Taylor Swift Is a Welcome Distraction at America's Most Dismal Public Event

It's Super Bowl Sunday, and this is the first Super Bowl I can remember whose discourse is dominated by someone who will be merely attending the event instead of playing or performing at halftime. There's already been a secondary discourse about why the hell conservatives seem so upset at Taylor Swift. I am not here to participate in that, but to proclaim that I welcome how she has added something new and welcome to the Super Bowl mix.

The Super Bowl is by far the most dismal event in American life, and that is saying something. It is supposed to be the championship game of a sport proven to turn its participants' brains into mush, a sport defined by the American dysfunctions of violence and commercial breaks. At this point, however, the Super Bowl is not really a football game. Half of the game's viewers probably have not seen a full football game this season. They are watching because it has become a media spectacle, one of the few that exists anymore that people from the entire broad social spectrum can participate in. It's also just another excuse for the excess consumption of tasteless lite beer and garbage food. It happens on a Sunday evening to boot, making work the next day even more miserable than your average Monday.

A significant chunk of the audience is watching just for the commercials. Is there anything more dismal than advertising being turned into entertainment? The structure of football itself makes this easy, considering that it has frequent breaks, and the ball is barely in play. Famously, there are only eleven minutes of action in a broadcast that lasts over three hours, and a lot of that action is boring two yard runs up the middle. The Super Bowl thus represents the triumph of capitalism where the advertising at the game ends up being more significant than the game itself. 

Even though I can't tear my eyes away, I've long felt that the Super Bowl sucks. It's certainly appropriate that due to changes in the NFL's schedule that it is played in mid-February, the most depressing, wretched time of the year. This year, Taylor Swift's presence has led to Super Bowl backlash for all the wrong reasons from the world's most irritating reactionaries. I, on the other hand, welcome her participation. She will give something to bond with my daughters over, who are normally lukewarm on this event. Swift is a cultural phenomenon on the level of Beatlemania right now, and like Beatlemania it's a lot of fun to participate in. Certainly a lot more fun than three hours of commercials. 

Crap Super Bowl Moments

This Sunday brings the Super Bowl, the massive consumerist orgy that is the high holy holiday of late capitalist America. The event has taken on a life of its own, where people who normally don't give a shit about football watch the game for the commercials. It comes on Sunday evening, cruelly forcing revelers to have to go to work on short rest, taunting the proles and cubicle drones to remind them of who their true master is.

When I was growing up, the Super Bowl seemed to be a lame blowout every year, two weeks of ridiculous hype leading to a massive letdown. In that spirit, I would like to share my favorite crap Super Bowl moments.

Super Bowl X Halftime Show (1976)

The halftime entertainment at several Super Bowls in the old days was provided by Up With People, who seemed to be a Nixon-era CIA psy-op to convert the countercultural youth into loyal members of the Silent Majority via the power of song. Their performances are awful, but none possibly worse than this Bicentennial extravaganza featuring songs like "200 Years And Just A Baby."

Larry Brown Winning the Super Bowl XXX MVP (1996)

The Super Bowl MVP award is such a strange thing. It's usually awarded to the winning team's quarterback, even if they do not play an exceptional game. Of course, sometimes it's given to someone else and they still manage to screw it up. Cowboys cornerback Larry Brown got the MVP in Super Bowl XXX for intercepting two passes. Both were important to the game, but they had less to do with Brown and more to do with Steeler's quarterback Neil O'Donnell being less accurate than a Rasmussen poll. A prime example of stats being over-valued.

Joe Buck's Lame Call of David Tyree's Catch in Super Bowl XLII (2008)

The most dramatic, most clutch catch in Super Bowl history, and Joe Buck calls it like a routine play. If this man was not John Buck's son I doubt he would ever have been let anywhere near a national broadcast booth. Even when the Super Bowl is a good one, its drama is destroyed by the NFL's lameness.

Super Bowl XXVIV (1995)

A boring lame blowout that's probably the worst of the worst. The 1990s 49ers juggernaut led by Steve Young facing a mediocre Chargers team piloted by...Stan Humphries. The game was over before it started. Bonus: the anthem was sung by Kathie Lee Gifford.

Michael Jackson's Halftime Performance at Super Bowl XVII (1993)

Michael Jackson's tragic death has had the unfortunate effect of covering his life and career in a rose-colored hue. Beyond the personal scandal, he spent the 90s putting out a lot of crap music. He also kicked off the modern era of pop star halftime shows with this creepy display of what appears to be fascist aesthetics.

