Bread and Circuses by Doug McVadon

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Every night I see the same thing, crutches, stretchers, ambulances poised nearby, just in case the combatants fall. After all, it’s football, every night the same thing, have you noticed?

It used to end on New Year’s Day, with the Orange Bowl at night. All the time I was growing up, Cotton and Sugar early, Rose in the afternoon and Orange at night, and if you stayed up for the end on the East Coast you’d be tired at work on January 2nd. But now it stretches on even past the twelfth day of Christmas, a new bowl game every night into the second week of January. And all will apparently get high ratings on TV.

Bread and Circuses, that’s what the Roman poet Juvenal said the people’s hopes had been reduced to. That was in about 100 A.D. Today we crowd into our own coliseums for our version: Beer and Football.

It’s what we LIVE for, according the commercials on television. Talk about opiate of the masses! Beer and TV and football are more pervasive than Protestantism today in America.

So the EMTs are on the sidelines for our modern day gladiators, who don’t get killed, well, not on PURPOSE anyway, and we think this is a good use of primetime, our time, our lives.

There will be arguments from football fans defending the mind-boggling volume of resources—people, money, time, electricity, gasoline, public safety personnel—that we collectively devote to the worship of Sports.

But I can’t help thinking, as I check what time the Fiesta Bowl starts, that maybe Juvenal was right.


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