c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)
UNDATED _ A clever series of commercials currently airing on the FOX television network depicts football fanatics spending quality time with their loved ones in some unusual ways. In one, a father gathers his family in the kitchen at a predawn hour so he and the kids can sing”Happy Birthday”to mom and then spend the rest of the day glued to football on the tube.
The point of this admittedly humorous promotion is to encourage fans to be undeterred in their observation of FOX’s day-long coverage of the Super Bowl.
Yet it also illustrates _ and exploits _ our all-out pursuit of entertainment and the price we’re willing to pay for it _ in financial and human terms.
That we pay a high price to be entertained, to”ooh”and”aah”over the God-given abilities of others, is certainly nothing new. Indeed, the fundamental assumption underlying the recent National Basketball Association negotiations was that the future of the league depended on the willingness of the fans to continue to foot the bill.
If the fans weren’t willing, at a minimum, to watch the games on television, advertisers would be unable to pay the networks the exorbitant fees that, in turn, are exacted by the league. Revenue sharing would go out of the window, and the NBA would go the route of the defunct American Basketball League.
The same principal holds true with the other programming the network moguls offer us, as NBC’s negotiations with the producers of”ER”and the now-ended”Seinfeld”clearly show.
However, beyond the financial bottom line lies the issue of the human costs of entertainment.
The scandal surrounding Salt Lake City’s bidding practices for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games provides a case-in-point. There, in the wake of acknowledgments by city officials of bribes paid to members of the International Olympic Committee, new allegations have emerged that prostitutes were made available to I.O.C. members by persons on the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee.
Given the city’s image as a morally conservative bastion of traditional family values, the allegations _ even if proven false _ will be damaging nonetheless, for what they suggest is that a community’s soul, to say nothing of its carefully crafted image, can be sold to the highest bidder.
It is this view of one’s soul as a commodity I find so disturbing. The soul encompasses one’s will and emotions, constituting, in the words of Webster,”man’s moral and emotional nature.”In short, the soul comprises the essence of the individual, as reflected in character and values.
Logically, then, to entice someone to compromise character and values is to invite to sell the soul.
When the FOX commercials suggest _ albeit humorously _ that our families’ special moments can be rearranged around a football game, they are asking us to sell our souls. When the NBA, its players, the networks and their advertisers, make marketing decisions based on the perceived desires of the public, it is our souls they are discussing. When the representatives of a city undermine the values of its citizens it is their collective souls that have been compromised.
That we as a society would be invited to sell our souls says much about those who seek to influence us. That we would be willing to give them what they want says even more about us.
DEA END ATCHISON