Bud Bowl I (1989)

America's most crap beer gave rise to one of the most crap Super Bowl traditions: the Bud Bowl. Witness early computer graphics and terrible humor. See anthropomorphic beer bottles somehow carry footballs and talk trash. I will admit, this is one of those so godawful it's good crap moments. Corporations play it too safe to be this gloriously stupid nowadays.

Some Suggestions For Improving the Super Bowl

When I was a boy, I fervently looked forward to Super Sunday.  I devoured the pre-game analysis in the newspapers and magazines, watched hours of pre game television, and normally viewed the game like a scholar, by myself.  (My dad has always disliked pro football.)  My enthusiasm was likely helped along by the first two Super Bowls I watch, the hard-fought 1982 game between the Bengals and 49ers, and the next year's close contest between Miami and Washington.  The latter featured a dramatic fourth down run by John Riggins in the fourth quarter, where the big man from Kansas broke loose for a long run in the open.

The blow-outs that followed still had their moments, though, like William "Refrigerator" Perry's touchdown run in '86 or crafty, quiet veteran Doug Williams lighting up a Broncos team lead by the over-hyped John Elway in 1988.  As the years went by, I began to notice things that I'd heard others complain about, namely the ridiculous hype, rampant consumerism, and general soullessness of the game itself.  The most visceral, exciting thing that happened in last year's Super Bowl was a power outage.  The game needs changes to make it good again, and I have a few suggestions.

Stop Playing On Neutral Fields
This issue, like many that the Super Bowl, stems from the game's origins.  When the Super Bowl first began, in 1967, professional football was still a recently popular sport finding its bearings.  The Super Bowl was thus a showcase for the rising game, whereas today the NFL dominates the American sports landscape.  There is no need to give it showcase trappings, and one of the biggest is the neutral field.  Early on, the games were all in attractive, warm-weather locales guaranteed to bring in fans and fill the seats.  Since then, the NFL has used it to reward teams for building new stadiums, hence Super Bowls in non-touristy places like Jacksonville and Detroit.  Does anybody want to go to Detroit in February, or go to Jacksonville in any month, unless they can really help it?  The neutral location also has the crummy side effect of cutting down on fan participation (as does the NFL's policy of reserving tickets for corporate types rather than rooters.)

The team with the best regular-season record (computer adjusted for strength of schedule) would get to have home field advantage.  The one exception would be if the two teams played during the season, then the winner would get home turf.  Doing this will drastically amp up the atmosphere for the game.  Denver and Seattle both have notably noisy and boisterous crowds, either would make the game more interesting.  I think of other sports and their great championship moments, and many are related to their stadiums.  Carlton Fisk's famous home run in the 1975 World Series would not have been nearly as dramatic had it not kissed off of the Fenway foul pole.  Magic Johnson's mini-skyhook buzzer-beater against the Celtics in 1987 was that much more amazing in that it came in the old Boston Garden, a place where the Celtics teams of the 80s almost NEVER lost.

Get Rid of Media Week
The Super Bowl is the most hyped event on the calendar in this country, why do we need an extra week to hype it?  Again, this is a vestige of a former time, when the game had a different purpose and the NFL craved extra attention.  The additional time off between games messes with players' rhythms, and allows coaches more time to exploit their opponents' weaknesses, something that lead to the boring blowouts of the past.

Eliminate the Half Time Show
This has always been an atrocity.  Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, Up With People did many of the shows.  (Want a taste of their super-sweet saccharine smarm?  Here you go.  They make Pat Boone look edgy.)  As if that wasn't bad enough, there was the trend of hiring pop stars after Michael Jackson's 1993 performance complete with fascist dictator chic.  After that we got Britney Spears paired with Aerosmith atrocity, Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction," the Black Eyed Peas stinking up the joint, and over-the-hill rockers like the Who and Rolling Stones.  The only good half time I've seen was Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band, and that was because the Boss and his pals just gave the audience a taste of their legendary stage show, and seemed to be having a blast.  Unless they have Bruce perform, skip the half time show, which will also shorten the game time, which is lengthened by having a longer half.

Bring Back the Bud Bowl
Young men of my generation fondly remember the animated game that played out between Budweiser and Bud Light during the commercial breaks in the Super Bowl.  If the game is a stinker, we can at least have the suspense of knowing whether Bud Dry's lighting passing arm can bring his team back.  The Bud Bowl may be the one positive thing that Budweiser has ever done for humanity.

Tone Down the Nationalism
The NFL has cravenly linked its brand to the US military, no more flagrantly than their exploitation of the death in combat of former player Pat Tillman, who had actually become critical of the war in Afghanistan near the end of his life.  The bombastic national anthems, jet plane flyovers, and flag waving combined with football's valorization of violence all combine to make a potent brew of militarist propaganda.  We could use a lot less of that.

