When Collapse Becomes Programming
Sports, politics, and democracy all running on the same broadcast loop.
I watched a trainwreck yesterday in the Ravens game. Multiple Pro Bowlers are injured, and the team unraveling from the serpent’s head down to its tail. It was professional sport redefined as professional entertainment, and even though the law may call it that, fans know the difference. The stakes aren’t life and death. Generations have sat in front of their televisions watching sporting disasters unfold: players stretchered off, dynasties collapsing, cities groaning in disbelief.
It comes with the territory.
In fact, the NFL once attempted to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that the entire league is not about competition at all, but rather that its 32 teams should be viewed as a single economic entity, a unified entertainment product. The case, American Needle v. NFL1, turned on whether selling logos and jerseys through a single licensee constituted collaboration or collusion. The NFL’s lawyers said the game itself requires cooperation first and rivalry second. Call it collaboration dressed up as competition.
And if you squint, it is the blueprint for more than just sports these days.
Because our increasingly televised world has expanded the stage far beyond football fields, we don’t just watch sports fall apart. We now watch democracy wobble, mobs storm government halls, and climate disasters roll in live. And in the chorus of voices yelling about a stolen election, the spectacle feels familiar, you know, just another Sunday meltdown, except this one can’t be shrugged off before kickoff next week.
Television is the invention that defined life after the Second World War. Before that, visual media were advancing steadily with the advent of daguerreotypes in the 19th century and Hollywood’s machinery in the 20th. By mid-century, television had become the shrine of the living room. It brought Kennedy’s funeral into suburban parlors, civil rights marches into segregated households, and presidential scandals into dinner conversations. The modern imagination became wired to expect history not just to happen, but to be seen.
That conditioning lingers. Sports and politics alike are spectacles with scripts we can’t always predict, but once they erupt with an injury, an invasion, or an impeachment, then they are replayed with the rhythm of prime-time drama. The unexpected becomes part of the program. The NFL may have lost its case, but it wasn’t wrong about one thing: spectacle requires collaboration. The production line runs smoother when we all agree on where to point the cameras.
Perhaps it’s the desensitization of the human brain to live through train wrecks that defines our era. Every collision broadcast, every crack in the foundation replayed, every scandal clipped and shared, until the “mean world” begins to feel like the only world. And yet, empirical data keep whispering that communities still gather, neighbors still care, people still build.
There’s always the option to turn it off, change the channel, or open a book. The real question is whether we can still tell the difference between what’s entertainment, what’s history, and what’s the fragile scaffolding of democracy itself.
Because, like it or not, democracy is being televised and streamed.
Oyez. American Needle, Inc. v. National Football League, 560 U.S. 183 (2010). No. 08-661. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2009/08-661
I am mystified (not really) that people becomes so emotionally attached to something in which it's participants are overpaid professionals. Be it European football, South American foosbal, American Soccer, or American football, basketball or baseball.
Look at you have a group of overpaid specialist slugging it out in a coliseum, wearing a uniform that does not represent the place of their origin, but that of a corporation, a franchise.
Imagine McDonald's, Wendy's, Big Boy, Burger King, in and Out all competing and people getting all emotional over who is going to win, or teams of lawyers.
In my neck of the woods, there is a big city which has a football franchise, a baseball franchise, two basketball franchises (male and female) a soccer franchise and an Ice hockey franchise, and not one of the players is from this area, much less the state,and they recently had a big celebration for a baseball player who left the local franchise for another, retired and was voted into the the baseball hall of fame, and he isn't even from this country, and still has trouble speaking English.
Pure insanity.
Still the same people who would cheer gladiators in the coliseum, or delight in watching lions and tigers tear up victims
War and sports, the best argument against evolution.
We delight in competition, the bloodier the better, but with cooperation well that is a meh.
I personally find it difficult to get excited over a bunch of overpaid professionals, who are recruited from all of the nation and the world I can't identify with them, or the name of their team.
The European union was distressed at the destructiveness of football riots, and paid for a study as to the cause.
Here is what they found. That men find their identity in a team , be it local or national, and when that team loses, their testosterone plummets, and the way that they rebuild their testosterone is through violence, so what they lost on the field, is made up for on the streets.
While at it, might that also be the motivating force behind shooters and assasination attempts.
I am old enough to remember the Columbine shooting. It was carried out by kids who called themselves the trench coat mafia. they were the victims of bullying in school, and in truth if you look at school shootings you see nothing but victims, the victims of gun violence and the victims of bullying.
Except that this culture only focuses on the guns and the victims of gun violence. we don't even discuss aloud the bully's and bullying.
And there is good reason for that, we are a society built on bullying, from the planter who hires an overseer to bully his slaves, to the settler and politician who uses the cavalry to bully the natives whose land that lust for, to the rail road baron, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and today the Larry Ellisons, Jeff Bezo's, Zuckerbergs, Jobs, Cooks, Musks and Trumps.
And it is just not people it is nations. no wonder the bully is never held to account, nor blamed