Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Superbowl Spleen

Let's see, how should I spend my Sunday? Should I keep reading Herwig Wolfram's magisterial History of the Goths? Should I perhaps go a-hunting online for some whimsical new videos of cats doing unexpected things? Or should I check to see if there are any noteworthy athletic spectacles on television?

There has been a dull din, growing louder over the past few weeks, that suggests to me that some big sports event is in the offing. Distant memories from childhood cause me to associate this din, in this particular season, with football. These associations, in turn, conjure up others still: of Ronald Reagan, of high-school meatheads in letter jackets telling me not to stand too close to their girlfriends, of ROTC, of PromiseKeepers, of words like 'buddy', of a model of American masculinity that quite literally spit me out as indigestible.

And now, here I am, back in the belly of the beast, steeling myself for yet another Superbowl. (The last Superbowl I can remember, in early 1994, I spent locked in a closet reading Anna Akhmatova as my parents hosted a wide-screen-TV Superbowl fiesta, complete with trays of bean dip made up with various ingredients to resemble a football field: sour cream for the yard lines, a goal post out of avocado, etc.)

Now all team sports may properly be described as sublimations of war, and to the extent that I've already confessed to 'getting' the Ernst Jünger-style aestheticization of battle, it is but a corollary confession to observe that I do find some such sublimations beautiful. But American football is not so much a sublimation of the martial as it is an outright advertisement for it. As far as I can tell this is how it's been for a very long time, which is precisely why it made such natural sense to fall back on the figure of the 'Gipper' when then-president Reagan made a characteristically hard-nosed move against the Soviets, or the Sandinistas, or air-traffic controllers.

And now today, from what I've gathered from brief glimpses while waiting in airport bars, the media event of a professional football game is entirely intermeshed with the promotion of US foreign policy (all this talk of honoring our troops, all these stupid ribbons, all this shitty conservative music at half-time that makes Bob Hope at the USO look like the Bad Brains), and with the preservation of the racial divide that defines American history (nothing quite helps to further reify the imaginary boundaries of race than the jovial displays of locker-room bonhomie between men of different skin tones, who never doubt that they belong to different natural categories and that their bonhomie succeeds only through the crossing of a real line).

I seriously do not understand how anyone who does not anchor himself to these ideological docks could nonetheless find something left over in the spectacle to get excited about. How, moreover, could anyone who is not American --or an immigrant trying overhard to become American-- possibly feel welcome at the spectacle? I do have friends who are not, politically speaking, yahoos, and even a few European friends, who adore American football. Until I hear an explanation, I will assume that they are all just trying to be idiosyncratic.

For my part, whenever I overhear or catch a glimpse of anything having to do with the NFL, I get a deep, preconceptual, instinctive sense that this is just not my world. I suspect that this is something that is not so different from the way sexual orientation works: sport might not be as important as kinship in the organization of a society, but it is pretty important. In both cases, when a person cannot play along with the way sport or kinship has been set up in a given society, that person risks marginalization. I am being quite serious when I say that I feel my marginalization very intensely on days of nationwide or worldwide athletic celebration. And as with sexual orientation, I feel like saying to anyone who would blithely insist that I need to lighten up and get with it: I can't. It's just not in me.

Of course, everyone will find him or herself unable to relate to at least some features of the modern world: many people hear off-the-cuff political analysis about, say, Suleiman's prospects in a post-Mubarak Egypt in the same way I hear the whooping and hollering about Ben Roethlisberger. That is, they don't hear it at all; they just switch it down to a sort of background humming.

I insist on writing semi-regularly about sports (my 'sports column', I like to joke) because I really do think this is important. Sports, as the t-shirt puts it, really is life for many in our society; and it is important to not allow this slogan to be elevated to, so to speak, a universal maxim with normative force. In this respect, I am quite serious when I emphasize the parallels to heteronormativity.

As it is, parent-child relationships are destroyed over a lack of enthusiasm on junior's part for throwing the pigskin around; and people actually lose jobs because they are unable to shoot-the-shit about LeBron James or whatever with their coworkers (not to mention the inability to go shoot a round of golf or 'some hoops'). Yet no one is there to defend them.

This remains for the moment a pernicious yet sub rosa variety of coerced conformity.  If I weren't an utter recluse I would start an advocacy group.

--

To follow me on Facebook, go here.

Men and Guns

Whenever Americans are depicted as a bunch of gun-loving yahoos relative to Europeans, it is surely not these Europeans who are had in mind:

 

This footage deserves attention. For one thing, it shows much more fully and vividly than anyone in the inane American gun debate will ever acknowledge why it is that men are so attracted to arms. The anti-gun, 'liberal' contingent in the US prefers to produce all sorts of irrelevant calculations showing the net harm of lax gun laws, while the opposite camp speaks of guns in terms of freedom and the assertion of individual control over one's own safety. Neither party will move out of this dull utilitarian calculus long enough to acknowledge what these Kosovar revellers grasp without having to say: that guns are an expression and an extension of a man's own being, which is to say his power and virility. Homo necans longed to get his hands on guns aeons before he contrived to invent them. Guns provide such a charge in fact that they thoroughly compensate for the absence of women from the festivities.

