{"id":121132,"date":"2018-02-02T14:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-02-02T19:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=121132"},"modified":"2018-02-05T13:14:09","modified_gmt":"2018-02-05T18:14:09","slug":"don-delillos-nuclear-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/02\/don-delillos-nuclear-football\/","title":{"rendered":"Don DeLillo\u2019s Nuclear Football"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

American football had a violent year in 2017.<\/p>\n

The refusal by all thirty-two\u00a0National Football League teams to sign free agent Colin Kaepernick, a black quarterback who had started kneeling during each game\u2019s national anthem in the summer of 2016 as a form of protest against police brutality, ignited a national political debate that often devolved into ugly racial vitriol. After additional players began kneeling to take up Kaepernick\u2019s cause in his absence, President Donald Trump made the NFL a target of repeated angry tweets<\/a>, railing that the protesting players were disrespecting the whole country and condemning NFL team owners for not punishing the players. The sad apotheosis of all this noise came when Trump, in his first State of the Union address, appeared to make reference to Kaepernick and other kneeling players when he said that a twelve-year-old boy\u2019s organized effort to lay flags at the graves of veterans \u201creminds us \u2026 why we proudly stand for the national anthem.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the violent rhetoric spread on social media throughout the season, the NFL saw its prime-time television ratings drop precipitously. It\u2019s unclear how much of the problem was political; people who say they watched less football in 2017 cited a whole host of additional complaints: too many games, bad games, unfair games, too many ways to watch a game on something other than television, too many things to watch besides football.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And always in the backdrop, there is the violence of the sport, and the growing unease over what professional football does to the brains of its\u00a0players. A study at Boston University last year of 111 brains belonging to deceased NFL players<\/a> found chronic encephalopathy (CTE) in 110 of them. Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots star and convicted murderer who died in prison last year, had CTE when he died at twenty-seven. He had played only three seasons of pro football.<\/p>\n

No novel nails the omnipresent violence of football better than End Zone<\/em>, Don DeLillo\u2019s second novel, published in 1972.<\/p>\n

Yes, the NFL has changed since 1972. It\u2019s grown into a fourteen-billion-dollar, logo-soaked commercial circus. It has become, arguably, even more DeLilloan. But the game itself has not changed much. (It is why the most accurate football movie, to this day, is North Dallas Forty<\/em>, from 1979\u2014years pass, American culture changes, but football culture remains generally the same.<\/p>\n

End Zone<\/em> isn\u2019t even about a professional player but a college player in dusty West Texas\u2014readers today will repeatedly be reminded of the book, movie, and television series Friday Night Lights<\/em>. The narrator is Gary Harkness, a running back and a reluctant team captain. Like almost every DeLillo character feels toward his occupation or obsession, Gary is both apathetic and passionate about football.<\/p>\n

Gary gets kicked out of Syracuse, then heads to Penn State, then quits Penn State because he\u2019s bored by the repetitiveness of practice. His coach implores him to keep at it, arguing that football bestows moral lessons and life skills. Gary asks him, \u201cYou\u2019re saying that what I learn on the gridiron about sacrifice and oneness will be of inestimable value later on in life. In other words if I give up now I\u2019ll almost surely give up in the more important contests of the future.\u201d The coach says, \u201cThat\u2019s it exactly,\u201d and Gary replies, \u201cI\u2019m giving up.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Gary quits the University of Miami and then quits Michigan State, he again tries to live at home with his parents but ends up at Logos College in West Texas because \u201cI had discovered a very simple truth. My life meant nothing without football.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Logos, Gary (and the book) becomes fully immersed in the language of nuclear war. He reads \u201can immense volume about the possibilities of nuclear war\u201d for a course on \u201cmodes of disaster technology\u201d (an extremely DeLillo college course indeed) and becomes \u201cfascinated by words and phrases like thermal hurricane, overkill, circular error probability, post-attack environment, stark deterrence, dose-rate contours, kill-ratio, spasm war.\u201d<\/p>\n

At this point, we are squarely in Don DeLillo territory: the language is meant to exhaust, to glaze eyes. The melding of Gary\u2019s football routine with his inner nuclear preoccupation is more of a macro effect. It doesn\u2019t rely on actually knowing what half these terms mean; they are there to paint a larger picture when you step back.<\/p>\n

When Gary first meets Myna, who will become his girlfriend, he notices her because of her orange dress and the \u201cmushroom cloud appliqu\u00e9d on the front.\u201d When they meet, Gary is wearing lampblack under his eyes, and reflects that, \u201cI didn\u2019t know whether the lampblack was very effective but I liked the way it looked and I liked the idea of painting myself in a barbaric manner before going forth to battle in the mud.\u201d Later on, he tells Myna that when she wears the dress, \u201cYou look like an explosion over the desert.\u201d He means it as praise.<\/p>\n

