Against Football
Lesson One
Essay Options
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that football is a necessary evil, including the brain sacrifice of many of the players, for providing escape to working-class Americans for whom football is their lifeblood, and to be denied this lifeblood would be to make the fans’ lives unbearable.
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that football is not merely an escape for Americans whose lives would be unbearable without football, but that football is the very essence of America, and therefore that to lose football would be to lose America as we know it.
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that football, which allows men to marvel at miracles on the field and to live vicariously through their heroes, is a salve for men’s wounded masculinity and their sense of irrelevance and worthlessness.
Support, refute, or complicate Almond’s claim that “allegiance to football legitimizes and even fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia.”
Study Questions for Lesson 1
One. Contemplating his love of football and his ironic detachment to it, Almond writes he had an epiphany: “Something was wrong with me.” Explain what this something is.
Almond has acclimated to an evil of violence and of sacrificing young men for the entertainment of hungry fans and in doing so he is enabling an evil enterprise. Because this evil became his normal, he lived for so long without seeing the moral bankruptcy of football.
Two. In many ways, this book is about the broader problem we have of the synapses that fire in the brain and the conscience that says, “Shame on you.” Explain this duality in the context of the book.
Almond feels a visceral, reflexive connection to football. It is his addiction. On the other hand, his moral conscience tells him it is morally bankrupt.
The same is true of wanting to be a vegan but then salivating upon smelling barbecued meats.
Just as one questions the suffering of the animal one eats, one may consider the brain damage and other problems a football player suffers in order to provide the Everyman some delicious entertainment.
Moreover, this sport was a form of warfare, in which the goal was to march into enemy territory. The military aspects of football are connected, Almond believes, to nationalism and the military industrial complex. His conscience objects to football’s complicity in the military prison complex.
Three. How is football a salve for men’s wounded masculinity?
Football combines grace with physical prowess and a sense of combat. In the industrial age where many men have desk jobs, they lose their primal connection to physical force and brutality, so they need to live vicariously through football.
It appears men thrive on controlled violence as a part of venting aggression and as a part of male bonding.
Additionally, many men are maladapted to domestic life, feel incompetent and irrelevant in the family, and find escape and bonding with their tribe on football weekends.
In many ways, football, with its constant commentary and controversy before and after games, is the first Reality Show.
Four. In many ways football harkens to the past of duels and gladiator fights. Why are such bloody spectacles appealing to men?
Like the novel Fight Club, people in the real world become numb, alienated, and depressed over living in a synthetic universe where everything we do is the result of an elaborate mechanism.
Decent, hard-working men conform to life's script, go to college, get a job, have a family, live in the suburbs, pay their bills on time, have an excellent credit rating, yet they feel empty, hollow, humiliated, emasculated, and irrelevant. Adorning themselves in the consumer trappings of suburban life has proved useless.
Fighting is an attempt to strip ourselves of these consumer trappings and confront our manhood face to face, bare-knuckled, so to speak.
Fighting is a way to give honor to courage and survival of the fittest. We read in The Professor in the Cage by Jonathan gottschall that such rituals are pagan. Paganism values honor, strength, and courage in contrast to Christianity, which emphasizes compassion for the weak and forgiveness of others, and turning the other cheek.
Gottschall observes that duels fill the imagination. One famous duel is that of the son of Alexander Hamilton, Philip, and his opponent. Three years later, Alexander Hamilton died in a duel himself. His death agony lasted 38 hours. His son’s was about 24 hours.
These duels were reactions over insult exchanges. Calling someone a liar or something similar resulted in a duel in early 19th Century America.
Hamilton entered the duel knowing he’d saddle his family with debts and that dueling was against his Christian faith. However, he was compelled by the code of manly honor. We read that, “Throughout the five-hundred-year history of Euro-American dueling culture aristocratic men were generally prepared to kill each other at the drop of a hat.”
Honor was a premium in duel culture. Honor “represented the entirety of a man’s social wealth,” Gottschall writes.
Five. How does honor culture exist in football and what is honor culture’s appeal to men?
This notion of “social wealth” has today been transferred to what Jonathan Gottschall calls “muscular cultures.” We see muscular cultures in prison, sports, and warfare. They bring out the “roots of masculine aggression.”
We further read that , “Prisons are the most extreme honor cultures currently in existence. The harder the prison, the harder the culture of honor.”
In prison, they don’t call this social capital honor. They call it respect.
A world of honor or respect is a world of “reciprocation. A man of honor builds a reputation for payback. In a tit-for-tat fashion he returns favors and retaliates against slights.”
We read an example of disrespect, even stealing someone’s banana or cutting in line at prison, can result in death because disrespect is the ultimate sin in a prison environment. We read, “By failing to retaliate, the new guy fails the heart test . . .”
Failing to have heart and losing respect will make someone a prison slave. “Not fighting over a banana or a book is the same as declaring I am a rabbit. I am food.”
In duel culture, to refuse to duel was the equivalent to suicide, a form of “social annihilation.” To be a “duel dodger was, in many ways, a fate worse than death.”
Conclusion:
No matter how successful in the material world, men are not happy unless they enjoy "social wealth," the esteem of others and themselves for having the kind of honor that is born of courage and masculine power. Lacking esteem in their own world, they seek to live vicariously through their football heroes.
Television is able to capture the football “mayhem” in glorious close-up to make a hyper-real universe that is more “real” than their own lives.
Six. How does football use war mythology to appeal to its viewers?
Myth is a huge part of football. NFL Films captures all of its history with Darth Vader music and Captain Kirk themes. Slow motion archival films with military music is America’s Anthem.
These films are so glorious one would think they were capturing battles that defined America’s greatness in history.
To add to the mythical power, when a team wins the Super Bowl, the winning quarterback receives a phone call from The President.
George Carlin is famous for his description of football as a simulation of war.
As part of the mythology, football is perceived as “intellectual” to give respectability to primal violence and aggression. This aggression is connected to American aggression: big business, the Establishment’s desire to achieve its purposes unfettered.
Seven. How is football America’s national obsession?
Americans just don’t watch football. They consume the entire football industry: TV, radio, fantasy leagues, blogs, video commentaries, scouting and draft reports, sports talk, Twitter, Periscope, other social media. Football is all-consuming. It gives meaning to people’s otherwise meaningless lives.
Football is in love with its own sense of grandeur and significance. It is a pompous enterprise. It takes itself too seriously. But Americans buy into the myth and the obsession. Why? In part because they don’t have options.
Almond mentions that people go to church, but these same church goers spend more time thinking about football than they do God. If religion is what you do with your spare time, then for many football is their religion--or addiction.
We have to come to grips with football as our Nation’s Addiction. Do you know people who are addicted to football or sports in general? You probably do.
Eight. What was the gateway drug for football fandom for Almond?
He bonded with his father. This is common. This includes myself. Many families bond over football. This supports the thesis that “football is America.”
Once you take in this drug, “wins and losses become personal.” Football becomes your life.
Nine. Almond points out that at least 30% of football players end up with terminal brain damage. Is this a worthy sacrifice for the entertainment and “meaning” so many Americans derive from football?
What if one makes the argument that for many, for whom football is a tradition passed down from family members, football is all they know; it is the only life they know, and that to take away football with all of its grand significance, self-identity, community, and family bonding, would be to take away everything. They would find their lives unbearable. Is football, which kills and maims its players, a noble sacrifice for the resut of us?
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