After the Super Bowl

Like many (maybe most) Americans, I spent much of Sunday evening at a Super Bowl "party." Personally, I couldn't care less about football. So, like many others, I barely paid any attention to the game itself. (Even some of the football fans, who were present, proclaimed the game part of the evening to be at best boring). For most of us, the really big event was the eagerly anticipated, much hyped in advance, Apple Music Half-Time Show, featuring the super popular Puerto Rican performer and recent Grammy award winner Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio). Bad Bunny is one of the most popular - most widely streamed - musical performers in the world. Being admittedly largely out of touch in regard to much of popular music and entertainment culture, I was unfamiliar with Bad Bunny's music until recently. But, of course, I wasn't quite the target audience!

As an entertainment experience, Bad Bunny's Half-Time Show was fabulous. It was exuberant and joyful, a genuine celebration of life and togetherness (complete with a real wedding), and a glorious expression of Puerto Rican culture and music, the first Super Bowl half-Time show almost entirely in Spanish. In one sense, it was not overtly political. (Trump was never mentioned by name.) As everything has become in our conflicted current era, however, the show was inevitably political, precisely for its celebration of the diversity of American society and its evocation of the many nations that share this singular American continent, not to mention the not so subtle significance of the performing sugar cane workers climbing electrical poles!

The multi-cultural, multi-racial reality of American society is a fundamental fact which one can either celebrate or lament. Some obviously may have chosen to lament, but they are inevitably the poorer for it.  The insinuation that the performer (who is, of course, an American citizen) and the Spanish-language performance were somehow "un-American," only highlights the absurd racial exclusiveness that - to some - masquerades as American patriotism. Meanwhile, the rest of America just enjoyed the party.

Karl Marx famously called religion the heart of a heatless world, the spirit of spiritless dominions, the opiate of the people. Whatever one wants to make of Marx's infamous claim regarding religion, the opiate of the people role has long ago been assumed by football. Expanding the religion of football's reach into diverse latino markets is obviously part of the industry's business plan. Roger Goodell's very public embrace of Bad Bunny only highlighted that business plan's strategic sense. Not for the first time, however, has a narrowly shrunken exclusive distortion of the American dream been undermined the very same greedy capitalism it professes to endorse.

The Super Bowl may no longer be - if it ever really was - the great unifying patriotic event it has at times pretended to be. Neither - as was so sadly also displayed recently - is the National Prayer Breakfast.  So many of our once supposedly culturally unifying national events have lost their purported luster. 

But the universal aspirations Americans have long valued, lived, and celebrated still survive - and sing in Spanish.

Photo: Bad Bunny performs during the Super Bowl LX halftime show (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images).