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Abstract
More than ever, entertainment industries work in concert with the US armed forces in the rhetorical production of militarism. This is especially the case in sport, where leagues such as the National Football League routinely make war imagery and military personnel a focal point of football culture. One such iteration of this relationship is the “Pro Football and the American Spirit” exhibit that is part of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Understood as an example of public memory, this exhibit reveals sport's capacity to normalize war and reduce the available models of citizenship in the United States.
Notes
1. For an extended discussion of this idea, see Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine: US Militarism and Popular Culture (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007); Geoff Martin and Erin Steuter, Pop Culture Goes to War: Enlisting and Resisting Militarism in the War on Terror (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010); and Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010).
2. Samantha King, “Offensive Lines: Sport-State Synergy in an Era of Perpetual War,” Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies 8, no. 4 (2008): 529.
3. James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military–Industrial–Media–Entertainment Network (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).
4. For more on these ideas, see Michael L. Butterworth and Stormi D. Moskal, “American Football, Flags, and ‘Fun’: The Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl and the Rhetorical Production of Militarism,” Communication, Culture & Critique 2, no. 4 (2009): 411–33; Gordon Mitchell, “Public Argument-Driven Security Studies,” Argumentation and Advocacy 39, no. 1 (2002): 57–71; and Roger Stahl, “Have You Played the War on Terror?” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 2 (2006): 112–30.
5. King, “Offensive Lines,” 528.
6. Jeffrey St. John and Todd Kelshaw, “Remembering ‘Memory’: The Emergence and Performance of an Institutional Keyword in Communication Studies,” Review of Communication 7, no. 1 (2007): 51.
7. Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, ed. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brain L. Ott (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 6.
8. Stephen Howard Browne, “Arendt, Eichmann, and the Politics of Remembrance,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 48.
9. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7; also see Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
10. For examples, see Victoria J. Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1999): 303–20; Rachel M. Gans, “The Newseum and Collective Memory: Narrowed Choices, Limited Voices, and Rhetoric of Freedom,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2002): 370–90; Todd F. McDorman, “History, Collective Memory, and the Supreme Court: Debating ‘the People’ through the Dred Scott Controversy,” Southern Communication Journal 71, no. 3 (2006): 213–34; or Kenneth S. Zagacki and Victoria J. Gallagher, “Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 2 (2009): 171–91.
11. For examples, see Barbara Biesecker, “Remembering World War II: The Rhetoric and Politics of National Commemoration at the Turn of the 21st Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 393–409; Carole Blair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci Jr., “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 3 (1991): 263–88; Elisia L. Cohen and Cynthia Willis, “One Nation under Radio: Digital and Public Memory after September 11,” New Media & Society 6, no. 5 (2004): 591–610; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in US Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm,’” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 1 (2003): 35–66; and Bryan Hubbard and Marouf A. Hasian Jr., “Atomic Memories of the Enola Gay: Strategies of Remembrance at the National Air and Space Museum,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1998): 363–85.
12. David Hoogland Noon, “Operating Enduring Analogy: World War II, the War on Terror, and the Uses of Historical Memory,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7, no. 2 (2004): 342.
13. Peter Ehrenhaus, “Why We Fought: Holocaust Memory in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, no. 3 (2001): 321–37.
14. Bryan C. Taylor, “The Bodies of August: Photographic Realism and Controversy at the National Air and Space Museum,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1998): 334.
15. Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2006): 29.
16. Carole Blair, “Contemporary US Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality,” in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 16.
17. Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” 304.
18. Tony Bennett, “Civic Seeing: Museums and the Organization of Vision,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 263.
19. Tony Bennett, “Speaking to the Eyes: Museums, Legibility, and the Social Order, in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, ed. Sharon Macdonald (London: Routledge, 1998), 29.
20. Elizabeth M. Crooke, Museums and Community: Ideas, Issues and Challenges (London: Routledge, 2007), 23.
21. Sharon Macdonald, ed., “Exhibitions of Power and Powers of Exhibition: An Introduction to the Politics of Display,” in The Politics of Display, 4.
22. Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 129.
23. I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that all communication scholars have ignored sport. Scholars in mass communication and media and cultural studies, in particular, have developed a robust sport literature. However, until quite recently, it has been a marginal area of study among rhetorical scholars. For some exceptions, see Michael L. Butterworth, “The Politics of the Pitch: Claiming and Contesting Democracy through the Iraqi National Soccer Team,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (2007): 184–203; “Saved at Home: Christian Branding and Faith Nights in the ‘Church of Baseball,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (2011): 309–33; Thomas B. Farrell, “Media Rhetoric as Social Drama: The Winter Olympics of 1984,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6, no. 2 (1989): 158–82; Daniel A. Grano, “Ritual Disorder and the Contractual Morality of Sport: A Case Study in Race, Class, and Agreement,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10, no. 3 (2007): 445–74; and Daniel A. Grano and Kenneth S. Zagacki, “Cleansing the Superdome: The Paradox of Purity and Post-Katrina Guilt,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 2 (2011): 201–23.
