Today marks the end of summer, at least as Americans understand it, which means that our culture is about to be overrun by nonstop football. I don’t dislike the game of American football as much as I cannot stand the instant and endless analysis that comes with it — the minute breakdowns of plays, the vitriol over referee calls, the obnoxious presence of gambling hovering over every aspect of play.

It’s no great insight to point out the similarities between football and military culture, many insightful writers have beaten me to the point. But the fact that football is about to take over America once again feels like an approaching dark storm to me. I feel like I haven’t recovered from the trauma of the 2024 election and the endless, disgusting anti-trans advertising that was ever present during football games that fall. I feel even worse is about to hit us now.

I suppose I have my own forms of escape, via movies and books, except recently I stepped into a stream of thought that has become increasingly haunted with the ghosts of fascism past and our violent present. I began by re-reading Thomas Mann’s early 20th century masterpiece “The Magic Mountain,” that brilliant examination of the cultural and intellectual forces that pulled Europe into a cataclysmic war, and that ended with the intellectual, somewhat ailing protagonist Hans Castorp running for his life on the battlefields of the first World War.

I followed that up with Mann’s even darker examination of Germany’s decline into madness, his postwar novel “Doctor Faustus,” that again follows intellectuals and artists in their own personal quests for achievement and glory, only to lead to the horrors of fascism.

And if that weren’t enough, I’m now watching Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 hour adaptation of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” while also reading Roberto Bolano’s nearly 900 page epic of violence against women “2666.” Both of these works seem to be arguing that the forces that lead men to brutalize women are the same that lead to fascism. I haven’t had time to process the argument yet (and am still working my way through both) so I may need to sit in the trauma for a bit before coming up with a coherent intellectual response.

So, clearly, I’m not making a very strong effort to escape the troubles of the world. But I do see a relationship between these works and the forms of violent escape our culture embraces. The men who stand outside direct acts of violence in these movies and books I’m absorbing also wish to be comfortable with it. In “The Magic Mountain,” Intellectuals debate culture and politics in a Swiss sanatorium, but also freely discuss the value of war in some kind of “cleansing.” In “Doctor Faustus,” musicians speak of their work in martial terms, as if breaking music away from harmony would be the equivalent of German culture taking dominion over Europe.

Men pass women back and forth with each other in “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” and even someone who raped and murdered a woman is welcomed back into society without questions asked. And “2666” includes a brutal 400 or so page stretch detailing one horrendous act of violence against women after another in a Mexican border town, to the point that you can only conclude that it is an expected (and perhaps accepted) part of the culture.

And lest we think we have any superiority over these stories, our own era has the Epstein lore readily at hand.

What these works of art point out, consistently, is that the people who perpetrate the violence are only one part of the culture that permits it to happen. The so-called humanists who casually accept and approve of war are part of the drift into World War One. The musicians who extolled the German volk gave rise to the Nazis, as did the Berlin petty criminals who fed the societal breakdown.

And perhaps most strikingly in the early pages of “2666”, we see that even literary European intellectuals are capable of horrific acts of violence when their manhood is challenged.

We blur the lines between outright and passive violence in our culture and women are most often the victims. Growing awareness of this cultural rot is creating a crisis of masculinity that I think is overdue and will ultimately create opportunities for a better world, but the transition period is perilous.

Over time, I think men are going to need to recognize the forms of militarism that exist at every level of our society and root it all out. That doesn’t mean taking ridiculous actions like banning sports, but it does mean appreciating how acts of domestic violence rise as obsessive sports watching and gambling proliferate, among other things.

Do I have solutions and hope in all this? Absolutely not. But I am generally optimistic that the world can become less violent over time and horrific authoritarian systems can be rejected. For now, I can only work on my thoughts, attitudes and actions, and hope that I can influence my children. The world will have to muddle through and, I hope, not slip back into the worst form of itself.