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January 30, 2011 Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, The Empire Bowl is Super!
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: If
you live in the vicinity of Santa Fe, I’ll be in your neighborhood this
week. I’m appearing on stage at a Lannan Foundation-sponsored series of
readings and conversations at the Lensic Performing Arts Center on
Wednesday, February 2nd at 7pm. I’ll read and then converse with Jeremy
Scahill, author of the groundbreaking book
Blackwater. Check the event out by clicking
here. To order tickets,
click here or call (505) 988-1234. Tom]
My father took me to Ebbets Field for my first football game -- in the snow -- in perhaps 1950. The Brooklyn Brooks of the old American Football League were playing some team I no longer remember. In fact, I have only the haziest memory of that moment. Still, I was hooked. The Brooks weren’t long for this planet, but football's New York Giants and baseball's Brooklyn Dodgers pretty much sum up my childhood fantasy world. (My Dad came from Brooklyn, I lived in Manhattan, and in the 1950s, sports still had a neighborhood quality to it, which is undoubtedly why, to this day, events like the Super Bowl have no meaning to me once New York teams are no longer involved.) Of course, between the 1950s and today, between the Brooklyn Brooks and the New York Jets, an awful lot has changed, especially the nature of spectatorship itself and the “menu” available. Sunday afternoon football, Sunday night football, Monday night football, Thursday night football in a preseason, season, and post-season that stretches from the dog days of summer to deepest winter, from one year to the next. That’s the juggernaut of professional football today -- and that, of course, is just the beginning of modern spectatorship. It’s hardly news that we’ve become a spectator society. At home, on the street, in a restaurant, in a meeting -- no matter where, in fact -- we can hardly bear to stop looking at one screen or another. Never has the idea of “bread and circuses” (or perhaps “ads and circuses”) been so all-encompassing. After all, what were the ten days of the Tucson massacre and its aftermath but a spectator event on a gargantuan scale, something that came perilously close to entertainment while masquerading piously as “national grieving”? It’s hard even to grasp what spectatorship means when it can command our attention, our lives, 24/7 and still be called “the news.” Consider it less than an irony that media outfits, discovering an event that will glue us to the screen for days, pour resources into it and refer to that act using the football term “flooding the zone.” Why, then, should we be surprised that the latest, sexiest American wonder weapon is a plane that can be “piloted” from thousands of miles away, turning even war-fighters into spectators with video screens and joy sticks? Consider, then, the nature of that ultimate American spectacle, the Super Bowl, as seen through the eyes of TomDispatch Jock Culture correspondent Robert Lipsyte, whose memoir An Accidental Sportswriter will be heading our way in May. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast video interview in which Lipsyte discusses what makes football all-American, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom You Must Watch the Empire Bowl |
