Florida promoter of local agriculture, he also writes for WND.com, FEE.org, AffluentInvestor.com, and AltarandThrone.com. Reach him at email: david@aneighborschoice.com
And don’t worry, we will still have major league baseball and the NBA.
Business-wise, I think the 32 NFL franchieses will be forced within two seasons to talk about a pay-cut and it’ll invoke some player-union episode of a strike. The owners won’t back down and I’ll predict an entire season is lost. After that point, three or four of the franchises will disappear and lawsuits by the former owners against the NFL will kill off profits. You can figure by 2025...with the concussion business, lawsuits, and franchise failures...it’ll dissolve and end.
The thing is...all those NCAA kids standing there and realizing the ultimate dream is over...then why play NCAA football? It’ll dissolve them out of existence and then high school football.
And Chess! Don't forget Chess!
Regards,
Remove the Federal anit-trust exemption
Ban using taxpayer monies to build stadiums for professional sport teams
Good riddance to the opiate of the inebriate.
Football is an American cultural icon. The demise of football was the left’s intent all along. We mustn’t let ourselves go along with it.
NFL is a now cultural icon for large black men making millions and living the thug lifestyle. Its demise had little to do with the left. The injuries were self inflicted by owners who determined that violent thugs made better players on the field than persons of character.
“The thing is...all those NCAA kids standing there and realizing the ultimate dream is over...then why play NCAA football? It’ll dissolve them out of existence and then high school football.”
I’ve been thinking that from the start. The kids that virtually kill themselves to get noticed by the coach, the parents in poverty who see a chance to get out with their kids going big-time...and it all over now, due to a bunch of MULTI-MILLIONAIRES who cannot constrain their hatred of the country that made them rich.
I do feel sorry for the kids...but, on the other hand, maybe some of them will be the next Thomas Sowell’s...kids from a dismal background who now see that memorizing physics formulas is MUCH MORE VALUABLE than memorizing the Playbook.
Bingo! (Especially the part about stealing er ah taxing for stadiums)
Re: “In college, the NCAA’s state-protected profiteering off of unpaid players’ physical sacrifice is increasingly criticized as well.”
Unpaid players?
Gimme a break. The average college football scholarship pays close to $50,000 per year (including summer school) in room, board, tuition, books, fees, and tutors. A good red shirt player can get a fifth year, which means one year of free grad school.
Only 2% of college football players are good enough to play even one full year in the NFL (minimum salary $465,000).
Bottom Line - getting a cost free bachelors degree seems like a reasonable deal for the other 98%.
Some get into trouble here and there but that has always been the case.
Yes, because everything is President Trump's fault. /s
No, the blame lies squarely on Colin K (can't remember how to spell his last name) and the NFL, encouraging this anti-American cr*p.
Football WAS an American cultural icon; it hurt itself badly with far too many commercials that stretched four 15-minute quarters into a 3 1/2 hour (at least) event. This latest nonsense is just turning it into basketball with a different ball...
There is much truth in what this says but for some reason the tone is off putting. He also neglects the large gambling component of the NFL. It is difficult to measure but some say if no gambling was involved the NFL would lose half its audience. He may be right about the predictions but the gambling part may be very resilient and keep the NFL going.
Gimme a break. The average college football scholarship pays close to $50,000 per year (including summer school) in room, board, tuition, books, fees, and tutors.
You are spot on. I went to a top ten college and because of my good grades, I got a job as a "tutor." I was under very heavy pressure to make sure that my football playing student passed his classes (i.e., write his papers for him).
It is quite the pampered lifestyle these guys live. Girls, grades...they have everything they want, as long as they can perform on the field.
Noticed the same thing. Author is stretching to tie gladiators,football, collesuims, etc. Its like he was going to make this illustration and football happened to be in the headlines, so he tried to make it work
NFL is dying BC of arrogance, greed, insulting its fan base, producing an unwatchable product, neglecting safety, enabling less than desirable culture, and ignoring the importance of the youth game.
Bumppo
“At sporting events, our government captures the nostalgia we feel for neighborhood friendship and family pastimes, associates it with the anthem and flag, and then converts it into passive, numb surrender to perpetual warfare.”
Statement is too dumb to comment on.
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