Are you ready for some conquest?

(originally published for The Internationalist)

To me, the first sign of fall is that smell of damp leaves beginning to cool and brown at the edges. Inevitably, the second sign is football games, which suddenly pop up on television like mushrooms after rain. Like the Muslim Ramadan or the Christian Advent, football season is a time of holy celebration. But this celebration upholds the unique American myth, and enacts its values of territorialist conquest, beautiful innocence, and obligatory cooperation.

To observe these themes, I watched the first ten minutes of the most recent broadcast of Monday Night Football. The pageantry was overwhelming. As four helicopter pilots swooshed over the stadium in diamond formation, the Top Gun theme segued to Flight of the Valkyries, and showers of gold sparks erupted from either side of a gigantic American flag. A real-life drill sergeant on the stadium floor thundered to the crowd, "ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL?" Cheerleaders and country music stars launched into a full-blown hymn calling the faithful to watch – an assertion of space, time and purpose that resounded across America. Players burst out of a cloud of smoke and pounded onto the field.

Scholars have long noted that football is a uniquely American game. In Investigating Culture, Stanford anthropologist Carol Delaney points out that there is no football in the Olympics, nor has football caught on in any other country. Why? First and foremost, it is a game of winning territory, yard by yard, clash by clash – and winning territory is exactly how America was founded.

As Whittier College historian Joseph L. Price notes in his essay "The Superbowl as Religious Festival," football evokes America's past. Territorialism was epitomized by manifest destiny: the nineteenth-century nationalistic belief that America had the God-given right to own all the land from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts. And manifest destiny was only another incarnation of the European invaders' philosophy: conquer land for the crown; obtain gold to fight wars; and spread Christianity for the glory of God.

Football also features violent, one-on-one physical contact as a matter of fact, distinct even from its predecessor, rugby. (In fact, as Newsweek columnist George Will wrote in his 1999 piece "Rough Rider in Green Bay," early collegiate football was so violent that dozens of players died. President Teddy Roosevelt cracked down on the league to tighten safety regulations, or he would campaign for its banishment.) This clashing violence evokes the bloody conquest of Native Americans. According to historians Jared Diamond and M. Annette Jaime, when the Europeans began invading the Americas, 95-99 percent of Native peoples were wiped out – when not by the germ, then by the sword.

But in America, the violence has a constant counterweight: innocence. Americans believe themselves not violent by nature, but out of necessity. As historian Catherine Albanese puts it, how else could the early Americans justify seizing the land, other than to believe they deserved it? To claim purity, innocence, and moral superiority? To remind us all of that fact, an American football game is never without spectacle: fleets of beautiful cheerleaders, famous music stars, flashing trumpets and fireworks galore.

Finally, alongside conquest, football also embodies the American ideal of the corporate. In the late nineteenth century, right around the time football began gaining popularity, the industrial revolution was also breaking ashore. Thus developed the modern American corporation. As anthropologist Conrad Kottak noted in Researching American Culture, a set of values began to emerge which personified the successful business and the successful football team: "discipline, teamwork, coordination, dedication, and submission to authority." Sure, there are the singular stars – the quarterback, the receiver; the CEO, the chairman. But mostly, for a corporation to be successful, the individuals must engender cooperativity and deference. Not surprisingly, historian Randy Roberts and other scholars have observed that college athletes disproportionately tend towards careers in business.

Perhaps these links seem tenuous, but in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his text Interpretation of Cultures, cultural analysis is "not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning." So the next time you sit in the bleachers with a cold beer and watch the game, imagine yourself sitting in a pew with your fellow faithful. The cheerleaders are liturgical dancers. The drill sergeant is our deacon; the commentators, our priests. On the field, the American dream of war, territory, beauty and business is ritualized for us to see again and again. "This is our land now," we are saying, and we continue to celebrate the conquest.