Bread and Circus

Someone remarked a couple of decades ago that the United States represents the first entertainment culture since the fall of the Roman Empire.  We’re familiar with the way the Romans looted the empire in order to provide free grain for the inhabitants of the capital city, offering them plenty of increasingly bloody entertainment into the bargain.  “Bread and circus” was the catchphrase, and the assumption was that if they were fed and entertained they wouldn’t be inclined to revolt.  If the people loved to see exotic animals slaughtered, bring them in from Africa.  If they wanted to watch people die, bring in the gladiators, or have condemned criminals executed in public, sometimes by large, hungry predators.  (I understand it’s an open question whether Christians were actually killed in the Roman Coliseum as they were elsewhere in the empire.)

So how does our society compare with that one?  About a year ago, it seems the most popular of all television shows was WWF wrestling, and now I notice that “extreme cagefighting” is quite prominent, not to mention boxing.  I recently saw some footage of Mohammed Ali; he has paid the price.  Oh, yes, and remember when “reality TV” meant people on stage baiting their relatives or other acquaintances, at which point the latter would come onto the stage and start a major fistfight?

I recall taking a date to the midget auto races.  (We were nothing if not pure class on our dates).  Soon the young lady informed me that she was bored out of her skull.  Then the left front wheel of one car ran up onto the right rear wheel of another, causing the first car to flip upside down on an embankment.  My concern was that those phony headrests on the midgets were for appearance only, since they only came up to the middle of the drivers’ backs, so I was sure the driver had a broken neck or worse.  I asked my date whether she was finally happy, and she answered enthusiastically that she was.  (The driver walked away without major injuries.  I don’t recall her reaction to that.)

Decades back we were already deploring sex and violence on television, and with the advance in special effects techniques things have only worsened, at least in the case of violence.  A sure-fire formula for a successful film is non-stop violent action with some sleazy sex thrown in for good measure.  Mention a beautiful, poetic film such as Babette’s Feast or Love Comes Softly and see what kind of response you get.  People don’t even bother to say, “Bo-ring” anymore.  They just look at you as if you had brought a skunk into the room.

Sports play a major role in our entertainment culture.  Leaving aside the “enforcer” in hockey matches, whose role is to start fights to keep the customers stimulated enough to return to their hotel rooms and trash them, we still have sportscasters who praise players to the skies for engaging in “smash-mouth football,” and last weekend there was a series of short videos of college players in boxing poses, feinting blows at the camera.  A few years ago a lot of effusive praise was heaped upon a former player at a Texas school for orphans who had been especially proficient at a move taught by his coach that involved catching an opponent under his chin with one’s helmet and jerking it up sharply.  This was guaranteed to knock the opponent out cold.

And then there are the salaries.  In case anyone doesn’t think this is, after all, an entertainment culture, how about a baseball team that offers a player who goes one-for-three upwards of 27 million dollars per year on a five-year contract, and he and his agent have to think it over?  Let’s face it; we pay for what we value the most, and just this morning I heard people moaning about public school teachers who receive salaries in the mid five figures.  I mean, these sports stars’ salaries are in eight figures.  Then there are those rock stars with the mind of a fern and the morals of an alleycat who make 130 million dollars a year.

Well, what about the bread aspect?  Did you see the woman who was interviewed after Barack Obama’s victory was announced, who was overjoyed because she thought all her living expenses would now be paid for by the government?  Richard Cochrane calls that “salvation without effort.”  Yes, Virginia, there are plenty of people who would love to have a socialist government installed, but who would never, ever consider the cost of it.  After all, there must be someone else out there who will foot the bill, right?  The Roman Empire found a source of bread and circus outside Rome.

And then they paid the price when those barbarians came crashing in and spoiled the party.  We hypocrites had better take a lesson here or we may repeat it.

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