Tomorrow I will join dozens of other Americans in not watching the Super Bowl.
Oh, no! I’ll miss Madonna’s halftime show! Thanks, but I’d rather watch ants crawling in and out of the ant-hill. The Stupid Bowl halftime show is always some boring entertainer that you’ve already seen hundreds of times, whether you wanted to or not. The real trick is avoiding Madonna altogether.
But you’ll miss the six hours’ worth of pre-game coverage! Eh? What can they find to talk about for six hours?
I have banished TV from my home, but I still have to listen to an infinite number of radio ads with Stupid Bowl themes. These are almost indescribably offensive. In most of them, adult males are portrayed as the equivalent of poorly brought-up four-year-olds, who would be almost certain to defecate on the sofa if their long-suffering wives didn’t nag them constantly. And on Stupid Bowl Sunday, the talking heads who nag you all year about healthy eating turn around and exhort you to sit on the couch for 16 hours gobbling snacks and fast food.
Somewhere along the way, they supposedly get around to actually playing a football game–not that you’d notice.
Alas! Is it come to this? Are we Americans become so tame, so lame, so empty-headed, that we can be led around by the nose, and brought to invest so much time, so much passion, so much money in a freakin’ football game? I suppose 150 years of public schooling, with its emphasis on mindless conformity, has truly done its work. If we’re told to do it often enough, by enough voices in the media, who knows what we might not do? How else do you think a community-organizing mystery man, with no more biography than a robot or a lizard-man, gets elected president?
It must be some kind of hypnotism. You are passionately interested in the Super Bowl. You are passionately interested in the Super Bowl…
No, no, no! You shall not tell me what I’m passionate about! I refuse to waste my passion on a stupid football game! (But isn’t that kind of what you’re doing now, old sport?) All right, all right–I have gotten cranked up about it. Maybe football brings out the worst in me.
But really, it’s not about football at all. It’s about cultural slavery, and marching when they tell you to march, and stopping when they tell you to stop, and, finally, drinking the poison Kool-Aid…
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