The writer is in America
I’VE lived in this wonderful country since the early days of the Reagan administration but have yet to watch a Super Bowl, namely, the annual league championship game of the National Football League (NFL) of the United States, somewhat analogous to the FA Cup Final I used to watch with my father when I was growing up in England.
I say this without any pride whatsoever. In fact, there have been many moments over the past half-century that I have felt an occasional pang of guilt over my lack of interest in a sporting extravaganza that this year attracted around 120million TV viewers, about a third of the population of the United States.
Nevertheless I feel compelled to celebrate an event that encourages families and friends to gather in front of widescreen televisions, drink beer that is almost entirely bereft of flavour or any other redeeming qualities, and compulsively munch on some of the unhealthiest food in human history. In this increasingly atomised culture, where families eat separately so as not to lose screentime, such gatherings, when millions of Americans, regardless of social class or racial and ethnic identity, are becoming more and more rare. We live in a world that is doing its level best to tear families apart and divide people according to invented characteristics like race and ethnicity, so I endorse anything that brings people together.
Part of my problem with the Super Bowl lies with my complete inability to understand the esoteric game of American football. A few years ago, a dear colleague, an accomplished teacher of history, psychology and civics, a football coach of some local renown and a moulder of young men’s characters, tried to explain American football to me. I listened attentively and even took notes, but had I been in a class the gentleman was teaching, he would have immediately phoned my parents and urged them to sign whatever form was required in order to have me removed from his class and enrolled in a much less demanding class, possibly a remedial one, and urged them to seek a sympathetic doctor to have me diagnosed with a learning disability. Poor man: he would have had an easier job explaining Hegelian dialectics or the finer points of Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language to me. I must be one of the few husbands in America whose wife knows more about football than he does.
Still, this year’s Super Bowl caught my attention. This isn’t to say I actually watched it. Heaven forbid. Wagner’s sublime The Master-Singers of Nuremberg at close to five hours, no problem, but over four hours of American football, count me out. I spent most of the day writing and listening to Brahms and Schumann. In the evening, my wife and I started watching Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the first time in many years. Hard to think that the nation where I was born and grew up was once capable of producing such intelligent and adult televisual fare. Magnificent stuff. Television taken to the level of middlebrow art. Yes, I know, I’m a snob. Tell me about it.
But back to the reason that this year’s Super Bowl sparked my interest: it wasn’t the football, which I’ve been assured was boring. What shocked me — nay, disgusted me — was what took place during the halftime show. Indeed, it was one of those moments when a man thinks he might have lived too long.
It is customary in this event to feature a prominent pop singer, megastars such as Prince or Michael Jackson, and put on an elaborate show during half-time. This year, as America gets ready to celebrate its 250th birthday, someone called Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, took the stage. Dubbed the ‘King of Latin Trap’ (Latin trap being a subgenre of Latin hip hop music that originated in Puerto Rico) Mr Martinez Ocasio — I’m sorry, I can’t keep calling him by his ridiculous stage name, I simply can’t — sang entirely in Spanish, which is just as well as the profanity-laden songs would not have been allowed in English.
I hesitated a week before I plucked up the courage to watch this abomination on YouTube. What I saw horrified me. If ever you need proof that America is in a rapidly declining spiral of civilisational suicide, despite the efforts of President Trump to save it, look no further than this divisive, pornographic and degrading spectacle of corporate-sponsored anti-American smut.
Masquerading as a celebration of Puerto Rican culture, with much of the action taking place against a backdrop of sugar-cane fields and Brooklyn bodegas, this crass diatribe against the United States made my blood boil and continues to do so, even more now that I’ve accessed the English translations of the songs, if ‘song’ is the right word.
What made my blood boil? Let me count the ways.
First, there were the pornographic lyrics, sung, as I said above, almost entirely in Spanish. Celebrations of promiscuous sex and taking drugs do not belong in an event where children are present or watching at home on television, let alone explicit references to male and female genitalia. At one point, Ocasio refers to his ‘dick being on fire’. Elsewhere, he refers to a woman who ‘took a pill that made her horny’ . . . and then ‘f***s in the Audi, not in the Honda’. There were references to ‘gasoline’, which often refers to semen in Spanish slang.
Perhaps the real horror of the evening was the way the performers moved during the performance, Ocasio included. Young women ‘twerking’ and provocatively accentuating their bottoms is, sadly, a mainstay in our increasingly sexualised culture; but when did it become acceptable for grown men ostentatiously to grab their crotches in public, with Ocasio leading the way while dry-humping the air? When did it become acceptable for two men to simulate gay sex at an event that is supposedly family-friendly?
Don’t believe me? Check the video.
I could list the many other abominations I witnessed watching this festival of vulgarity and smut, unbelievably described by the Washington Post as ‘wholesome’ entertainment and a celebration of ‘family values’, with the ghastly Guardian dubbing it a ‘thrilling ode to Boricua [Puerto Rican] joy’.
But before I conclude, allow me to put the smut aside, which fewer and fewer of my fellow Americans seem to notice anyway, and finish by drawing attention to what were, for me, the most troubling aspects of this year’s Super Bowl.
First, before the football started, there was the singing of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’, universally known as the Black National Anthem. A sovereign nation should have only one national anthem, one that celebrates the entire nation regardless of racial or ethnic identity.
Second, as the half-time performance drew to a close, Ocasio, after singing God Bless America, went on to list every sovereign state in the Western hemisphere, from south to north, the United States being the penultimate listed, casually, incidentally, and almost as an afterthought.
What I witnessed during those 15 minutes of the half-time show for America’s greatest sporting event was yet more evidence (I’m not yet ready to say conclusive evidence, though I am coming closer by the day) that my adopted country and the country where my beloved wife was born and grew up, is on an irreversible downward spiral to a dystopic, pornified hell — a hell riven by identitarian conflict and societal anomie, cultural and artistic decadence, and violence.
