With the Super Bowl this Sunday, it's appropriate to raise a question for capstoners and other political junkies. Are we now in an era in which an amendment to Marx's famous characterization of "religion as the opiate of the masses" is in order? Marx, you will recall, was trying to make sense of the failure of his predictions to materialize. Despite the correctness of his predictions on the increased marginalization economically at the hands of the capitalist class, members of the proletariat didn't turn uniformly to the streets to bring down their shrinking elite of exploiters. Later, Lenin would attribute this to the value of imperialism, but in the near term Marx chalked it up to the power of religion's promise of a better life to come, thus relegating suffering today a rationalized position that would be more tolerable in the face of a more upbeat afterlife.
This isn't the first time to ask whether the religion's role in promoting "false cosnciousness" has been usurped in the current context by sports. We saw in Port Said, Egypt this week a post-soccer brawl killing at least 75 and one wonders if this violence is random with respect to the setbacks the post-Arab Spring reforms have experienced in military-dominated, post-Mubarak Egypt. The Super Bowl is in Indianapolis, and given the success of Mitch Daniels in eliminating collective bargaining rights among the public employees, coupled with the downsizing of public services in the Hoosier state, some might expect a huge protest at the Super Bowl dramatizing the political losses that average Indianans have accrued under Governor Daniels. But the likelihood of such an event on Super Bowl Sunday seems remote indeed.
Thoughts?
DT
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So do you believe that people take their frustrations in life and hold them in until they irrationally take them out on a fellow soccer fan's face? I would say that they definitely have every right to be irrational. The people of Egypt had their uprising and they believed that things would be better. Unfortunately, a realist would have understood that it will take a long time for things to get better. Same goes with our economy here. I read an article saying that the Occupy Wall Street protesters were expecting anywhere from 100-1000 people to protest with them. That is a pretty big difference in size. However, with the normal protesters also comes the "crazies." The anti-gay groups stated that they also planned to protest in Indiana that day as well. However, little of this was reported on. I even heard that the picket signs were edited out of that inspiring Chrysler commercial...that's pretty bad.
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