So there I was about to watch the Super
Bowl, I had a plate of nachos in front of me and a two liter soft
drink. I was about to participate in the American ritual that the
Super Bowl has become. It's been two years since I'd watched the game
and fourteen months since I'd watched any TV to speak of. There was a
time in my life when the TV was always on. You can't really
appreciate TV until you turn it off and then come back to it, because
for most of us the TV had been turned on for us since we were small
children.
We grow up with it, we accept it as a normal course
of events. We become conditioned to it and blind to its subtleties
and numb to its eccentricities. From Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street
or Mr. Rogers we accept watching TV as a normal daily course of
American living.
I read this morning that Super Bowl XLV set
records for viewers, I won't watch again, I found it crass and tinny.
The camera was sponsored by Budweiser, hell, everything was sponsored
by someone. It was Capitalist Christmas in all of its raging camp and
bubble gum trappings. The stadium with its stage lighting and giant
tacky TV screens, overpriced sky boxes and art decked hallways
donated by the owners family. It is a glittering steel and glass
monument to public - private partnerships, $1.15 billion in
construction costs subsidized by higher taxes on the working folks
who can't afford a ticket to the game anyway.
Fox broadcasting
did its normal whiz bang job and I honestly think that Fox could make
porn boring. The announcers, Joe Buck and Troy Aikeman it seems were
both trained at the Tim McCarver school for the inane. It seemed
their whole purpose was to distort the game and to annoy the viewers.
Why Troy Aikeman wasted all those years in the NFL when he had the
god given ability to read minds is beyond me. All night, Aikeman
explained to the viewers what the players on the field were thinking
during particular plays. Buck pattered out scenario's where player X
was a rookie and the team management didn't know for sure what his
capabilities might be. I shook my head in astonishment, management
recruited, signed and paid this player hundreds of thousands of
dollars but didn't know his capabilities?
It was myth making,
gushing hero worship right out of a Marvel Comic book. Captain
America plays football. Green Bay's star defensive back is injured
and the narrative becomes, can Green Bay recover from this disastrous
turn of events? What a relief this must be to the Steelers, I'm only
guessing here, but I had a gut feeling that Green Bay might have one
or two quality players left on the bench. This was an attempt by the
broadcast crew to create a story whether there was a story there or
not. They weren't reporting a story but creating a story.
You
can't be trusted to just watch they game, it must be explained to
you. You must be coddled and fed a steady diet of pabulum and never
under any circumstances are the announcers allowed to remain quiet
for more than a few seconds.
The TV commercials aired during
the Super Bowl have become as important a part of the ritual as the
game itself. I sat waiting to be dazzled by Madison Avenue and can
only assume that Madison Avenue hired copywriters without knowing
what their capabilities were. In the Mike Judge film, "Idiocracy"
America, in the future has become a nation of mindless idiots. In the
film, the number one American TV program is titled "Ow, My Balls"
where the main character suffers nut busting accident after accident.
The public can't get enough of it and I thought a lot about that film
the other night. In the Pepsi X commercial the nerd being picked on
pushes a button and cans of Pepsi fly out of the cooler to hit his
tormentors in the " you guessed it, the nuts. "Ow, My Balls!"
Then there was an animated Dairy Queen commercial where a cave man
trades a rock for fire. After the caveman accepts the rock in the
exchange he throws it at the other caveman and hits him in the head
and takes the torch back. Oh, the comedy! Oh, the hilarity!
"Ow, My Balls!"
Then there was a commercial with Richard
Lewis as a ...lumberjack? But the funny part was when Roseanne Bar is
hit by a big log! "Ow, My Balls!" How do they do it? Who manages
to think up this imaginative comedy?
Then came the half time
show, more glitz with a light show, the Black Eyed Peas drop like
paratroopers on to the stage. Then as a they perform their big
corporate radio hit former Guns and Roses guitar player Slash,
emerges from under the stage. Sure! That works, hard rock and hard
pap, then Usher drops from the sky. It was a hodgepodge full of glitz
and glam, zing and zam. Guaranteed to be a non-offensive spectacle, a
mixture of this and that jumbled into a hat thrown out on the fifty
yard line complete with black light show.
As I watched the
third quarter I began to wonder what was going on. Green Bay is
penalized for a face mask violation that wasn't a face mask
violation, giving Pittsburgh the ball on the fifty yard line. Then
Green Bay is penalized again for unsportsmanlike conduct when
Pittsburgh players tried to push a Green Bay player into a live ball.
Keep in mind that I don't care who wins and by this time I was
wishing it was all ready over. Then on a third down play Green
Bay completes a pass that was then stripped away and fallen on by
another Green Bay player. The referee declares the pass incomplete
even though the pass was caught and the runner had changed direction
with it.
It all just seemed as if someone was trying to keep
the game close.
AP- "In fact, the most-watched single play
of the game was Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger's final
incomplete pass to Mike Wallace with about a minute to go, according
to measurements by TiVo Inc., the digital video recorder maker. When
that pass hit the ground, it clinched the game for Green Bay.
Besides, I tend to be suspicious any time George W. Bush is
in the room. I wonder and have no way of knowing what the advertising
revenue was for the second half of the game? Are those advertisements
in the second half discounted? Are they even further discounted in
the event of a blowout? While I'm asking questions, if American Idol
is the number one program in America, why must Fox advertise it
during almost every commercial break?
AP- "People were much
less likely to stop the game to repeat the ads in the second half,
when the football action was compelling, Maitra said. No beer ads
made TiVo's top 10 rated ads for the game."
Then with the
game over, Roger Staubach walked the gauntlet of Green Bay players
while he held the Lombardi trophy. It was then, that it occurred to
me why I wasn't enjoying the game. Why I couldn't enjoy his climbing
up on a platform made to look like a giant silver football, because I
didn't belong there. Two years of homelessness and three years of
unemployment have stripped me of what many American's call,
"culture".
This game was all about consumerism and
product endorsements, big money and the hard sell. I didn't belong
here, it's been years since I bought a product that I didn't need for
basic survival. I don't live in that world anymore and what's more,I
don't want to. It isn't a question of intellect, it is a question of
peace. After watching two hours of television I was irritated, not
entertained. I was annoyed by the bad actors, stupid premises and
nerve jangling sounds effects.
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