Electoral politics as sport
OVER THE NEXT three weeks, America will be in thrall to its cult of masculinity. Weekends will be defined by the NFL playoffs, culminating in the Super Bowl Feb. 3. What remains of the nation's attention, after football, will be seized by presidential politics, leading up to the decisive primaries on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5. The first process is a celebration of a peculiar notion of manliness, while the second is a prisoner of it.
It does not take an anthropologist to understand that professional football occupies its central place in the American imagination as a sublimation of violence. That may be its main virtue. Indeed, games in which males draw up lines on fields and then contest those lines with balls date to the dawn of history, when such activities took the place of actual combat. Struggles between tribes were ritualized with primitive games, sometimes to the death. The first balls may have been decapitated heads.
Our bullet-shaped pigskin amounts to moral progress, but the unconscious appeal of such sport still consists in its character as regulated mayhem. The fact that the symbols of the National Football League amount to self-parody - the martial and animal names of teams, outsized body armor, fight songs, victory dances, rhetoric like "bomb" and "blitz" - does not take away from their character as aggrandizements of the warrior ethos.
In America, football is a last preserve of "manhood." Boys embrace it as a rare rite of passage that is not generally available to girls, and men value it, both as players and spectators, as one remaining source of gender bonding that has withstood the pressures of the feminist revolution.
Indeed, football players remain the beau ideal for girls who hope only to be some guy's trophy. And football, with its culture of unashamed physicality, butt slapping, and hugging, offers release from the otherwise too-threatening impulses of the homoerotic.
Unlike baseball, where patience and deftness reign supreme, or basketball, where the graceful feint outscores the brutal confrontation every time, football is all about hitting and taking down. It celebrates virility in its crudest form, with brawn as the ground of excellence. All of this is at the service of a violence that can be openly enjoyed because, in the end, no one dies and, with luck, no one is really hurt.
But violence is uniquely the point of this game, and it reveals a lot about the United States both that no event competes with the Super Bowl as a festival of national cohesion, and that no other nation has "American football" (as opposed to profoundly non-violent soccer) at the center of culture.
Electoral politics comes to climax in this same period, but in this primary season politics does not so much parody the cult of manliness, as try to break free from it. The stakes in the race for US president are mortal, and people will die, and will get hurt - perhaps by the hundreds of thousands - if the wrong runner wins. Candidates reveal themselves, and their idea of the voting public, by what they emphasize.
In this uncertain time, Americans are thought to be wanting "toughness" in their leader, above all. Belligerence, readiness for war, contempt for tribal aliens (aka immigrants), cruelty toward miscreants, intolerance of nuance - such are the professed virtues of candidates. But the cult of virility is reduced to the absurd by the clack of television and radio pundits - mostly, but not entirely, male - who sustain a testosterone-fed feedback loop around which violence cycles both as America's greatest threat and best solution.
John McCain's ascendancy slides along the grooves of this preoccupation because his warrior credentials - and impulses - are unimpeachable. Mitt Romney is Clark Kent, saving us from migrant workers. Mike Huckabee began to win by donning the costume of a hunter, flourishing a gun. Rudy Giuliani is the cop who will do whatever it takes, whatever "it" is. Republicans instinctively bang the manhood drum, and if that is the music America wants, Republicans cannot lose.
The Democratic problem is that the cult of masculinity is always reactionary, and no liberal Democrat can authentically indulge it. Hillary Clinton thwarts the manliness ethos just by being a woman, even if obliged to pass its test. John Edwards features the visceral rage of the warrior class, while defining it as working class. Barack Obama politely declines to play the game, which may, in this season, be the real toughness.
All of which is to say, in both contexts, "Go Patriots."
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. 