The charge that the display of weaponry provides can in other cultural contexts be sublimated into channels that have no explicit or immediate connection to violence (e.g., fireworks). But where you see men pleading for the right to display their weapons, you are probably missing the point if you take at face value their invocation of safety, order, the social good, and so on; that is, if you take the American desire to bear arms as motivated by anything different, anthropologically speaking, from the Kosovar desire in full evidence here.

Saturday Sports, #3

Tick-Tack. Now some play this Game with Toots, Boveries, and Flyers; Toots is, when you fill up your Table at home and then there is required small throws; for if you get over with a Sice you have no benefit of Toots. Boveries is when you have a man in the eleventh point of your own Tables, and another in the same point of your Adversaries directly answering. Flyers is, when you bring a man round the Tables before your Adversary hath got over his first Table, to the effecting of which is required very high throwing of your side, and very low throwing of his.

Ketch-Dolt. At Ketch-Dolt the first throws and lays down from the heap of men without the Tables, what is thrown at it may be Sice Deuce, if the other throw either Sice or Deuce, and draw them not from his Adversaries Tables to the same point in his own, but takes them from the heap, and lays the Ace down, he is dolted & loseth the Game, or if he but touch a man of the heap and then recall himself, the loss is the same. Some by frequent practice will never be Dolted, and then they strive who shall fill up their Tables first; which done he that bears them off first hath one the game. And so much for play within the Tables.

--From Charles Cotton, The compleat gamester: or, Instructions how to play at billiards, trucks, bowls, and chess Together with all manner of usual and most gentile games either on cards or dice. To which is added, the arts and mysteries of riding, racing, archery, and cock-fighting, London: printed for Henry Brome at the Gun at the west-end of St. Pauls, 1676.

Saturday Sports, #2

All natural blessings are either mental or physical, and there is no other category of blessing. Now it is abundantly clear to everyone that athletes have never even dreamed of mental blessings. To begin with, they are so deficient in reasoning powers that they do not even know whether they have a brain. Always gorging themselves on flesh and blood, they keep their brains soaked in so much filth that they are unable to think accurately and are as mindless as dumb animals.

Perhaps it will be claimed that athletes achieve some of the physical blessings. Will they claim the most important blessing of all: health? You will find no one in a more treacherous physical condition... Their sleep is also immoderate. When normal people have ended their work and are hungry, athletes are just getting up from their naps. In fact, their lives are like those of pigs, except that pigs do not overexert or force feed themselves...

I think that it has become abundantly clear that the practice of athletics has no utility in the real business of life. You would further learn that there is nothing worth mention in such practice if I tell you the myth some talented man put into words. It goes like this: if Zeus decided that all the animals should live in harmony and partnership, and the herald invited to Olympia not only men but also animals to compete in the stadium, I think that no man would be crowned. In the dolichos the horse will be the best, the stadion will belong to the hare, and the gazelle will be first in the diaulos. Wretched men, nimble experts, none of you would be counted in the footraces. Nor would any of you descendants of Herakles be stronger than the elephant or the lion. I think that the bull would be crowned in the pyx and the donkey would, if he decided to enter, win the kicking crown...

This myth shows quite nicely that athletic strength does not reside in human training. And yet, if athletes cannot be better than animals in strength, what other blessing do they share in?

Perhaps someone will say that they have a blessing in the pleasure of their bodies. But how can they derive any pleasure from their bodies if during their athletic years they are in constant pain and suffering, not only because of their exercises but also because of their forced feedings? And when they reach the age of retirement, their bodies are essentially if not completely crippled.

Are athletes perhaps to be worshipped like kings because they have large incomes? Yet they are all in debt, not only during the time they are competing but also after retirement.

--Galen, Exhortation for Medicine 9-14; A 215.

Is Swimming Natural?

[T]hat man should swim naturally, because we observe it is no lesson unto other animals, we cannot well conclude; for other animals swim in the same manner as they go, and need no other way of motion for natation in the water, then for progression upon the land. And this is true whether they move per latera, that is, two legs of one side together, which is Tollutation or ambling; or per diametrum, lifting one foot before, and the crossfoot behind, which is succussation or trotting; or whether per frontem or quadratum, as Scaliger terms it, upon a square base, the legs of both sides moving together, as Frogs and salient animals, which is properly called leaping. For by these motions they are able to support and impell themselves in the water, without alteration in the stroak of their legs, or position of their bodies.

But with man it is performed otherwise: for in regard of site he alters his naturall posture and swimeth prone, whereas he walketh erect. Again, in progression the arms move parallell to the legs, and the arms and legs unto each other, but in natation they intersect and make all sorts of Angles. And lastly, in progressive motion, the arms and legs do move successively, but in natation both together, all which aptly to peform, and so as to support and advance the body, is a point of Art, and such as some in their young and docile years could never attain. But although it be acquired by art, yet is there somewhat more of nature in it then we observe in other habits, nor will it strictly fall under that definition, for once obtained, it is not to be removed; nor is there any who from disuse ever yet forget it.

*

Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, London, 1658.

Illustration from J. Frost, Scientific Swimming; being a Series of Practical Instructions, on an Original and Progressive Plan, by which the Art of Swimming May Be readily Attained, with every Advantage of Power in the Water, London, 1816.

(Saturday Sports, #1)