View From the Phlipside - Violent Entertainment

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, Radio, the Movies and more.  I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View From the Phlipside.

Last week saw a great furor break over the National Football League.  Since this isn’t a sports commentary I’ll skip over the question of whether the hits were legal and if the punishments fit the crimes.  It did lead me to think about something else that has always nagged at me.  The question of violence as entertainment.

Any even quick survey of the history of humanity shows that we have ALWAYS been entertained by some form of real or formalized violence.  To pretend that somehow it isn’t there in among the multitudinous other cultural skeletons is just fooling ourselves.  And real violence has had a place in our entertainment choices into the relatively recent past.  Wrestling was a major form of entertainment from the earliest days of the Republic and the level of physical mayhem that was considered acceptable is pretty appalling by modern standards.  Physically disfiguring your opponent was considered reasonable up to the 1800’s.  It was in the last century that we began to see some regulation to make the violence more formalized.  Don’t forget that in the early 20th Century football was so violent that 18 players died playing it that year.  And there were a LOT fewer people playing the sport back then.

Football controlled the violence.  So did boxing and wrestling.  Baseball was never a terribly violent game but over the years greater protections came even to that gentle sport.  In recent years I begin to wonder though if that trend is now headed the other way.

Professional wrestling offers the illusion of greater violence.  Boxing is being supplanted by the much more violent personal combat of Mixed Martial Arts.  Now football is arguing about the need to make devastating potentially disabling or fatal hits for the purity of the sport.  Even our most formalized entertainments, video games, have grown ever more violent in concept over the last decade.

The underlying concern is that we once again getting enjoyment from ever increasing levels of violence committed on the bodies of other people.  At some point there may be no discernible difference between our entertainments and the gladiatorial confrontations of ancient Rome.  It’s an historic path that I think we need to carefully consider before we travel too much farther down it.  The lack of respect for life in our entertainments has a nasty way of looping back on society itself.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010