The American Way
Like those Roman spectators American football fans love the ferocity of the game. The elevated portrayal of violence; especially the violence in a blitz, which is as visceral as Sam Peckinpaw’s Wild Bunch or the violence and gore in Tarantino new movie Django. We Americans love guts, glory and gore.
It’s epigenetic. It transcends DNA.
I love eating pizza and drinking beer with fellow football addicts while looking and listening to helmet-to helmet clash, clavicles snap, crackle and pop, while ACL and LCL rip. The football stadium is the only place in American life where you can actually pay to see human beings commit acts of violence while drinking and eating. Football’s ethos of violence seems to be America’s last bastion of pride for alpha males.
The 60s black activist Rap Brown once said,” Violence is as American as apple pie”.
Is that why Americans get such a sick voyeuristic high out of helmet-to-helmet contact? Is it because most American men live such dull lives that football’s orgiastic violence captivates us?
Author MacCambridge says that “football exploits something in our national DNA, something we have in common with ancient Romans—a weakness for spectacle and pageantry”. Football is the blood rite passage to manhood in America.
American men are increasingly feeling emasculated in a culture where women are surpassing men as breadwinners. Some men feel impotent since traditional ‘male’ jobs have become extinct. I wonder is that why African American men make up 67% of the NFL? Or is that stat because of other factors like dismal employment opportunities, money, or the Darwinian impulse to exorcise the John-the -conqueror demons, racist demons, impotent demons and emasculating demons that cling to black athletes like a snake’s eviscerated skin.