Super Bowl

Even though Hallmark hasn't figured out how to cash in on it, the Super Bowl is our true national holiday, the Sunday set aside in which we pay homage to the two guiding principles of American life….aggression and consumerism, might and material goods. Hopefully the violence is benign and the advertising results in purchases sufficient to ratchet up the economy.

There is nothing to get the blood circulating so much as rooting for our favorite gladiators. And if winning isn’t enough there is the betting; the point spread, the total score etc… Ten billion dollars is expected to be exchanged on this game by 200 million people. Once again it will be, by far, the most watched TV program of the year.

Too bad wars couldn’t be settled this way; wolfing down beer and pizza and no loss of life. The best part is that on Monday morning nothing will have changed. Everybody cares and then nobody cares.……..unless you bet and lost your shirt. Are we reaching the point when the existential questions of life are settled, once removed and with no consequences?

On the other hand there is the coming together. The living room becomes a sort of public space with animated discourse; some between friends, some directed at the TV set. For a few hours the political divide is bridged, class and race are set aside. New alliances are forged. A new occupy movement is sprung.

Another American phenomenon….99% of those in attendance in Indianapolis will be White. 90% of the players are Black. Bigots will live in Black skin jeering White opponents. But they’ll soon get over it.

Next month is March Madness followed by the NBA finals where a few racists may experience a humanistic awakening but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Some people, I’m told, mute the game and turn up the volume just for the commercials. A new species has emerged; avid viewers of advertising. Everything has become commodified. Our fantasies are marketed, bought and sold. The manipulated enjoying the manipulators.

Indeed, this has become a much-anticipated art form. What new products will be unveiled in astonishing ways that knock our jerseys off our backs? Forget the game. The enduring memory will be Apple’s latest or some new technology, without which, we never knew our remaining days could not be lived.

While all this is going on, about a dozen of us will gather for our monthly Salon, watch a film on great Directors, munch some morsels and talk about the issues raised or anything else on our mind …as long as it doesn’t get around to the game. Not that we are above such things, only off to the side.

Football

Baseball is life, so they say, and I don’t disagree. But that was when we were pastoral and puny; a diamond in the rough, heedless of time as we ran around the bases counter-clockwise. Now football is our pastime, a metaphor for business and for war, for all things adversarial. It is America’s game; what we do at home, vicariously, while our military is occupying enemy territory, shocking, awing and droning. 18 of the top 20 most watch T.V. programs are football games, as befits our muscular foreign policy.

We bet on outcomes as if we were generals, fantasizing our armies, devising strategies. Concuss or be concussed. Football players do battle in padded gear and we sit on the couch growling and guzzling. I know; I’m one of them, feeding my reptilian brain.

Of course I look at it as a choreographed ballet of bulky bodies; a cerebral sport with blocking assignments, Hail Marys, fakes and audibles improvised at the line of scrimmage as the quarterback reads the defense. The gridiron is a chessboard with an occasional stretcher.

The game itself often brings out 100,000 fans on Saturday and brings in ten of millions of dollars for division one NCAA schools. It is a growth industry on many campuses. Few student-athletes make it as professionals. Whatever glory is achieved and no doubt,embellished over time, is generally accompanuied by scars followed by an early blue plaque for handicap parking.

Strange, how it is a peculiarly American game, unlike the futball played by the rest of the world. Consider the shape of the ball; American exceptionalism again. Kick, run, pass. Use your hands, your feet, your helmet. A score is not one point as in soccer; it is six and with a conversion,7. There are no ties. We have sudden death as if life itself was on the line.

Football is an elongated march downfield, a muddied advance, played in rain or snow in defiance of the elements. Many exercise their right to bare arms. It is a manly game that spills hormones all over the field. Needed yardage is bulled for, straight ahead. Ulysses inches his way from post to post like the rest of us …. to swooning Penelopes cheering on the sideline. They huddle, we huddle. They fumble just as we bumble; missed assignments, sacks, broken patterns, interceptions. Once I may have punted on first down. This time I go for it on 4th and inches. One team gets to the end zone with victory swagger. It could be me.

The fans at the stadium suit up or down for the spectacle like a paramilitary unit with their gladiator faces, fangs and tattoos, often stripped for action. Aggression sublimated, one hopes.

It’s both brainy and brutal. I gladly let them reenact the ancient ritual. Perhaps football was more symbolic of trench warfare when armies battled for every foot of real estate. Today, our wars are fought with remote buttons against guerillas who vanish into caves or tunnels. The new national pastime might be a series of computer games which simulate both terrorism and occupation along with the next misadventure of a world power foolish enough to imagine we can police the planet. However, until drones come to our neighborhood, football will have to do.

Super Brawl

Baseball, Basketball and Football all occupy a place in my reptilian brain. Baseball has a claim as our pastoral game and Basketball, the urban sport but nothing bumps up the testosterone level as Football.

I’m glad we’ve devised ways to sublimate aggression and set aside next Sunday to ritualize our collective animus. This gives me time to get in touch with my schoolyard bully, my latent brute and killer-instinct. What about my lethal shoe which ended many lives in mid-crawl? There are still those among us who put stones in snowballs, obedient to a distant command, as if it meant tomorrow’s meat.

Some of us change into our jerseys, don the helmet and shoulder pads, sit on the couch talking trash while wolfing down pizza and beer as we grunt and curse the big screen. We have all afternoon to grow fur and fangs and slam the pillow. Un-cage the beast; let him snarl and breathe fire. Great catharsis, it’s bred in the bone.

This is what I tell my wife: Relax, its just family time together. 130 million folks in a shared experience. Look at the sportsmanshp. These are college kids having some fun.

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WAIT A MINUTE! The SUPER BOWL IS ABOUT ADERTISING. THE CREATIVE GENIUS OF AMERICAN INGENUITY. AND THEN THERE'S THE HALF'.TIME SHOW.

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Football is a game of strategy, play books and assignments. It’s a brainy game. All about camaraderie and finesse. If a 300 pound line-backer happens to pile on, it must have been inadvertent.

It’s just theatre, really, with padded men re-enacting that battle of the first rock assault on the first cave. Look at the winner with his end-zone swagger just like a caveman pounding his chest.

If we are hard-wired as such, war as theatre trumps war as war. Before the Super Bowl, Christians were fed to lions or we slashed each other jostling to feed our beast. Of course, now, we would never resort to such violence; we just invade countries or bomb them with pilot-less planes from air conditioned, underground, un-disclosed air bases on far-away continents.

But I don’t suppose that gives the same release as men get, fighting for real estate on a gridiron, a yard here, an inch there with the clock running. It’s about territory, don’t you see. Even while super-powers make much over their publicized summit-huddles it’s really about going for the bomb and scoring with a Hail Mary. As the late coach Vince Lombardi, who could have been a general, famously said Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing particularly if we have money on it, as we do on our civilized way of life.

There may never be an armistice for that war we've declarded upon ourselves.