¶ We were astonished to read a piece in the Times, even if it was printed on blue paper at the rear of the Magazine, posing the question “Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl?” What makes this essay impressive is its having been written by an avowed football fan, Steve Almond. We don’t think that American professional football is immoral; we think that it’s criminal, or ought to be. But a long history of failed prohibitions stays our keyboarding hand.

We don’t believe that it’s necessary to get to the question of whether watching the game is moral or not; we think that it’s enough to contemplate the damages inflicted on the athletes, and then to question our interest in what ought to be nauseating. But we’re thrilled that the question has been raised in such a prominent venue. As with gay marriage, we didn’t expect things to happen quite this fast. But then, we’re old. And it never would have occurred to us to point to the linkage between the baroque spectacle of today’s Super Bowl with our dreary military record. Dummies, we.

Over the past 12 years, as Americans have sought a distraction from the moral incoherence of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the game has served as a loyal and satisfying proxy. It has become an acceptable way of experiencing our savage impulses, the cultural lodestar when it comes to consuming violence. What differentiates it from the glut of bloody films and video games we devour is our awareness that the violence in football, and the toll of that violence, is real.

The struggle playing out in living rooms across the country is that of a civilian leisure class that has created, for its own entertainment, a caste of warriors too big and strong and fast to play a child’s game without grievously injuring one another. The very rules that govern our perceptions of them might well be applied to soldiers: Those who exhibit impulsive savagery on the field are heroes. Those who do so off the field are reviled monsters.

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