#39, January 20, 2004

The Political Bowl

During the battle for the presidency in November 2000, many pundits declared that the election was like an American football contest. Vice-President Gore, they told us, had faced 4^th-and-long on several occasions and had converted each time, but would he be able to do so again?

When Governor Bush had control of the ball, he was described moving it down the field deploying his Friday-Night-Lights-inspired Texan offense. On the one-yard line, however, he came up against the Boies-ian defense, seemingly designed by a Tampa Bay coach, not just defending the goal line, but going after the ball to force a fumble or interception.

The lawyers were described in their huddles working out their plays for the various judges; they tried different kinds of running and passing patterns to get the ball into that end zone, so that they might win their trophy –twenty-five elusive Electoral College votes.

When all these maneuvers failed, the Bush team planned its end-run around the defense, planting the Florida Legislature, with its 2/3rds Republican majority, firmly in the end zone and getting ready to send them a “Hail Mary.” These Republicans apparently knew how to catch.

Some wags even suggested that the Electoral College should field its own football team so we wouldn’t have to listen to all this football-speak anymore.

All such talk ended, of course, when the Supreme Court zebras stepped in to nullify all the plays and declare George W. Bush the victor. From their position as final arbiters (using all the instant replay technology available to them) they were able to show that it was no longer how you played the game that mattered, it was rather how many judges your party had managed to appoint.

With all this Sunday afternoon football talk, however, there was one football analogy that that the pundits didn’t draw on. Maybe they should have done so. But to do so, they would have needed a comparative historical perspective on the game of football, a perspective seldom evidenced among American journalists.

One of the fundamental features of American Football, which distinguishes it from Rugby Football, out of which it developed, is the manner in which players are refereed or policed. The self-serving assumption that English gentlemen brought to the game of rugby was that the referee was almost superfluous. Honorable gentlemen would police themselves and refrain from illegal acts, they claimed. Games could be free flowing, and a referee, when needed, would only have to keep the score or restart the game if the ball went out of play. He could even be an old man wandering around the field 30 yards away from the play.

People who weren’t gentlemen, however, could not be trusted to police themselves. In a potentially dangerous game like rugby it was considered almost unthinkable for members of the working class to participate in the sport. Were they to do so, it was imagined, games would almost inevitably turn into brawls. And if a referee failed to keep up with the game, the gentlemen believed, the worker-athlete would do his utmost to lay out and otherwise injure one of his opponents.

Consequently, Rugby League was created for such people, controlled and run by members of the business classes but played by professionals, or workers (as portrayed so beautifully by the recently deceased Richard Harris and the cast in the film, “This Sporting Life”). The gentlemen who controlled rugby league increased the number of referees and declared that every time the ball touched the ground the game would be stopped and players returned to their positions before the game recommenced. In this way, the possibilities that “mauls” and “rucks” (sites of gouging and other unseen acts of violence) might occur would be minimized, and referees would be better able to maintain their authority.

Now if working-class Britons often felt insulted by their superiors’ assumptions, elite Americans turned such negative characterizations on their head, arguing that they were also less restrained and repressed than English gentlemen. At a time when people like Theodore Roosevelt were decrying the “closing of the frontier” because it might make Americans too “feminized”, games like football were extolled for their contributions to restoring American masculinity.

So the similar officiating traditions would be applied in American football as in Rugby League. But if professionals in England continued to play with multiple referees only reluctantly, American college players almost reveled in their need to be refereed. What started off with one old gentleman-referee huffing and puffing as he ran after the ball turned into the most officiated game in human history.

Such intense officiating has spawned the widespread assumption that an infringement is only an infringement if it is detected by an official. Holding not seen by the referee, or a late hit that doesn’t result in a penalty, is a good play. An injury inflicted on an opposing player, one that causes the player to miss the rest of the season, even if it is a premeditated act for which there might be legal recourse, is also an excellent play. No defensive lineman who decided not to hit a quarterback because it might hurt the opposing star would ever have his contract renewed. In American football, self-restraint has almost been legislated out of existence.

This footballing mindset now seems to pervade American society. Speeding, for example, is no longer illegal; it is only subject to a fine if a trooper, who is busily racial profiling on the side of the road, happens to pull you over. The orange traffic signal is not a directive to slow down so that you may stop; it is a reminder that you need to speed up lest you have to stop at a red light. A red light itself doesn’t mean stop unless it has been red for several seconds, depending of course on whether one is driving an SUV or just a regular sedan.

Cutting to American politics we see the same rules apply. Political parties endeavor to find loopholes in the laws that apply to fundraising so that they can get around any obstacles that stand in their way. If there are limits placed on particular kinds of funding, then the parties only need to find new ways to get their money.

For example, with all the mechanisms put in place during the early 20^th century to disenfranchise African Americans and the poor, one might imagine that the objective would now be to ensure that everyone gets to vote so that democracy might prevail. Instead, in the mould of football culture, the objective is to make it as easy as possible for people who are registered for one’s own party to cast their ballots, and as difficult as possible for everybody else.

And, during the last presidential election, the state of Florida, harboring many of the shrines of college football, reflected this approach to political culture. It was not necessary to ensure that ballots could be as easily cast in a poor district as in a rich one. It was OK to fill in numbers on absentee ballots because there would not be any “legislative remedy” for this “illegal” activity. It was fine to set up a police checkpoint near a polling station, because no one would be able to say for sure that it was there to intimidate African-American voters.

Republicans said that the election process needed to end immediately, after they had declared George W. Bush the winner, because the indecision was beginning to make the United States look ridiculous in the eyes of foreigners. Concerned that foreigners were making jokes that Florida was like a “Banana Republic,” they argued that election officials needed to certify the vote and record the score as soon as possible. What they missed was that foreigners associated the process of certification and disenfranchisement of voters with their sense that Florida was much less than a democracy.

It is the very football mentality, where the rules only apply if they can be enforced, that perturbs people around the world about political culture in the United States. For, they reason, if people who believe in this “win-at-any-cost” ethos lead the “Free World”, then international law itself will also be “up for grabs.”

Not altogether surprisingly, this has proved to be the case ever since the 2000 election. The new American quarterback, once again moving his country down the field towards the goal line, has now even managed to persuade the officials – the press, the courts, the legislators – to turn a blind eye to his infringements. The rule book, that once-revered Constitution with its Bill of Rights, no longer counts for much when it can be replaced by what seems to be an exciting play book, full of dramatic surgical blitzes and tax breaks for the wealthy.

© Rob Gregg, 2004