Reminder: The entertainment-military fusion will destroy us all

The end of the NFL season is upon us, and I’d like to remind everyone that the military and the NFL are in cahoots and we’re all going to be dumber for it.

An overview: The league gives $300 to military charities for every point scored during 32 designated “Salute to Service” games in November (for a total donation thus far of $228,900). The NFL says it donated $800,000 in all last year.

As Drew Magary notes, for that small sum, the NFL gets to lease the goodwill and critic-proofing armor of the American military:

Any time the NFL slaps a camo ribbon on their unis, any time Fox cuts to a bunch of happy veterans watching a Thanksgiving Day game from the armpit of Afghanistan, that’s the league doing its best to imbue itself with moral authority on a national scale. It helps portray the league as some kind of noble civic endeavor when it’s actually just an entertainment venture and moneymaking apparatus designed to rake in billions of dollars and fuck your town out of stadium money … That $800,000 helps buy the American flag the Falcons and other teams get to hide behind any time you start to wonder if the league really does have the public’s interests at heart.

The military gets to promote itself to young military age men, but the true benefit of this symbiosis is that only its Sunday best is shown. The military becomes like an official priest at the ceremonies. Tell me those massive flags, jet flyovers and veterans returning home to children are not evocative of those Chinese Great Leader rallies, and I’ll tell you that you’re lying.

This occurs in other sports as well. An NBA commercial states that soldiers are “protecting our country, they’re protecting the world, and, you know, obviously we wouldn’t have freedom without them.” The first pitch of the World Series occurs in the prescence of three Medal of Honor winners. Baseball teams wear camo on the field.

Movies, too, often become “slickly produced feature length advertisements for the U.S. military,” and there are many young gamers who think of Modern Warfare as something done by dual-wielding superhuman ninjas.

The result of all this, as Salon’s Justin Doolittle notes, as it that the

“unanimous, entirely uncritical appreciation for the military, and the irrational belief that we owe gratitude to the troops for virtually everything we cherish in life, up to and including freedom itself, is very dangerous for our intellectual culture. It stifles any potential for rational, coherent discussion on these matters. It makes us, free citizens of a constitutional society, meek and excessively obeisant.”

All this makes the very real and complicated struggles of the military something very abstract, holy and unimpeachable. Soldiers I know are often wary of all this, honored but wondering what exactly is going on, as if the wedding is for someone else.

The military experience is complicated, but complicated doesn’t sell. The worst part is that debate is stifled and that soldiers may not get the help they need because the public is placated by the hollow support they currently get. The next worst part is that corporations can use the military’s image to make themselves part of the public sphere:

Annualized, NFL stadium subsidies and tax favors add up to perhaps $1 billion. So the NFL took $1 billion from the public, then sought praise for giving back $440,000—less than a tenth of 1 percent.

One is left with the impression that everything here, all around this issue, is disgusting.