Due to our unfortunate involvement in the Middle Eastern wars we have become familiar with CTE, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Soldiers exposed to heavy blasts and explosions often suffer serious concussions. They may survive the hit but the trauma may leave them with a damaged brain involving changes in some biochemical processes that will slowly but surely lead to deterioration of brain functions. As the adjective “chronic” suggests the condition is irreversible and, so far, incurable. The symptoms are devastating but may not appear until years after the incident.
Needless to say, our soldiers did not deliberately expose themselves to the danger of slowly losing their minds. They are heros whom we sent out to fight in defense of our national interests. Most of us, of course, stay home. There is a bumper sticker that says “We support our troops.” It is probably too lukewarm a tribute when you consider what could happen to our troops years later as a result of brain damage incurred in the line of duty.
There is another part to the CTE story. The victims in this story are also afflicted with CTE but they are not heros fighting for anybody’s country. They are merely athletes, mostly football players, strong, skillful, admired, and often well paid men. But while the soldier in the field is wounded in the service of his country many, if not most football players suffer equally serious concussions with the same symptoms and consequences while, and this sounds absurd to me, while playing with a ball! It is called a game, but it looks more like the fight-to-the-death gladiatorial games the ancient Romans were fond of.
To the fans, of course, football is not trivial at all. Football games are watched and cheered by thousands, sometimes millions. And so, although it is more like a business, it is also still a game and a spectators’ pastime which has taken on the aura of a national, even patriotic, ritual. There is a Greek word, eisegesis (as opposed to exegesis), used by textual scholars to characterise interpretations that introduce the interpreter’s own ideas beyond what the text says. Applied to the issue of football, we have on the one side, simply stated, a ball game, albeit a dangerous one. On the other side we have the fans who interpret the same set of circumstances as a patriotic ritual, something that merits flags and national anthems.
My prediction is that the game will go on, football forever, ignoring the threat of encephalopathy. We will manage to convince ourselves that it cannot by as serious as all that. We spectators do not risk anything. The players do. Just as we do not go to war, soldiers do. Football is a well established tradition and we will continue to rely on our own interpretations of what it means and what it is good for. We may be dealing with a third kind of CTE which I would call Continuing Traditional Eisegesis.
The sad part is that even school boys and college students are often encouraged to play this macho “sport” of football. Is it worth the risk? Or is it time for “Friday Night Lights Out” as someone suggested in a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times (2/8/18). My guess, though, is that this will go on, encephalopathy or no encephalopathy. Unless, perhaps, mothers of sons start a protest movement.
PS. Women are known to do such things.
(c)2018 by Herbert H. Hoffman
Picture credits: brain stock photo