A Phantasm of Camouflaged Violence

Time to change our national programming

Yes, I’ll admit it: I’m a sports fan. This past Sunday, I kicked back to watch a couple of football games. This whole month is a “salute to service,” a gushing tribute to U.S. troops and veterans by the NFL. As a veteran myself, I should relish this “salute” to my service, except the hoopla turns me off. Troops in uniform shouldn’t be on the field at NFL games. They shouldn’t be running out with the players while waving American flags like so many cheerleaders and team mascots. But this is the reality today. The NFL has teamed with the Pentagon to make sports inseparable from the military, and vice-versa. It’s been going on now for two decades and each year the hoopla gets a bit more over the top—insidiously so.

It’s not just the NFL, of course. My NHL (ice hockey) team auctions off camouflage jerseys signed by the players. Speaking of camouflage, look at football teams on the sidelines, geared up with camouflage caps with coaches wearing military brown clothing. Guess what? All this gear is available to fans to purchase. Surprise!

Only $100. But, if you act now, you can save 30% at NFLSHOP.com. Show your fighting spirit!

Even with the omnipresent blending of sports with the military, however, recruitment remains down in the U.S. Army. Goals aren’t being met. How long before we start hearing more urgent calls for a revival of a military draft? Perhaps NFL players should be drafted first and en masse? That’s a “salute to service” that would show some commitment.

Violence is down in the NFL, as in violent hits, which more frequently draw flags for “unnecessary roughness.” Meanwhile, violence during the commercial breaks is trending upwards. Seriously, I can’t count the number of guns I saw, often aimed at people. Pistols, assault rifles, sniper rifles and cross hairs, all frequently depicted in promos for shows like CSI and its various offshoots. My wife describes these shows as “models with guns.” Violence is linked to attractive men and women wielding all manner of guns in quick cuts. And we wonder why there are so many mass shootings in America.

I find my mind becoming immured by it all, confined within a gun-toting fantasy world featuring actor-models and sports stars decked out in camouflage, perhaps with a few exploding cars thrown in for atmosphere.

A phantasm of “acceptable” violence is what I’m presented with on my screen. What I’m rarely presented with is the all-too-real and vicious violence occurring in places like Gaza, Syria, Ukraine, Somalia, and similar war zones. Best not to look at these too closely; in fact, best not to look at all. Best to focus on games and game-like gun shows. Who needs real-life madness, am I right?

Here, I must admit, I’m repeating myself. In November 2010, I wrote a piece for Huff Post: “NFL Too Violent? Beware the Commercials.” Here’s most of what I wrote then. Nothing’s really changed, except for even more pro-military boosterism linked to U.S. sporting events:

Watching a recent [NFL] game on Sunday afternoon, I spied advertisements for network crime dramas featuring deadly weapons and bloodied corpses along with bone-crunching elbows to the face; Hollywood movie trailers featuring cataclysmic explosions and mass death; and (my favorite) "Call of Duty: Black Ops," a combat video game in which ordinary Americans are immersed in urban warfare, firing assault rifles and RPGs at unseen enemies while dressed in pant suits or coat-and-tie. In its rousing finale, an entire city block gets napalmed. I guess my video warfighting neighbors had to destroy the virtual village to save it.

Complaining about violence on TV is like shooting fish in a barrel, but there's more going on here than you might think. Commercials, of course, offer intense snippets of violence; they're also largely context-free. Since there's little context to the violence, they hit harder than the same scenes in a full-length feature [film]. Watching violent commercial after violent commercial is a little like trying to understand NFL games by viewing only the most violent hits of the week.

At the exact time the NFL is trying to outlaw violent hits, TV commercials - with their smash-mouth action - are institutionalizing them, only in different and more disturbing forms. Indeed, TV ads are enticing us to tune in to shows, go see movies, buy video games precisely by showing us ever more extreme examples of violence.

Yet there's another irony here. Even as advertisers in the mainstream media seek to expand the brutality of various representations of reality, the mainstream media itself continues to sanitize our all-too-violent real wars.

It's painfully ironic that as we sanitize war and fight to bound the violence of NFL games, TV commercials push those boundaries to their limits, and beyond. Besides lite beer and big trucks, these commercials are selling us a violent world in which we're alternately hapless victims and plucky resisters. We're alternately suspended in fear and ready to rumble. Even those ubiquitous Viagra ads play a role: We're alternately impotent and omnipotent. Small wonder that action-driven and flag-waving military recruitment ads are usually shoehorned into the mix.

Violence in the NFL is controllable; it's a game, after all, with rules and referees. But life is not a game, and the violence in our commercial media is not so easily controlled, especially when so many of the referees seem determined alternately to scare us and recruit us.

Well, at least Viagra commercials are gone (expired patent rights).

Ah, America. Love it or leave it. Or change the channel.

Or, dare I say, change our national programming?