The nuclear language is in fact more the point than the football; it\u2019s the only interest Gary has outside of his sport. The most appropriate End Zone <\/em>cover design, of the many versions over the years, is the edition that simply bears a nuclear reactor symbol with a football at its center.<\/p>\n

When we finally get a big, bursting set piece\u2014thirty-eight pages of game action, Logos against Centrex\u2014Gary describes what he\u2019s seeing in reverent, militaristic language. It sounds like a Game of Thrones<\/em>\u00a0battle sequence. \u201cThe special teams collided, swarm and thud of interchangeable bodies, small wars commencing here and there, exaltation and firstblood, a helmet bouncing brightly on the splendid grass, the breathless impact of two destructive masses, quite pretty to watch.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one ever accused Don DeLillo of being too subtle. But lest you think the message of football as war is being hammered home too hard, DeLillo offers a treatise on \u201cthe exemplary spectator,\u201d who, Gary insists, \u201chas his occasional lusts, but not for warfare, hardly at all for that. No, it\u2019s details he needs\u2014impressions, colors, statistics, patterns, mysteries, numbers, idioms, symbols. Football, more than other sports, fulfills this need. It is the one sport guided by language, by the word signal, the snap number, the color code, the play name.\u201d (Of course, Logos<\/em>, in Greek, means \u201cwords\u201d or \u201creasoning.\u201d)<\/p>\n

A football spectator may not lust for warfare, but warfare is what the spectator gets. Even in the locker room at halftime, the players and coaches psych themselves up for the rest of the game with noises of anger. \u201cCree-unch. Creech. Crunch,\u201d one coach chants. Another coach screams, \u201cThis is footbawl. You throw it, you ketch it, you kick it. Footbawl. Footbawl. Footbawl.\u201d (It is a perfect football coach line; I think of it extremely often.)<\/p>\n

As they run back onto the field, the players conjure for each other images of cartoonish violence to get in the spirit:<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re out to get us. They\u2019ll bleach our skulls with hydrosulfite.\u201d
\n\u201cThey\u2019ll rip off our clothes and piss on our bare feet.\u201d
\n\u201cThey\u2019ll twist our fingers back.\u201d
\n\u201cThey\u2019ll kill us and eat us.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the dorm, watching an NFL game, Gary reflects that, \u201cIn slow motion the game\u2019s violence became almost tender, a series of lovely and sensual assaults.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, there is nothing lovely about seeing a player get hit in the head by another player\u2019s head, drop to the field, and take a long time to get up. And that is an image NFL fans see with regularity. The cover of the December 18, 2017 issue of Sports Illustrated<\/em> reads CARNAGE: INSIDE THE\u00a0NFL\u2019S\u00a0SEASON\u00a0OF\u00a0PAIN<\/small>. The number of concussions in the NFL in 2017 grew to 281<\/a>, the highest it has been in the last six years.<\/p>\n

The NFL has sought to improve safety by introducing new and more high-tech helmets. But some say no helmet can ever make the game safe. Rich Cohen<\/a>, author of the book Monsters<\/em>,\u00a0about the famously terrifying 1985 Chicago Bears team, says that some of the defensive tackles he interviewed for the book told him, \u201cOur game plan was, we\u2019re going to get to know your second-string quarterback today.\u201d Their intent was to injure.<\/p>\n

\u201cFootball is violence,\u201d Cohen says<\/a>. \u201cYou can\u2019t get rid of it, because then there\u2019s nothing left. If you take the violence out of football, you don\u2019t really have football.”<\/p>\n

DeLillo knew it, and he captured it perfectly.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Daniel Roberts is a business journalist in New York City. He has written about books for <\/em>Salon, <\/em>NPR,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em> Daily Beast,<\/em> LitHub,<\/em> The Millions,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em> Morning News,<\/em> and more.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American football had a violent year in 2017. The refusal by all thirty-two\u00a0National Football League teams to sign free agent Colin Kaepernick, a black quarterback who had started kneeling during each game\u2019s national anthem in the summer of 2016 as a form of protest against police brutality, ignited a national political debate that often devolved […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1249,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[931],"tags":[28832,1889,3962,212,12454,933,28241,7779,12760],"class_list":["post-121132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-sports","tag-conflation","tag-don-delillo","tag-end-zone","tag-football","tag-monsters","tag-nfl","tag-nuclear-war","tag-rich-cohen","tag-superbowl"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDon DeLillo\u2019s Nuclear Football<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Football is a war game, and no one knew it better than Don DeLillo.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/02\/don-delillos-nuclear-football\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Don DeLillo\u2019s Nuclear Football by Daniel Roberts\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 2, 2018 \u2013 American football had a violent year in 2017. 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