Although this topic might seem quite dated by the time you
read it, it is nevertheless always relevant in modern America to discuss
professional sporting events or athletes. Professional sports are more important than
the economy, foreign affairs, or even the weather. I
could write a column about steroid abuse amongst Chinese ping pong athletes,
whether or not there even is such a thing, and get away with it because it has to
do with a quickly moving ball.
Considering that I am about to discuss the most important of all
sporting events, I am really a bit shocked you aren’t in the process of Skyping
various relatives in order to read them this column right now.
As a society, we learned a number
of important lessons from our most recent Super Bowl. Primarily, if you are in the middle of a
heavily televised, high stakes sporting events on its way to an uninspiring
blow out, kill the lights. Shutting off
the power makes everyone a little jumpy and is apparently enough to remind the
losing team that many people are watching them lose.
A
second thing we learned, and by “we” I mean my wife and I, is that our daughter
will no longer watch Super Bowl halftime shows.
Four-year-old girls should not tell anyone, much less out-of-town
guests, to “put a ring on it.”
Our
final lesson, and this one is by far the most crucial, is that our future
historians are really going to get off easy.
A thousand years from now, when our distant progeny are reading Pluribus: The Rise and Fall of the Last Western Empire,
chapter seven will begin like this:
“Many
of the symptoms of America’s moral degradation, from its sex-saturated media,
troubling fascination with violence, and intense consumption of processed
foods, can be analyzed almost in their entirety by a casual observation of an
early 21st century Super Bowl Sunday television broadcast. Despite the adulterated content of many Super
Bowl advertisements, the event, once merely a high stakes athletic competition,
by the end of the twentieth century had evolved into a cultural phenomenon of
intense religious significance. Antithetical
to the values in which most Americans of
the time purportedly believed, such as selflessness, temperance, and piety, Super
Bowl Sunday advertisements, by and large, celebrated the exact opposite
vices: greed, gluttony, violence, and
lust.”
In
other words, just about everything that is embarrassing about us as a culture
can be seen in overly priced, thirty-second spots scattered throughout the
game. And, despite the plausibility that
these commercials are used for terrorist recruitment somewhere on the planet,
having these commercials all in one place really does streamline the
head-scratching process.
“Hmmm,
I wonder why Americans keep gaining weight?”
Gee, I
don’t know, did you watch the Super Bowl this year?
“How
come we can’t get rid of those pesky STDs?”
Weird,
isn’t it? Oh, hey, did you watch the
Super Bowl three weeks ago?
Now,
I’m not saying that commercials inspire people to eat cheeseburgers and make
out with strangers. What I’m suggesting
is that these commercials reflect our actual, real-time values. Super Bowl commercials act as our cultural “canaries
in the mine shaft.”
Many years ago, before appropriate
ventilation systems were installed and other safety features became the norm, miners
would carry caged canaries with them when working in a new coal seam. If dangerous levels of poisonous gas were
present, such as methane or carbon monoxide, these brave birds would often
indicate this by not singing. A dead
canary meant that an immediate evacuation was needed.
The birds didn’t create the danger,
just as these Super Bowl spots aren’t producing bad behavior. What some of these commercials might be
indicating, however, is that our culture could use a bit of sunlight.
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