I can't formulate a charitable non-trivial interpretation of what you wrote or what Chomsky said. Perhaps you can help. Does sports actually dull the collective mind? Controversial, but possible. Is sports produced, marketed, and televised _because_ it serves (or is believed to serve) this function? That seems implausible.
-- Luke
^^^^^
CB: About 20 years ago , even though I am a sports fan, I formulated "_spectator_ sports are the opium of the American ,_male_ masses ". You know because of the stereotype of couch potatoes drinking beer on Sunday , the traditional church day, ritually watching football on television, etc. Spectator rather than actually playing because playing is active and spectating is passive. All a spectator can do is wish and hope, and can't actually impact the result of the game, sort of praying. And it sort of soaks up getting together in large crowds that would be a rudimentary aspect of mass political activism and feeling mass power directly. I guess specifically it's not just all spectating, but especifically television watching or radio, because in a stadium there is a large crowd where mass strength can be felt, whereas with television the crowd is dispersed, removing any sense of mass, crowd power.
The idea would not be that this whole scene was concocted by the ruling class to opiate the masses. Rather, it would be like religion , which arose spontaneously , on its own, but once in existence has had a side effect that is helpful to the ruling class, and so all the ruling class has to do is nurture and nudge it and defend it in small ways. Similarly , with modern televised sports, it was not created by the ruling class to carry out a mind dulling, political crowd dispersing function, but once they saw the phenomenon, they didn't mind nurturing it for these depoliticizing side effects, because afterall, the entertainment industry does make money off the whole set up anyway.
I don't know if Joanna agrees with this, but this has been my thought over the years. I do sports spectate myself, still, even sitting around drinkng beer on a couch.
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