Cranky Bear Takes on the Super Bowl

[Editor's Note: I'm enjoying some family time this weekend, so I thought I'd turn the reins over to my friend Cranky Bear, who has been chomping at the bit to get one of his missives published.  As usual, I claim no responsibility for what follows.]

Hello y'all, Cranky Bear here with a glass of smooth Portugese table wine and a plate of pasta puttanesca to warm my belly on a cold February night.  Tomorrow is our nation's most popular unofficial holiday, the Super Bowl.  It is a holiday that represents much that is rotten and awful in American society, and I am here to deliver a sermon on this theme.

We live in a society debilitated by consumerism, marred by violence, stupefied by mass media, made flabby by gluttony, and politically stunted by mindless, jingoistic nationalism.  The Super Bowl puts all of these things in a big, bombastic package.  It all seems to have very little to do with its ostensible purpose, which is to decide the champion of the National Football League.  There are masses of people who don't give a flying fuck about who's actually playing, and are waiting to see what commercials are airing.  (Yes, we are so consumerist in our outlook that advertisements have become entertainment.)  Others are just amped for a Sunday of eating seven layer bean dips and bacon-wrapped little smokies washed down with large quantities of beer.

Super Sunday itself only comes after two full weeks of unremitting hype.  "Media week," the extra week off between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl, is an inescapable torrent of inane story lines, stupid questions, and idiotic speculation.  Even more so that presidential elections, the run-up to the Super Bowl exposes the complete utter fucking vapidity of national press.  It is such a ridiculous spectacle that there is even media coverage of media week itself as its own phenomenon.  It's America's uselessly shallow post-modernism at its most empty and soul-sucking.

As true sports fans know, the Super Bowl has long been a let-down when it comes to on-field excitement, especially after two weeks of media saturation.  Growing up, it seemed that every year brought a new blow-out.  Yes, there have been exceptions, like the 1991 Giants-Bills game that ended with Scott Norwood's wide right field goal try, or the Giants-Patriots in 2008 tilt that turned on David Tyree's famous "helmet catch."  However, more typical is the Stan Humphries-led Chargers getting vivisected by Steve Young's 49ers 49-26 in 1995.  Many of the games that look close on paper were actually snoozers.  Other sports have a lot more excitement in their championships.  Nothing in the Super Bowl has ever come close to matching Magic Johnson's last second mini-skyhook at the old Boston Garden in game four of the 1987 NBA finals or Kirk Gibson's home run to win game one of the 1988 World Series.  I doubt anything ever will.  In both of those games I felt giddily stunned, as if the world had fallen off of its axis.  Nothing in the Super Bowl, not even the Tyree catch, has made me feel.

The Super Bowl is hardly worthy of a sport that is America's most popular, but that popularity increasingly perplexes me.  The NFL is a carnival of technocratic violence, of men with impossibly large bodies smashing into each other again and again and again.  It is becoming increasingly obvious that the physical and mental toll of the game destroys the lives of players and their families.  The game has become so specialized and strategized that individual excellence is increasingly hard to find, apart from a small number of players who are endlessly touted in the mass media.  And to a greater extent than other professional sports, NFL players like to spout off about how God enabled them to win the big game.  There is perhaps no more prominent platform for the spewing of the narcissistic "by this sign you shall conquer" brand of idiot American religiosity.

Worst of all is the Super Bowl's (and NFL's) exploitation of jingoistic nationalism.  The NFL was just as complicit in turning Pat Tillman from a doubting soldier killed by friendly fire into a larger than life he-man used to gin up support for our misbegotten adventure in Afghanistan.  Once the real circumstances of his death emerged, the league was more than happy to play up its associations with the military while letting Tillman's name drop from the conversation.  Each year seems to bring plenty of flag-waving and tributes to the military, complete with jet flyovers and bombastic renditions of the national anthem.  At home the people stuffing their fat fucking faces full of buffalo wings can feel like they've taken a moment to "think about the troops" without doing a goddamned thing to contemplate the misery and death that our nation's wars have caused and still do.

It's only appropriate, I guess, that this year's display of empty-headed national pride will be taking place in the New Orleans Superdome, site of one of this country's greatest shames, the treatment of victims of Hurricane Katrina.  I wonder if anyone will bother to think much about that, beyond some maudlin sentiments to wash down the guacamole and bean dip.  How soon we forget such things, and fuck the Super Bowl for perpetuating our nation's moronic, soulless way of being.