"Football, War, & Brain Damage"
When you have some time, please read this article, tell me what you think.
http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2013/01/21/football-war-brain-damage/
"Most of us watching the Navy F-18s flyover the Super Bowl or the myriad NFL tributes to the military branches and their "wounded warriors" at nearly every game probably don’t think of it as a twisted glorification of two institutions that have largely contributed to the brain damage of a nation.
Of course not. Most of us are conditioned to accept that football and the military are synonymous expressions of American identity and therefore befitting of fervent manifestations of patriotism, celebrated together under domes that might as well be cathedrals, but identified by such names as "Fed-Ex Field," or "Bank of America Stadium." Whoever came up with the idea of conflating the red-blooded American — not to mention highly commercial — sport with military service and war is a marketing genius. And the NFL has certainly run with it straight down middle – guilelessly announcing its "Salute to Service" campaign in November, all the while scooping up millions from defense industry advertisers who see dollar signs among the sanctimonious pageantry and spectacle.
"It is interesting to note how both the military at its upper reaches and the NFL are out to sell a product and have developed a certain symbiosis that fuses national greatness with commercialism," notes Antiwar writer Phil Giraldi, a longtime fan of the game who’s become increasingly repulsed as the military and NFL continue to ratchet up their mutual exploitation of one another for maximum impact. "
