“Go Seahawks!” screamed 65,000 people, urged on by 64 sign-waving “Sea-Gals” on the field and a leather-throated guy on the PA system. The Seattle Seahawks were in the football playoffs, but facing a team that had already beaten them twice this season. “Go Seahawks!” Not loud enough, yelled the PA guy. Not nearly loud enough. GO SEAHAWKS! 65,000 people now on their feet waving towels provided by the management. Men with huge wigs and faces painted Seahawk blue and green ran down the aisles, beating their chests like the warriors in Braveheart. Fireworks exploded in our ears, while a two-story-high monitor at the end of the field showed race cars exploding in fireballs. Three Army helicopters clattered low over the stadium, just missing skimming the top of just missing sounds like they intended to hit it an American flag the size of a living room.

The message was unmistakable: “Football is war,” and the promoters of the game were doing everything they could to conflate the two. As the decibels in that stadium rose to the level of pain, the whole place shook with battle cries. And the game hadn’t even started.

I kept to my seat. I like to watch and play sports, including contact sports. I cheer for my teams. But this afternoon I felt like I was on the island in The not because I was shy Why suggest that—it didn’t occur to me that you might be but because I was scared. Lord of the Flies. Or in the amphitheater in Nuremberg. In , by the realization that in this very Blue city that had just voted for John Kerry three-to-one, had that PA guy suddenly screamed, “Kill Muslims!” or “Bash gays” many of those roused, roaring people would have shifted to those cries without thinking.

You think I’m kidding? You should have been there. Or, I suspect, at the Big Game in most any other pro football stadium in the country.

Of course, other sports are violent too. But only football, and especially pro football, cloaks itself so deliberately and so thoroughly in war imagery. Even the language used to describe the game equates a gridiron with a battlefield. A quarterback in the shotgun formation evades a blitz of onrushing linemen and throws a bomb, his injured ribs protected by a flak jacket.

I don’t blame the athletes for football-as-war. They’re just highly paid employees, not policy-makers. I miss the hired-gun line. I blame the promoters and the media, both eager for high ratings and profits. Even the best competitions can occasionally seem dull, especially if you’ve never bothered to learn the fine points of a game. But war imagery—as produced for us by promoters and sports media—is never dull, so conflating football with war sells tickets.

Don’t get me wrong—I not only like contact sports, I have a history of liking war. By the time I was forty I’d put myself in harm’s way so often I’d almost died a violent death fourteen times. A John Wayne wanna-be, my assignments in the US Foreign Service had put me in the middle of wars and revolutions, including 18 months in one of the most dangerous areas of Vietnam. I loved it, loved the adventures and especially the ultimate adventure of war. But at the height of the battle for Hué in 1972, I finally “got” the total irresponsibility of a life driven by an unholy cocktail of adrenaline and testosterone.

So maybe I’m like a recovering alcoholic, who knows too well the perils of drink. From the perspective of a sometimes violent younger life, I see big dangers in pro football’s identification with war.

Conflating football with war distorts the reality and hides the gruesome seriousness of real war, especially for the young. I know from my own experience how attractive war can be to young men, and how seductive those attractions are—right up to that first time you see how poorly human flesh stands up to jagged pieces of flying steel. Conflating football with war depends on and extends the myth that war is a game. Clever marketers are now using football-as-war to sell absurdly violent video games that further hide the reality of real war. The most heavily promoted product on a televised football game I saw recently was a video game called “Mercenaries – Playground of Destruction.” It was limitless mayhem and the “mercs” all seemed to be having a very good time. Note the word “playground” in the title. War is a game. A game is war. Does anybody really expect a kid playing a video game or watching pro football to understand the difference? How do they know that in Falluja you can’t just press the Reset button and start over?

Football-as-war undermines the positive ethos behind football and, by association, all competitive sports. I believe that competitive sports, including contact sports like football, can build camaraderie and teamwork, teach people to respect and not demonize opponents, show them how to persevere through pain, fatigue, and failure, and otherwise train them to be at their best. But most if not all that positive training is lost if sports, led by pro football, elevate violence over skill and sportsmanship, teach kids that adversaries on the field are enemies to be obliterated, and drum into their heads that winning is everything. What the football pros do works its way down to Pee Wee leagues, to little kids hardly bigger than their shoulder pads—and to parents screaming on the sidelines.

Football-as-war is dangerously manipulative. It’s one thing to cheer your team on to victory. It’s a completely different thing for the promoters of a contest to deliberately suffuse a stadium in war imagery and then to manipulate the mindless raw emotion they’ve conjured up. Of course the promoters will say that they’re manipulating emotions for a completely innocent purpose—and that it’s all part of the fun of going to a game. Yet by creating a state of mass mindlessness suffused in war imagery, football-as-war gives people the perfect forum for letting rip the anger and pain of unresolved conflicts and frustrations at home and work—the stuff that most of us keep inside because we find it so difficult to resolve.In a stadium full of screaming Bravehearts, the positive excitement and enthusiasm of a sports contest can be turned to the dark side. In the worst cases, football-as-war lets spectators experience dominance and the inflicting of pain, without the danger of being hurt themselves.

What the promoters don’t understand (or care about) is that the spectacle they create moves people not to release their inner poisons but to thicken them. If 65,000 people can be manipulated into screaming insults at the opposing team, how hard would it be to get them to scream a racial epithet, even in polite, friendly, tolerant Seattle? A current commercial by an insurance company cautions fans to avoid road rage when driving home after the game. That company understands what’s going on.

And then there’s political manipulation. If people get used to having their emotions manipulated at football games, how well will they resist a political or religious demagogue urging them to act on those emotions? Our country is now at war, raising policy questions of the utmost importance, deserving reflection from every citizen. In football-as-war, singing the national anthem is the only quiet part of the pre-game show. The rest of the din only detracts from whatever reflective moment the anthem may produce, generating at best a jingoistic patriotism with as much depth as a video game. By conflating a game with war, pro football generates mindless support for war, war without consequences or complexity.

What can we do?

Speak up. When Janet Jackson bared her breast during last year’s Superbowl, millions of people were upset enough to lodge protests. When entire stadiums and vast television audiences are programmed to glorify and mimic war, there is no outcry. This is nuts. Let both football owners and sports media know that you notice and that you care. Call them. Email them.

Talk about it with your friends. Especially for guys, stick your neck out and bring up the subject of football-as-war in the locker room at your gym, in the car pool or during a lunch break. Of course some eyeballs will roll—this is difficult stuff. Ask your friends why they think so many people are attracted by war imagery? Why is it so titillating? What effect does that have on our culture and our national policies? Why should we care?

Talk about it with your kids. Broaden a discussion of football-as-war to include the violence of some video games. Do your kids know what’s real and what’s not? Do they know what’s an appropriate way to express anger and frustration and what’s not?

Talk about it with yourself. I think many people who get swept up in the hysteria of football-as-war have made themselves vulnerable to that manipulation by failing to deal with inner demons. Others are vulnerable because of inner emptiness; they haven’t found enough meaning in work or relationships so they look for it in three hours of football-as-war. For people who’ve found and lead full lives, a football game is not war and it’s not a search for meaning. It’s a football game. What does the game mean to you?