No doubt, given the status of sport as a multi-billion dollar a year industry, capitalism is certainly a culprit: to continue to maintain that it's only game may be an act of faith requiring a hand on your heart. Even Bush's favorite pastime entails a past business venture: in 1989, Bush became co-owner of the Texas Rangers at $600,000; in selling his piece several years later he made off with $15 million. An even among athletic academics, to win is to cash in. Sociologists of sport and soccer enthusiasts Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman, in their treatise Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, speculate their favorite sport's success in terms of niche marketing akin to Starbucks--a purported "nationalization of diversity, multiplicity and variety."⁵ There isn't much else one can conclude: American sport culture is a matter of industry.

To Adorno, sport was not just industry; it was "the culture industry," an administered form of mass production known only to capitalism, positing culture to the consumer from above by way of conformity, contrary to culture's previous source from below by way of consciousness. No more personal creation, no more reflection, and worse, no more realm of possibility: all human activity is subject to limitations we hardly can hope to conceive of, let alone work beyond. While "hegemonic sports culture" remains the soccer dream of Markovits and Hellerman, it was the societal nightmare of Adorno. While we labor away at reified means, our goals and ends--like, say, the pennant, or perhaps a World Series ring--remain unconsidered, often ill-considered, and always irrational. Indeed, the culture industry itself in a way undergoes "sportification:"⁶ it reflects all that is barbaric in sport, while systematically doing away with all that sport provided for in the way of a vision of a better world. We'll never get beyond the status quo, Adorno says, if we keep running the bases: "While the act of repetition schools obedience, it absorbs the fateful damage in the perpetual potential for anxiety, and so it continues." ⁷

While nine-year-old innocents put bat to ball on the lawn of the most powerful man in the world, they certainly don't do so in a totalitarian terror-state; but nor do they do so in a vacuum. Adorno once wrote "No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb;" pertaining to sport, we might say that while no universal history leads from sport to barbarism, there is one leading from "the great lessons of team sports: following the rules, respecting other players, and supporting teammates" learnt in childhood;⁸ to the perpetuation of a world in which, as Herbert Marcuse was wrote, "anything goes: military dictatorship, plutocracy, government by gangs and rackets."⁹ Still, Marcuse, a lifelong colleague of Adorno's, was never the sporting fellow. Better to let those in the sports culture industry speak for themselves. "Nations that have produced good athletes have also been able to produce good soldiers," reads an editorial published in New Orleans magazine on the eve of Super Bowl No. XXXVI. "The infrastructure that can make great quarterbacks can also make good field commanders. The wealth and technology that makes domed stadiums, instant replay and satellite hookups can also manufacture stealth fighters, infrared viewing and unmanned spy planes."¹⁰ Makes sense that Super Bowl XXXVI slogan was, after all, "Heroes, Hope, and Homeland."

Next page: Only a game?