Dummy Tackles

An article online this morning reminds me of an old conundrum of mine. NFL teams drill their players in running, blocking, passing ... but all punches are pulled in tackling practice. They practice everything hard: except tackling. They don't want to injure their own stars. Come Sunday each team's stars can waltz through the other team's punch pullers.

Kids grow up playing Bang Bang, You're Dead. I did. And I was steeped in cowboy movies with their bar fights, John Wayne taking a punch, shaking it off, and powing the other guy. At the end of the cowboy movie Gary Cooper would shoot umpteen bad guys so he could finally go one on one against Frank Miller and kill him dead, Grace Kelly then forgetting her Quaker foolishness and giving him a kiss. Real gun fights really killed people; Hollywood has only one Gary Cooper: so Hollywood chairs crumble to sawdust when crashed on his head, Hollywood haymakers just miss: and the actors playing the heavies get to sue big time if they sustain a bruise from practice with Jean Claude Van Damm. As a kid my Christian training made me resist enjoying the general culture's training: one hour of love and tolerance on Sunday has a hard time standing up against 24/7-1 of Hopalong Cassidy getting hit with sawdust chairs. I refused cooperation in following John Wayne and Gene Autry. It wasn't until I was at college and started going out of the general way to watch Akira Kurosawa's direction of Toshiro Mifune in chopping off heads and cutting people out of their kimonos with his katana.

I discovered that I loved the violence: violence with a heavy moral always. Then I'd watch Mifune go one on one (or one on a dozen) in any director's samurai flick. But by that time I was an adult (of sorts: do any of us ever really reach adulthood?) I loved art, including cinematic art, but I loved science too: Darwin, evolution, Bateson ... And I thought and thought: how can it be good for the species for "our" hero to kill "their" hero? (Or for their hero to kill our hero?) If the Yankees beat the Dodgers every year, why were there still Dodgers to beat next year? (I never doubted that the lords of Flatbush wanted to raid the Bronx (or beter yet, Manhattan) and rape and pillage, leaving none alive.)

If Gary Cooper shoots every other six footer every two hours, how can there even be one six foot Gary Cooper?

Now, restate the problem: if the NFL players really played to tear each others head off, how can there be more than one NFL player left with a head? And if all punches are pulled, if all is Hollywood, how come there are real fatalities in real wars? Are there any real wars? The NFL doesn't mean to practice fakery, but that IS what they practice. Come Sunday heads get torn off only by accident: and then everyone howls.

Why howl for blood, and then howl if there is blood? (Is that what it is to be human these days?)

Once upon a time wars were to kill enemies. But then war changed. Now wars are to kill a few so the surviving bulk can be ruled: as passive consumers. The Romans killed the Celts to take over their salt mines without paying them any royalty. Modern Romans (like us) kill as few Celts as possible: so we can own the salt mine, paying surviving Celts peanuts to work the mine: and then sell them the salt!

Ah, I've wandered into related areas. I meant to stick with the one point: lions competing against hyenas on the savanna can kill the hyena without much visible harm to the lions, but the big male lions can't kill all the other big male lions without harming the lions as a whole.

In the wake of worshipping Kurosawa's costume flix I heard about martial arts tournaments where the combatants could break bones, maim, and maybe kill each other, all scrambling for the one top spot. Musashi doesn't just beat Kojiro; Musashi kills Kojiro. (And Kojiro doesn't mind: he wanted to discover whose bushido was better: and Musashi shows him).

I'll develop this further later.