Analysis of Harry Potter is totally okay for the Duck. Not that I'm the Decider, but that's my input. Cross-post if you'd like.
As you and Peter both know, I find this conversation a little ridiculous, probably because I enjoy and find meaning in both Harry Potter and football, and really, do we need to argue that one is a better topic for conversation than the other? Then again, this is far preferable to working on the article currently on my desk, so here we go.
In praise of football as a topic of conversation (and without casting aspersions on Harry Potter, which has also made me cry, though not as often as the Hurricanes have, or the Dolphins, for that matter):
*the analogies, even beyond war, are useful for politics. One simply needs to use them appropriately and with regard to context.
Argh. This is impossible here. Full response at my place.
Patrick paints an unfortunate straw man of the discussions we can and cannot have about football, specifically, and sports, in general. To suggest that we are limited by the game as it is played on the field is to suggest that a Harry Potter reader is limited by the structure of the sentences that Rowling utilizes.
Sports captivates so many precisely because it speaks to larger issues in sports. Just off the top of my head I think of: Jackie Robinson (and race relations more generally--in every US sport, including football), the Munich Olympics, and the patriotism/nationalism that attends so many international sporting events like the World Cup.
To each their own, but I would so much rather discuss football than Harry Potter.
I have to disagree with you on one point, Patrick, and that's on the football=baseball versus HP comparison. Don't get me wrong, HP is fine, but to me, baseball is actually closer to it than football, because of the differential nature of the game. Football tends to be static. A "one-shot" encounter. Whereas baseball stretches over seasons, if not decades. The Yankees dynasty and its current struggles, like Gulliver being pinned down by Lilliputians; the Red Sox finally winning; the constant struggles of the Cubs and my beloved Nationals... baseball is a sort of performance art in a way that football isn't. And baseball most certainly leads to moral issues - take Barry Bonds, for instance. And myth? You want myth, baseball's got it.
So I guess my disagreement is both with Peter - sure, HP is high discussion, but football isn't - and with you, in that while football may not be, baseball is.
One final point - the HP universe may perhaps allow for a greater deal of "expansion" in conversation than sports, but I think it's stretching the fabric a wee bit. Whereas the tapestry of baseball is just as rich, and perhaps, given the shared American experience of tee-ball/Little League/softball, more experiential even than HP.
I certainly don't want to deny that one can use sports as the object of very interesting analyses; nor do I want to deny that such analyses generally work best when both speaker and audience have some shared knowledge of the sport in question. But to my mind, that's no longer "talking about sports" -- that's using sports as an example or illustration of something else. Sure, I can try to communicate something about international relations theory by using a parallel from football, but that's not the doing the same thing as dissecting a game after it's been played or speculating on (e.g.) the Yankees' chances of making the playoffs this year. [At this very moment they're getting battered around by the lowly Royals, while Boston looks well on their way to beating Cleveland, but there's still a lot of baseball left to play in the season . . .]
My point is that if one is talking about a sport in its own terms, one is restricted in what one can talk about in a way that one is not restricted when one is talking about a piece of popular mythology (like HP, or Star Wars) in its own terms. And all of the examples that everyone has offered look, to my mind, like examples that reinforce my point by stepping outside of the sport strictly defined and either a) using the sport as an object of analysis or b) subtly shifting the discussion from the sport to stories about the sport. Such stories are emplotted in a broader way than the enactment of sport itself is, which makes them able to travel further.
When I encounter colleagues and we "talk about baseball," we talk about how players and teams are doing. Moral content: virtually nil, because all of the tough moral and political questions have been settled in advance by the rules of engagement on the playing-field -- and even in those cases where there are ambiguities, we are still talking about a relatively restricted domain of human social action. When I encounter colleagues and we talk about HP, even as we are discussing what characters did and how situations turned out we are talking about matters of ethics and politics. I can talk about how unbelievably amazing A-Rod is as a player without getting anywhere near the philosophical richness contained in a discussion about the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort.
