Cannibals and Poets

By Dr. Henry Flores, NewsTaco

A dear friend once described politics in her country as a struggle between cannibals and poets with each side taking turns running the country.  When the cannibals are in power they eat the spirit right out of the country with corruption running amok, civil and personal rights being trampled and, generally, the country faring badly at all levels.  The bad times created by the cannibals give way to an era when poets take over and try to fix everything the cannibals ruined. The solutions created and implemented by the poets usually upset the business sectors (also dominated by a cannibal mentality) signaling the return of cannibals to political control.  So, the governments in her country change hands accordingly.

I see a similar analogy playing itself out in both the United States and Texas.  This is important to understand because Latinos will be at the receiving end of whatever policies the cannibals espouse.  Nevertheless, I got to wondering the other day about the origins of both cannibals and poets.  Where do these two diametrically different tribes come from?  And, why do they even exist in the first place?

Origins of Cannibals and Poets 

The television ratings people indicated that over 111 million viewers watched the Super Bowl this year; I didn’t for the first time ever.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love football (I also love futbol but that is for another discussion), it was just that I finally got sick and tired of all the suspicions of cheating by one team and the ability of the other team to field a team of players who played with debilitating injuries.  While these dramas were being performed the internet was being inundated by the “college recruiting wars.”  These are the struggles of Division I and some II teams to lure the best high school football players to their campuses.  The rule of thumb in this game is that the schools with the largest athletic budgets generally win these matches.  The schools with the most money attract the best high school football players.  There is no discussion of academics, oh sometimes Rice University, Columbia or even Harvard will attract a player, one player, but that athlete must meet the stringent academic standards of those schools.  Although there is no discussion of academics in the recruiting wars, there are discussions of how fast the players are, how many passes they can complete, and how much poundage they can lift.

High school players are taught that as long as they are fast, can catch footballs, can hit the hardest then they will become the campus heroes.  They will carry the college or university banners to greatness.  Many will not obtain their degrees or will obtain degrees of questionable marketability.  Some will go on to play professional football where the stakes are higher and where the athletes are perceived, spoken of and treated like so much property.  Then they will end their careers broken men, many with debilitating head trauma from all of the violent and vicious hitting that characterizes many games at that level.

The process of creating these athletes brings us, the television viewers and fans, practically unlimited entertainment from Thursday evenings through Monday nights every week from the beginning of August through the end of January, almost six months of mayhem.  Where we can sit, drink, eat horrible snacks and cheer on the gladiatorial contests we call football.  The high school and professional recruiting follows the mayhem and continues until sometime in April.

Why Cannibals? 

The producers, owners and participants of these annual rituals are the cannibals and they perpetuate cannibalism that abound at all levels of society.  We create an environment where violence is lauded, intellectuality and creativity are nowhere to be found and then we take these same values and transfer them into the voting booths and the public policy processes.        

The same process that creates the gladiatorial environment for football creates the environment for the ascension of cannibals to high office.  Where the football players are violent to each other, the cannibals are violent toward the people.  Once in office cannibals eviscerate public policies designed by poets to help people such as education, public health, voting rights and so forth.  Until we can reverse the values that give birth to cannibals we will have to suffer the consequences and hope and pray for the return of the poets to right the wrongs committed by the cannibals.

Henry Flores, PhD, is the Distinguished University Research Professor, Institute of Public Administration and Public Service; Director, Masters in Public Administration (MPA); Professor of International Relations and Political Science at St. Mary’s University.