Is Monday Night Football Our Culture's Soma?

If you’ve been watching ESPN recently, you’ve undoubtedly seen the promos for its Monday Night Football program running ad nauseam. The premise, as it has been since the campaign began last year, is that MNF is a bastion of happiness in an otherwise bleak and dreary existence. After all, the weekend is over, we’ve forced ourselves to drag foot over foot to the office to begin another week, and the only thing we have to look forward to is that distant Friday, a mirage on the horizon. Enter MNF, which attempts to turn this archetype on its head by asking “Is it Monday yet?” With its fireworks display of sports entertainment, MNF gives us a glowing reprieve from the drudgery that otherwise pervades our daily lives. Yes, today was bad, but at least there’s football tonight! MNF defines itself, essentially, as the antidote for the unhappy.

Astute readers (read: bookwormish, pretentious readers) will perhaps have seen a parallel here. In his prophetic novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes a society satiated by soma, a drug designed to provide an escape from the rigors and frustrations of everyday life. In the book, the World State government uses soma as a means of controlling the populace through pleasure. You ingest a gram, and “instead of feeling miserable, you’d be jolly. So jolly.” This euphoria is the most effective means of control, more effective than totalitarianism because, as Huxley later wrote, those who oppose tyranny universally “[fail] to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In the words of Neil Postman, media-critic extraordinaire, comparing Brave New World to George Orwell’s 1984:

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