Sudden death overtime: from the NFL to Iraq

The distance from the Super Bowl to Baghdad is shrinking as the languages of sport and war converge, says Joe Boyd.



...


We have seen the statistics about how few Americans can locate London on a map, much less Baghdad or Kirkuk. Most Yankee males know a lot more about Shaquille O’Neal’s scoring average than Abu Ghraib. Not only has sports provided a “bread and circuses” distraction allowing politicians and generals to get quietly on with their bloody business, but those same politicians and generals probably know a lot more about Peyton Manning’s new record for touchdown passes in a season than they do about the nuances of Sunni and Shi’a versions of Islam. Sport’s structured and contained world is far more satisfyingly comprehensible than the messy, complicated maze of a hostile foreign culture.

“Don’t back down”, “play to win”, “an in-your-face dunk”, “smash-mouth football”: for someone who hears a lot of sports broadcasts, the language of American foreign and military policy sounds eerily familiar. The culture of sport has become a dangerous chemical in the American drinking water: people root for the “coalition forces” as they would for their favourite football team, with all the contempt for the opposition and the strutting aggression that accompanies a heated rivalry. Compromise and restraint are out of step with the national mood. A decade and half ago, the NFL instituted an extra period so that even a regular-season contest needn’t end with something as wimpy and un-American as a draw. Is that what we are seeing now in Iraq: “sudden-death overtime”?

...The so-called “culture wars” have also been dragged into the rituals of NFL games. The ranks of pop, r&b and country music used to be combed to find the most hilariously unsuitable voice to mangle the pre-game Star Spangled Banner, but this kitsch moment has lately been replaced by more sober renderings, often from military choirs. And as for the lurid Super Bowl half-time entertainment, following the Janet Jackson nipple crisis of 2004, the next season’s attraction was the Beatle-lite blandness of Paul McCartney.

...

Sport once served as a way of keeping young men in shape while sublimating their aggressive instincts in times of peace. The American genius for commercialisation has transformed it into a marketing plug for militarism and a Rorschach test for social reaction. The war for which young American – and British – men and women are being asked to leave their playing-fields and risk their lives, meanwhile, is a campaign as superficially slick and fundamentally juvenile as the playoffs of an all-American sport. The Super Bowl received more thoughtful analysis and overall coverage in the US media than the first round of the Iraqi elections the previous month. More beer and hot-dogs, anyone?

http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts/american_football_2993.jsp