People Power
Organised sport has always disgusted me: making all allowances for it’s devotees’ belief that it serves as a mimicry of warfare, spiritual and actual, without the latter’s ontological import; and the fact that for the players — who are undoubtedly, if only very minorly, skilled — it improves health [ up to a certain point after which it diminishes it instead ] the idea of caring whether one bunch of eejits beat another bunch of eejits merely exemplifies the sadness of existence, no matter how preferable it is to not existing longer.
It is noticible that the rulers most scorned are the pacifically minded > few have been so thoroughly excoriated as James the First & Saxt, no matter how sensible his policy — continued by his great son — of avoiding direct participation in the Thirty Years War. Similarly, the Emperor Honorius is disliked for concentrating upon feeding his pigeons, maybe a rather expreme expression of Voltaire’s advice to cultivate your garden… yet ending gladiatorial combat is definitely preferable to continuing to give people what they want… Animal games continued for a century or two though. Sport as religion is as tolerant of unbelievers, as full of fake moral ( social ) reasoning, and as empty as most real religions; yet if the participants enjoy it, let them, so long as they don’t proselytize — it’s those who merely watch, live vicariously by giving it meaning it cannot possess, and pay for such imbecility who are still lesser beings. Is there any aspect of life in which democracy is not a wholly vile concept ?
The musician was dead and the animals were fighting for the parts of his body strewn over the hillside. The crowd was weak from laughter and the girls on the barge were laughing too. The Master of the Games gave another signal.
This time nothing seemed to happen. Then one of the girls on the barge suddenly gave a shriek of terror. She was seated on the gunwale and the water in the arena was washing against her bare feet. The barge was sinking. The other girls took fright. Jumping up, they began screaming for help. A slave inside the barge had been watching through a knothole for the Master of the Games’ signal. When it came, he gave orders to pull out the plugs and sink the vessel. The paddlers inside the barge had escaped through a hatch and were now feverishly swimming for the podium wall, praying that they could reach it before the crocodiles and hippos got them.
Hippos are by no means the big good-natured pig-like creatures that they seem. These animals were all bulls and in a very bad temper. A slave happened to touch one of the creatures. Instantly the hippo swung around, making the water swirl around him, and plunged his great tusks into the man’s body. As the red dye spread, the crocs began to thrash around, sometimes seizing a hippo by the leg and sometimes each other. The crowd rose to its feet as one man at this new spectacle. The barge full of screaming girls was now awash and some of the more determined girls had plunged into the water and were trying to swim to the mountain island or reach the podium.
Few of them made it for the Master of the Games had carefully selected girls who were non-swimmers. Those who reached the mountain were promptly attacked by the wild animals, now crazed by the scent of blood and the taste of the dead Greek. A few reached the podium wall and clung to it, screaming for mercy. The water around the barge was churned white as the crocs attacked the girls that still clung to the wreck. Two of the mighty reptiles seized one girl and began twisting in opposite directions. One wrung off a leg, the other an arm. One gigantic animal that must have weighed well over a ton reared out of the water and grabbed a girl standing on the gunwale. He submerged with her, carrying the shrieking girl as easily as an elephant carrying a carrot. Others of the enormous saurians were trying to knock the girls into the water with their tails. The barge, being made of wood, did not sink completely but there was no protection on it for the women.
Several of the hippos were approaching the barge, excited by the noise and the smell of blood. Although not carnivorous, the big brutes were as aggressive as bulls. Only their eyes and noses showed above the water as they floated studying the hysterical excitement on the remains of the barge. The crowd was furious. People yelled, “Go on there, you big slobs ! Do something ! Get the fire !” for bulls that would not perform were occasionally goaded into action by throwing burning javelins into them.
Then one of the hippos charged the barge. Lifting his head and shoulders out of the water and opening his huge mouth to its fullest capacity, he plunged his two tusks over the gunwale and began to worry the vessel like a terrier shaking a rat. The submerged wreck heaved and shook as two tons of enraged hippo struggled with it. The last of the screaming girls was flung into the water and the white bellies of the crocs flashed as they twisted in the water, trying to wring off pieces of their prey.
The mob was now uncontrollable. Women stood up in the stands drumming with their fists on the backs of people in the seats before them and screaming hysterically: “Kill ! Kill ! Kill !” Even before the games started, smart young men could spot women who would give way to this madness and make a point of sitting next to them. While in the grip of hysteria, the women were unconscious of everything else and the boys could play with them while they screamed and writhed at the bloody spectacle below them. Old men, long impotent, sat drooling gleefully. Even ordinarily normal men watched with mouths hanging half open, eyes staring eagerly to take in every detail, and then fought their way out through the crowd to take advantage of the prostitutes assembled in the arches under the building. Children shouted and danced on their seats, as much to relieve their nervous tension as with joy at the sight below them. Only in the lower ring of seats were there connoisseurs who watched with dispassionate interest, commenting to each other on the strength and ferocity of the animals and criticizing the girls’ figures as they were dragged to their death.
Daniel P. Mannix : Those About To Die