24. Stephen G. Wieting and Judy Polumbaum, “Prologue,” in Sport and Memory in North America, ed. Stephen G. Wieting (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 4. Although it is not primarily about sport, a good example of the memory work done by sporting iconography can be found in Victoria J. Gallagher and Margaret R. LaWare, “Sparring with Public Memory: The Rhetorical Embodiment of Race, Power, and Conflict in the Monument to Joe Louis,” in Dickinson et al., Places of Public Memory, 87–112.
25. Butterworth and Moskal, “American Football, Flags, and ‘Fun,’” 413.
26. Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 9.
27. Michael MacCambridge, America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation (New York: Random House, 2004), xiv.
28. For examples, see Dale A. Herbeck, “Sports Metaphors and Public Policy: The Football Theme in Desert Storm Discourse,” in Metaphorical World Politics, ed. Francis A. Beer and Christ'l De Landtsheer (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004), 121–39; Sue Curry Jansen and Don Sabo, “The Sport/War Metaphor: Hegemonic Masculinity, the Persian Gulf War, and the New World Order,” Sociology of Sport Journal 11, no. 1 (1994): 1–17; and Jeffrey Segrave, “The Sports Metaphor in American Cultural Discourse,” Culture, Sport, Society 3, no. 1 (2000): 48–60.
29. Gerald R. Gems, For Pride, Profit, and Patriarchy: Football and the Incorporation of American Cultural Values (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000), 78.
30. Wanda Ellen Wakefield, Playing to Win: Sports and the American Military, 1898–1945 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 89.
31. MacCambridge, America's Game, 11–2.
32. Michael Oriard, Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 30, 18.
33. See Joseph Price, “The Super Bowl as Religious Festival,” in Sport and Religion, ed. Shirl J. Hoffman (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1992), 13–5.
34. Gordon R. Mitchell, “Patriotism at 500 Feet and 450 MPH: Whoosh and Awe in Military Flyovers at Sporting Events,” (paper, National Communication Association 94th Annual Convention, San Diego, CA, November 2008).
35. Lawrence A. Wenner, “The Super Bowl Pregame Show: Cultural Fantasies and Political Subtext,” in Media, Sports, & Society, ed. Lawrence A. Wenner (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989), 157–79.
36. Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 258.
37. Michael Silk and Mark Falcous, “One Day in September/A Week in February: Mobilizing American (Sporting) Nationalisms,” Sociology of Sport Journal 22, no. 4 (2005): 464.
38. Michael J. Shapiro, “Representing World Politics: The Sport/War Intertext,” in International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, ed. James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989), 80.
39. Michael Mandelbaum, The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football, and Basketball and What They See When They Do (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 196.
40. Herbeck, “Sports Metaphors and Public Policy,” 122.
41. Jennifer Souers Chevraux (Exhibit Specialist), personal correspondence with author, March 31, 2010.
42. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 6.
43. Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting,” 30.
44. Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting,” 30.
45. Kurt Edward Kemper, College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 2.
46. “Pro Football and the American Spirit,” Pro Football Hall of Fame, http://www.profootballhof.com/AmericanSpirit.aspx
47. All quotations from the exhibit's displays are based on my own notes taken during my visit.
48. Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 29.
49. Sturken, Tangled Memories, 141.
50. Noon, “Operating Enduring Analogy,” 340.
51. King, “Offensive Lines,” 534.
52. Mary Tillman with Narda Zacchion, Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman (New York: Modern Times, 2008).
53. Gary Smith, “Remember His Name,” Sports Illustrated, September 11, 2006, http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1108561/3/index.htm
54. Annual attendance information available at “Facts and History,” Pro Football Hall of Fame, http://www.profootballhof.com/hall/hof-history.aspx
55. Der Derian, Virtuous War, xv.
56. Biesecker, “Remembering World War II,” 394.
57. Dave Meggyesy, Out of Their League (Berkeley, CA: Ramparts Press, 1970), 147.
58. Just as examples of these forms, see Stephen H. Browne, “Reading Public Memory in Daniel Webster's Plymouth Rock Oration,” Western Journal of Communication 57, no. 4 (1993): 464–77; Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10, no. 4 (2007): 595–626; or Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
59. “Pro Football and the American Spirit,” Pro Football Hall of Fame.