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Bowl of Confusion
While American football may not be everyone’s cup of amusement, understanding the mysterious ways of the National Football League may help to understand America.
The plague of a global pandemic and the ongoing atrocity of extrajudicial killings leading to widespread Black Lives Matter demonstrations exposes an unflattering view of American culture right in its own mirror. With travel halted and populations quarantined over the past year (so far), the whole show finally seems played out. We are the Land of the Free and we don’t even have a firm grip on what freedom means, let alone what it costs. The American Dream is a grim fantasy. In fact, the Sweet Land of Liberty is, more often than not, a brutal landscape of winners and losers wherein it is right and good and proper to lay out anything or anyone that gets in the way of victory. Armed cosplay Cossacks roam state and federal seats of government with violent tantrums in a vain and prolonged anti-authoritarian circle jerk with no apparent goal beside “owning the libs!”
But even now the Super Bowl is still our grand national midwinter festival. And it’s still the absurdly grandiose socio-economic advertising showcase for corporate cultural doublespeak. On one hand, we…