Panem et circenses versus entertainment

Three days ago marked a big day for Denver and Seattle – the Broncos and the Seahawks will be the two teams to compete in the Super Bowl. While in Olympia listening to speeches on the importance of lobbying and how to, people watching the Seahawks game in the hotel lobby would cheer whenever the Hawks scored (and I also guess when they played a good defense…?). At one point, the hollering was so distracting that we assumed (and rightly so) that our team won. When I went on Facebook following the victory, my newsfeed was filled with a flurry of Seahawks (and Denver) victory posts.

However, not everybody in Washington or Colorado celebrated the wins. I noticed how some people compared the games to “distractions” or “panem et circenses.”

Some people may recognize the “panem” part from The Hunger Games – the country in which the story takes place. What does it mean? Bread. If you have read Mockingjay, you may already be familiar with this.

Let us translate panem et circenses. We already know that panem means bread. “Et” in Latin is “and.” “Circenses” stands for “circuses.” Bread and circuses. This phrase came from Juvenal, a Roman poet and satirist, in his work Satire X.

"Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses."

(I got this translation from Wikipedia. As with every translation, different versions abound, but this was the best I could find on the internet.)

These three words would not mean much unless one knows the meaning behind them. Panem et circenses is a superficial way of creating approval for public figures or policy. It is a means of distraction from the duties and concerns of the civilians.

Scenario: I am running for my school’s student government. However, my opponent knows more about the position and seems to be ahead of me, according to the polls. In order to increase my popularity, I throw on a big house party the weekend before voting begins. During election week, a researcher gathers some voters for interviews. She finds that the six out of ten people she interviewed that voted for me attended my party. Here were some standout quotes: “I don’t really know any of the candidates, so I voted for her because she was the only one I’ve met;” “My friend invited me to the party, and this friend of mine told me that I should vote for Katrina because she is more reliable than her opponent;” “Katrina seemed cool, so I decided to vote for her;” “She was kind enough to hold a party that was open for anyone to attend. We need more leaders like her who will be there for the people.”

Not that I would ever do that if I run for office.

*cough*

Panem et circenses feeds on:

1.       Ignorance of the issues at hand

2.       Unwillingness to look into details

3.       Feeling content with the first impressions of a given solution

What does this have to do with football or the Super Bowl?

If I am to guess correctly, those who claim that sports are panem et circenses are referring to its ability to draw people into the TV or arena (if you are lucky enough to get tickets) and get the spectators drawn in to every detail, especially as their team makes it further into the season.

Does this necessarily make it panem et circenses?

Simply, in my opinion, no.

I think this way because I tend to feel that sports are entertainment. Panem et circenses must contain entertainment in order to be so, but that doesn’t necessarily mean all entertainment is panem et circenses. (Think of how all rectangles are squares, but not all squares are rectangles.)

The more well-off a society becomes, the more time and resources the people can devote to entertainment and competition for fun.

The NFL was founded on August 20, 1920 (although it has roots from decades before).

Here are some tidbits of information that share some qualities of being symptoms of panem et circenses:

1.       While the NFL is not exactly a government entity, it is government-subsidized, which, of course, I am not a fan of. Nevertheless, it does not make it an anomaly seeing as how a lot of organizations depend the government for money.

It just makes sense afterall.

2.       Even though the NFL was not destroyed or abandoned during the Great Depression, it still did suffer a bit, but it fared better than other economic areas. Just as you hear people went to the movie theaters in droves to “escape the real world,” they must have done the same with sports. It reminds me of the concept of clowns. If a performer was to get injured or killed during a show, the circus “sends out the clowns” to distract the audience. There is a difference between forgetting your pain momentarily and being distracted to the point of completely disregarding a tragic event.

3.       During World War II, the games went on, despite the conflict. Some teams had to disband for the time being, and pretty much the rest desperately looked for players to sign (or re-sign) on. Because I am not an historian, I cannot tell you how this period of time affected those in the NFL or spectators or why it was not “important” enough to abandon during the war years.

My final points for why football is not panem et circenses have to deal with its relations with policymakers and endurance as an American tradition.

Because I am a libertarian and a drug legalization advocate, I had liked pages on Facebook and friends who are for marijuana legalization (at the very least) and are very happy that the two states that got into the Super Bowl are the ones who voted to legalize recreational marijuana in 2012 (and have just now started opening and giving out licenses to the corresponding businesses). Seeing as how this outcome from the games has sparked such conversations about drug policy shows that it is not complete distraction from society’s problems. Not to mention that you will not find many politicians who would openly endorse the legalization of recreational marijuana. I mean of course if you are against drugs being legalized, you could have seen the Seahawks and Broncos victories and the resulting weed jokes/discussions to be a kind of panem et circenses – “football causes societal disruption and makes people want to forget important matters and talk about and smoke the pot!”

Sure, there are a lot of crazy, obsessed football fans out there, but there are also areas of study, hobbies, and other forms of entertainment that draw in dedicated followers, if not sometimes bringing about unhealthy obsession bordering on the lines of worship. There can never be a “collective agreement” on what matters in the world – answers will vary and a lot of people will disagree with each other. Just as a politician can dismiss a sports fan for focusing their interests on the wrong topic, an environmentalist and a pro-peace activist can disagree on which matter is most important. For the most part, I would think that an average football fan has a general understanding of world matters…or at least on par with the general American (which is another story in itself). Even if football did not exist, because of the influence of mainstream media and other things, the fans who are already not aware of important happenings would have other interests that would keep them from keeping up with important matters.

Every fall, football season begins. It has become such a norm in American culture that you could almost totally ignore it if you wanted to. The Olympics, on the other hand, happen every four years (well, every two because of summer and winter). I guess an easier argument could be made that the Olympics are panem et circenses, unless you sincerely believe that it does help to encourage friendly competition and comradeship.

By writing about this, I have come to feel that comparing American football to panem et circenses downplays the more serious displays of it, such as the gladiator fights or the gruesome spectacle that Roman theater had become. The same could be said of a school newspaper satirizing the clothes of a female student campus and saying it is “sexual harassment” because as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) beautifully stated : it "trivialized the real offense of sexual harassment." This can also go for calling the United States a “police state” because of several bad police role models and a few corrupt divisions, despite being told from people in other countries that our police force does its job pretty well (although it could do better). This does not mean that we should ignore the potential of entertainment completely distracting us from important matters in the future via a downwards slope. However, please save terms of substance for true investigations of its legitimate meaning.