Don't get me wrong -- I like talking about baseball (football, not so much, but that's another post). And I like using baseball examples to make non-baseball points. And I like studying baseball as an important and revealing social practice. But I do not think that these activities carry the same ethical and philosophical richness as a discussion of HP in its own terms, an entry into the imaginary universe of HP, does -- like any myth, HP is in my opinion a more profound basis from which to engage in such discussions, since we can do so without stepping outside of the imaginary universe in question.
And pace Will, the mythological character of baseball is in my opinion not about baseball per se, but about the place that baseball occupies and continues to occupy in the national "sport space" of the United States and a few other countries. Virtually anything can become the object of such popular mythological narration, I'd say -- it's less about any intrinsic character of the object and more about how that object is positioned relative to others.
Again, Patrick's argument only holds if you accept how he has defined sport "in its own terms." In my mind, sport is as much about the issues that surround the games as the games themselves. Just wait to see the way that football is employed this fall on the campus of Virginia Tech. I suspect there will be far more water cooler talk about the emotions of the Virginia Tech community and the way that sports can assist in healing than about any specifics of the games themselves. This, to me, is sport "in its own terms."
Excellent posts, both this one and the last one on HP. You managed to express properly, in an articulate, clear and learned way what I was trying to say in a clumsy way in my blog a few days ago:
"Quite beyond the literary quality of the books themselves, there is genuine cultural value in sharing an experience with millions of other people. It is the reason I am not ashamed of eagerly waiting to read the next Harry Potter and then discuss it with people and see all the online fans' reactions to it, while I am blissfully ignorant of many other fantasy series which are probably better written."
Oh, and please do write an post analyzing Deathly Hallows here. Dozens of "serious" blogs are doing them, from Volokh Conspiracy to Pandagon. Shying from it undermines your whole argument.
Well, i feel i ought to defend my self here, if only just a bit.
I think my main point has already been expressed above, in part-- Patrick's argument depends on a very narrow reading of 'football' as only that which happens on the field, and a broad reading of Harry Potter as to include the moral and political issues implicated in the different juxtapositions of character, plot, and the like.
Yet Football--any sport--is more than just the plays on the field. Watching NFL Matchup on Sunday mornings is a pure joy, as is Easterbrook's TMQ, as Jenny pointed out and linked to. Sure, there is that. But there's much more to it than that. Football gives us an entry to talk about race, class, society, adversity, success, failure, and life. Not just as analogy, but as an arena in which those issues play out, an arena where those issues are brought into a national discussion.
Consider health care--the issue of how the NFL treats its former players has raised the issue of health care for veterans of a brutal enterprise and the obligations owed. Those former players are in some ways nondescript, but others are heroes of days gone by, people our fathers and uncles would lionize.
Consider the discussion about race and the Rooney Rule in hiring coaches, or the discussion of 'the black quarterback' from several years ago--this was not an analogy to race relations in this country, it was part of the national politics of how we understand race, and an entry point for many to a frank discussion of the role race plays in longstanding institutions.
I could go on and on, but the key is that football is more than what is 'on the field.' Now Patrick seeks to exclude this from the conversation, but to any football fan, this is front and center in the conversation. Football does indeed lead you to talk about big moral and political issues. Its not just--gee, how do the Falcons look with Harrington instead of Vick. There's a much larger question there about Michael Vick, violence, morality, politics, ethics, and fairness--this is the very conversation that is happening in sports page columns, on ESPN, on sports radio.
Talking about football--what happens on the field gets really boring, really fast. Is good for a 5th quarter show, but what do you think football fans talk about Tuesday through Friday? A lot of the stuff Patrick gets out of those Potter books.
In closing, I'm not going to embed yet another Daily Show bit, but but true Daily Show form, this parody gives you brilliant insight into the power of 'football.'
...Or you could be at the table for our NFL game day discussions where my friends and I cast a Harry Potter movie using only NFL coaches and players. We've also cast Star Wars. All of us are SIS MA grads. We're clearly using our degrees well.
And that same table would probably challenge your comment about NFL discussions not allowing one to raise the kind of ethical and philosophical issues that talking about HP does. However I see your point about using the game to illustrate our comments about world politics/theory rather than having those issues actually manifest themselves because of our viewing of the games. I'm going to have to listen closely to our discussions this season...
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