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Has sports become the real opiate of the masses?
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of TheColumnists.com
An exchange in Peter Schrag’s “The End of the American Future” written decades ago, applies only too well today. A Gary, Ind. Steelworker, Jim Balanoff, said:
“Twelve thousand were laid off by U.S. Steel in the last year, and a lot of these people will never go back. Everywhere you go these guys will tell you that the country’s in trouble, that it’s all gone. At the same time they don’t want to hear the bad news. What they want is baseball in the morning, football in the afternoon and basketball at night. If they had to think about all those big issues, they’d go crazy.”
In modern times it is sports--not religion--that is the opiate of the masses. Sports is the new religion. Nor was critic Paul Hoch barking up his Marxist tree when he took the opiate of the masses argument a littler further during the Vietnam War. He said:
“Identification with sports teams is at best escapist and for a worker to identify with his ‘company team’ or the ‘nation’s military team’ might well run against his true interests. It goes without saying that the worker who is so busy rooting for the Yankees that he forgets that his real wages are declining is a good bet to be so busy rooting for the Yanks in Vietnam that he forgets his son might be killed there.”
Any argument that sports is an opiate is often greeted with disdain. There is contempt for many attempts to deal with sports critically. Dr. Arnold Beisser, whose “The Madness of Sports” was a pioneer psychiatric analysis of sports case histories, wrote:
“Although there is a tendency to minimize the importance of sports as only a leisure activity not to be taken seriously, I am cognizant of the fact that I am analyzing that which is sacrosanct and that such analysis is likely to arouse vigorous denials and criticism from those who choose not to question the meanings of their environment.”
Bill Bradley, the eminent Princetonian, Rhodes Scholar, New York Knick and New Jersey Senator, once said, “Thousands of people who don’t know me use my participation on a Sunday afternoon as an excuse for non-action, as a fix to help their everyday problems and our society’s problems. The toll of providing that experience is beginning to register with me.”
There are those--and I almost wish I was
one of them--who would claim that if things get really bad, as
things have come to pass after eight disastrous years of the
Bush presidency, people will finally begin to pay attention.
Witness the ascension of Barack Obama, a sports fan himself,
whose monumental task to right the country now commands the attention
of the nation over and beyond sports.
.
Bradley later said, “I think I have overstated the case.
I think there are valid reasons for sports as a diversion for
people who have more significant interests The sad thing, though,
is that even if sports were to disappear, most people wouldn’t
suddenly get interested in the budget or day care or more meaningful
things; they would find other diversions.”
I recall a conversation with a friend late in the baseball season, when the Philadelphia Phillies’ drive for a World Series championship coincided with Obama’s pursuit of the presidency. He is an avid Phillies and Obama fan.
I asked him, “If only one of them, the Phillies or Obama, could win, which would you prefer?
He looked at me and there was a long pause. It was mindful of the long pause by Jack Benny after being challenged by a robber, “Your money or your life.”
We can’t expect people to get their jollies from watching the fluctuations of the Dow Jones index. But it is sports that has traded on the pursuit of leisure to become the greatest distortion of what it was meant to be. It is big-time sports that perverts the ideals of academia.
It is sports that wraps itself in the flag in producing a star-spangled Super Bowl that will involve the hopes of almost a billion viewers Sunday in Tampa. And it is the Super Bowl that conjures up visions of another time and place.
The psychiatrist, Dr. Beisser, wrote:
“The lessons of ancient Rome should be sufficient justification for a close examination of America’s athletic activity and its motivations. One can see many parallels between our sports and the sports of the declining years of that great empire. A single Coliseum served Roman spectators; today thousands of stadiums great and small, serve the United States…While Romans cheered their games and gladiators, their empire crumbled. Can our national drive and productiveness be traveling a similar path today?”
It is a chilling thought.
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Feb. 2, 2009.
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