MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The past two years have seen a heightened media focus on National Football League (NFL) players kneeling in protest during the playing of the national anthem. Arguments of “free speech” versus “patriotism” have dominated the media. However, those polarized arguments rarely take into account the origins of the national anthem’s inclusion in televised broadcasts of NFL games.

For much of its history, the NFL did not broadcast the anthem during its national programming. However, in 2009, the Defense Department began paying for nationally televised patriotic displays at professional sporting events. While the Defense Department also financially supported displays of patriotism at basketball, hockey, and baseball games, its framing of the inherently brutal sport of football through a lens of nationalism linked patriotism and the violence necessary to gain territory on the field for the viewers at home.

Building on Giorgio Agamben’s political theory, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, this paper will explore the spectacle of nationalism and its proximity to the orchestrated violence of NFL games as a service paid for by the U.S. military. Furthermore, the bodies of the NFL players, when framed through a militaristic and nationalistic lens, became stand-ins for the glorification of violence as a necessary means to an end during a period when the American public’s support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was wavering.