The college football season has begun. I know this because a player for Oregon has been thrown off his team for cold-cocking a player from, I think, Boise State following the latter’s narrow victory in the opener.

I’ve seen the video, players from both teams milling around, some with helmets off. The Boise State player, one Byron Hout, grabbed the Oregon player, star running back LeGarrette Blount, and appeared to follow a few brief remarks with a smirk just before Bount knocked him on his ass. It was a really terrific punch, a right cross, I think it was. Boom!

According to the AP story, it happened like this:

“Celebrating the victory on the Broncos’ trademark blue turf, Hout yelled in Blount’s face and tapped him on the shoulder pad. Before Boise State coach Chris Petersen could pull Hout away, Blount landed a right to Hout’s jaw, knocking him to his knees.”

Perhaps Hout, a defensive end, was reminding Blount that Boise had held him to minus-five yards on eight carries, rubbing it in a little. Perhaps Blount, his pride wounded and now having to endure some smart-ass lines from that burr-head cracker, just snapped. Maybe it was playing on blue (!!!) turf. It adds up.

Blount will never play for Oregon, or probably anyone, again. Hout will get a good “talking-to”. Violence is not acceptable from football players once the whistle blows. Before that, take the fucker’s head right off, you get featured on one of those “Play of the week” videos.

Look, it’s the nature of the endeavor. High-stakes football, as in war, requires a serious course of desensitization. Most people do not easily jump at the chance to decaptitate someone; if they’re going to do the program any good, that fussiness has to be excized. In boot camps and training camps, the mental object is the same: bring the recruit past the point where he or she has any reluctance to inflict pain, injury, and even, in the military, death.

Certainly we all know this. We’ve got a highly-militarized society, and that came about because we’ve been sold on the regrettable necessity for official violence. Therefore, when a 72-year-old motorist in Florida is hit with 20,000 volt taser shocks because she objected, verbally, to a traffic stop, we shake our heads but we move on.

Move on. Nothing to look at here.

Right now one of the major under-reported scandals involves the staggering suicide rate among Iraqi war veterans; an even bigger scandal: returning vets who kill others, including their own spouses or families.

The reason that nobody wants to talk about it is that the implications are evident. Teach millions of young people to objectify and assault, and in the case of the military, to kill, and you’ve got to figure some of them will keep right on going.

Violence may be a tactic for military commanders, politicians, and football coaches, but it’s not something human beings can turn on and off like an electrical switch. Therefore, recruits have to be brainwashed. It is necessary that this be so; you cannot run an army if your troops hesitate in combat situations.

Military psy-ops have long realized that most people have ‘triggers’ which can elicit violence, and various programs employing psychological testing have been used to locate ‘special’ people who are both unusually agreeable to inflicting pain and unusually susceptible to modes of programming.

The disclosure of some of the tortures engaged in by American forces in the fake “war on terror” was accompanied by the careful explanation that these were the acts of rogue personnel. Indeed, soldiers have been prosecuted. Yet the programs which make torture possible are intentionally devised by military and political planners, and the administration of torture is a conscious policy.

It’s a long way from a football program at a major university to Guantanamo and the other hellholes America now operates around the world, yet there is a formulative link.

What we have elevated as important in the U.S., what has come to represent ‘success’, has necessarily created a culture of violence and predation. We are seeing its effects in every area of our lives, from the great bank heist to drug wars in our streets. We are seeing it in hate radio and in staged or incited incidents at supposed town hall meetings on health care.

LeGarrette Blount is one guy, a black running back from Mississippi playing at Oregon, who snapped, not without some provocation. But these days most of the nails are not being pounded down.

It is passing curious that quite recently another football sucker punch, one that sent the victim to the hospital, has been swept under the carpet by mutual consent among the perpetrator, the victim, the police, the city powers-that-be in Oakland, and for that matter the state authorities. The head coach of the Raiders, white, incidentally, caved-in the face of an assistant coach; witnesses told about it. But nobody’s talking now. It’s an “internal” matter.

If you’re important, it’s an internal matter. Criminal outfits such as Bear Stearns handle their own problems, no need for the government to bother. If you did what Citibank executives did, you’d be in prison.

The culture of violence never helps the poor. It never helps anybody on the lower end of the scale because violence is used most effectively by those with the wherewithal to command it and the juice to get away with it. That ain’t you. It’s Monsanto and Chevron, and Boeing, and whoever hires Blackwater Security, which has changed its name to “xe”, presumably because the old name was too closely associated with murder.

The culture of violence doesn’t help most people. It’s pervasive now because it has paid off so far. We’ve let it happen, maybe even invited it. We are now inured ourselves to the infliction of pain, boot camp recruits by proxy. Cops taser an old woman in her car, we notice but are moved only for an instant. The old woman, we didn’t know her. What’s on television tonight?