248 Polemical Conclusion
Soul. There was nothing like today’s technology of diversion at his
disposal.
The primary appetite of the Soul—or the one most often sup-
pressed by current life and so in need of feeding—is not hard to
guess from the state of current culture. The shape of that culture
may suggest to us that Homer (as equivocal as he may occasionally
have been) and his warriors were right: human beings are desperate
to enter the State of Soul defi ned by courage.
The simulation of the martial world is one of the largest busi-
nesses in current consumer culture. The elements of this world are
almost too tedious to enumerate.
Corporately mediated sports are probably the primary vehicle for
contact with simulated, safe, and sanitized Homeric virtues. A tele-
vised football game is an irony- free zone, where the commentators
can talk openly about courage and daring and the will to victory.
Football is not simply football—it is a packaged, mediated, and con-
trolled experience. The announcers, acting in the interest of the
corporate sponsors, take a boys’ game and turn it into an epic quest.
The players are warriors; the line of scrimmage a battle line (its zone
is referred to as the trenches); on comes the blitz— beware the im-
pending quarterback sack. (The vocabulary of war has eff ectively
been diverted to the game of football.) The game’s an absorbing one
for many and maybe sometimes an inspiring one: there are amazing
feats of athleticism; there are remarkable plays. These feats are not
entirely unlike the feats of the battlefi eld; they share a vague but true
kinship. Yet to force them together and to suggest that heroics in
corporate sports are equivalent to battlefi eld heroics is delusional.
On football fi elds, players suff er concussions and that is too bad;
on battlefi elds soldiers commonly die, often with great bravery. Such
deaths are the true subject of epic and of tragedy.
A highly produced, highly mediated televised football game is an
impressive simulacrum of heroic culture. There is usually even a