War & Peace Quote by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck is doing what he does best: taking an American ritual that wants to be harmless and showing the machinery of myth humming underneath it. College football, in this framing, isn’t just a pastime; it’s a sanctioned theater where communities rehearse the emotional logic of conflict. “Glory and despair” is a deliberate pairing, yoking the triumphal pageantry to the gut-punch of loss, the way war language always smuggles in both romance and ruin.

The key move is “foreign state.” Steinbeck isn’t talking about nations; he’s talking about American states, which makes the word “foreign” feel faintly absurd - and then uncomfortably accurate. The subtext is that regional identity in the U.S. can behave like nationalism: proud, defensive, tribal, hungry for symbolic borders. A Texas team becomes “an army with banners,” a phrase that elevates the players into a collective emblem. They’re not just students in pads; they’re proxies for a whole public’s self-image, tasked with carrying it into combat under bright colors and fight songs.

Context matters: Steinbeck wrote across eras when mass spectacles and mass mobilizations blurred together - the Depression, World War II, the rise of modern advertising and broadcast culture. He’s not scolding fans so much as warning how easily the language of war colonizes everyday life, turning rivalry into righteousness and opponents into outsiders. The wit is in the exaggeration; the chill is in how little exaggeration it requires.