posted by jack
Last week’s release of the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games provides an opportunity to consider the current resonance of the ancient Latin proverb, panem et circenses, or, “bread and circuses.” The saying refers to the Roman contempt for a spoiled and entitled population, one who had mostly abandoned participation in important municipal and imperial political conversations for the baser, more selfish interest in one’s own entertainment and indulgence.
Collins named the political entity that survived a collection of natural, martial, and political disasters Panem in order to focus our attention and criticism on how near-sighted self-involvement not only distracts us from the real social, economic, and political tragedies occurring on our globe and in our nation, but how our own disinterest in these issues can affect and amplify the seriousness of these contemporary issues.
A not-insignificant portion of today’s circenses is football– high school, college, the NFL. Merely one college conference, the Southeastern Conference, topped $1 billion in revenue for the 2010-11 season. Football, in other words, leaves a pretty big footprint on our national landscape. Football’s relationship to The Hunger Games may at first appear forced, and while the comparison suffers in scale and intent (no one is out to kill or see someone be killed in football, despite the recent revelations of the New Orleans Saints’s bounty program), the NFL and NCAA football stand out because of our time commitment to and the integral role that violence play in the sport.
I probably pay more attention to the NFL than the average American, reading analyses, recaps, power rankings, etc. weekly, in addition to watching a number of games per week, each running approximately three hours. So despite my moaning over the absence of nuance in political ads, debates, and coverage, I probably spend more time watching commercials during a single NFL games than I have in attempting to follow the current GOP race or the healthcare debate at the Supreme Court.
But tackle football has more immediate consequences than simply weaning me from political engagement. An emerging awareness of the threat that concussions pose to amateur and professional football players might put the prominence of the sport at risk long-term, since growing evidence appears to suggest that athletic success comes at the expense of the mental and emotional health of the participants.
In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an expose of sorts for The New Yorker, providing a sketch of the burgeoning research into head and brain injuries of (mostly) professional football players. His most poignant and indicting image comes from comparing football players and their fans to the loyalty of dogs trained to fight in illegal dogfighting rings:
“In a fighting dog, the quality that is prized above all others is the willingness to persevere, even in the face of injury and pain. A dog that will not do that is labelled a ‘cur,’ and abandoned. A dog that keeps charging at its opponent is said to possess ‘gameness,’ and game dogs are revered.
In one way or another, plenty of organizations select for gameness. The Marine Corps does so, and so does medicine, when it puts young doctors through the exhausting rigors of residency. But those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff– and dogfighting fails that test.”
The question that Gladwell raises is whether or not we can separate the “breeding” for gameness in football players from the betrayal of that loyalty, whether intentional or not, and maintain interest in the NFL and football.
Football is almost unavoidable in the United States. Estimates place viewership for the most recent Super Bowl, between the New York Giants and New England Patriots, at 113 million, over a third of our population. No other domestic event or sport compares. Comparing football to the Hunger Games borders on the hyperbolic and also ignores very real issues of tyranny, choice, child murder, and other things; however, on a more immediate level, panem et circenses asks us to reassess how we spend our time, and at what cost our choices come to ourselves and those removed from us.
