Super Bowl

Wait, don’t go away. This is the great Americana gala. I know, for you it’s the Stupor Bowl, time to catch up on your sleep but Sunday is our national holiday. There will be growls and jubilation. 120 million crazed Americans will grow fangs from their reptilian brain plus another 30 million overseas. 

At the same time our bifurcated cleavage will cleave together. Kumbaya on the couch. MAGA nitwits will share pizza and beer with democratic socialists. MSNBC will give high fives to Fox News. 16 billion dollars will be bet. Many will lose their shirts in this reenactment of World War I with American exceptionalism on display.

Listen to me; you’re not listening. Football, with all its human tonnage, is the brainiest of all sports. If you don’t believe me we can meet in the back alley. Eleven oversized men on each side move with precise assignments to execute each play. There is agility and finesse. It is chess with stretchers. A concussion here and there. Encephalopathy down the line is indefensible. 

I never allowed my sons to play but then again I don't have any sons. Consider the comradery. Who knows what goes on in those huddles. Where else do men huddle? Maybe even commune. And when the game is over they embrace their adversaries. Inarguably an advance over the Roman gladiators who never embraced the lions.

Think of it this way, football is a way of sublimating male aggression. Without it we might be well into WWIII. The game is a version of trench warfare fighting over yards. Better this than the carnage in Ukraine. Let them vent with controlled but violent infantilism.

When I was 16, I followed college football well enough to pick the winners of 17 out of 20 games. I was the headline of the newspaper. The only problem was that the paper was the Daily Worker, a publication of the Communist Party. I couldn’t show off to my friends but I’m sure J. Edgar Hoover took note. I expect the FBI opened a file on me. My mother and father were Party members but the thought of my Dad violently overthrowing the government was laughable. He couldn’t overthrow my mother.  But I digress.

Will I be watching the game this year? Who’s playing? I’m for the team with the Black quarterback but both teams have Black quarterbacks. Then I’m for the team with the injured quarterback. They are both injured. This is the end of the season. Everyone is injured. It is a game between a hospital ward and a rehab. If I watch it I'll be entering the mindset of a fan, living vicariously, plunging ahead into the realm of the irrational.

There will be a winner and a loser. On Monday morning the world will go on, unchanged. It is merely theater after all.