Super Bowl Simulcast

Up to kick-off and even after it, I was expecting the Executive Order. Or the Black Shirts. Or both.

If Commander-in-Chief Trump can, while flipping through his own large-print rulebook, change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, Greenland to Iceland, the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center (with plans to do the same to the new RFK Stadium to be built in DC) then he can damn well rechristen—or, I guess, unchristen, or just plain rebrand—Santa Clara into Santa Claus. Rip off the hair habit of the 13th-century Italian nun whose life was dedicated to radical poverty, put a white beard and red coat with fur piping on her, and declare it henceforth Christmas all year round.

What better moment than at the Super Bowl to issue the Proclamation, since, like Christmas, this peculiar institution is all about hedonistic consumption, binge eating, drunk uncles, vital distraction, fleeting elation, bad bets, dreams for sale, dashed hopes, and, at last, numbing boredom? From now on in America, the streets will be paved with Bitcoin and every day will be a holiday. Consumer confidence lifts off with that flyover F-35 to the stratosphere and beyond. Amazon opens its flagship fulfillment center on Alpha Centauri. Retail rejoices with the angels. Bombs away!

But wait: who’s that Rubenesque figure plummeting from the bomb bay of the B-1 leading that chevron of fighter jets of various vintages, a tight-formation advertisement for some of the most corrupt and wasteful weapons systems ever stuffed into the stockings of the Military-Industrial-Football complex? Who is that Evel Knievel hurtling toward earth only to pull his ripcord at the last possible sub-second and land upright at the 50-yard line of Levi’s Stadium just as singer-songwriter Charlie Puth—his noodling fingers having teased his Fender Rhodes with bluesy sweet nothings, then caressed it toward arousal through gently probing harmonies before pounding it toward climax—finally lets his fabric-softener voice foam up in ardent falsetto, then erupt in ballistic release with the rocket’s red glare and the bombs bursting in air?

(We interrupt this lurid scene depicted in purple-mountain-majesty prose for a bit of pretentious music theory coupled with hermeneutic reflection: the final deceptive cadence with which Puth groped the national anthem onto the louche lowered submediant triad and then proceeded by faux-heroic, if utterly hackneyed, whole step up to the home-key tonic was like mixing lethal doses of Quaaludes into the good old-fashioned ale of this 18th-century English drinking song. Let’s hope that revered racist Francis Scott Key never wakes up from having had the brew funneled—deservedly—down his throat.)

You guessed it! The intrepid skydiver who has landed back on Silicon Valley turf, where he made his millions under the Luciferian wing of Peter Thiel, is none other than VP Vance. The first deployment of the latest noise-canceling, signal-crossing, ear-and-soul-busting weaponry recently touted, if obscurely, by his boss, Donald Trump, converts the hailstorm of Super Bowl boos into a Chorus of Hallelujahs as VPJD doffs his helmet, grabs the mic, his plump and bearded face filling the Jumbotrons, and sings out: “Hello, Santa Claus!”

Still smarting from the humiliation of having had to witness the long, unutterable name of the football franchise based in the nation’s capital renounced and changed to the Commanders, at least VPJD doesn’t also have to enforce a rebrand of the two contenders now on the Super Bowl gridiron sidelines with their hands on their hearts, no knee even infinitesimally flexing toward the Levi’s grass where banished 49er (yet another mythical mascot of American Manifest Destiny) Colin Kaepernick knelt in protest. What could be more American than Patriots, especially since the team’s ownership is fiercely loyal to the Revered Leader? Plus, it’s historically resonant and storyline-potent that these Tea Partiers should tangle with a team dressed up in ersatz Native outfits whose totemic symbol on their headgear was lifted from the Salish-speaking peoples of the Pacific Northwest—never mind that the “Seahawk” itself is Seattle-specific alliterative bunkum.

A first half of field goals only stoked the fervor for halftime.

Encased in faultless white, Bad Bunny wasn’t being bad at all, but goodness through and through—or so it seemed to the linguistically lazy millions who didn’t know a word of Spanish other than Dorito®.

The fabric of Bad Bunny’s outfit wasn’t fluffy, but he still stroked it—and himself—as he sang, in what I took to be signs of pride or pleasure. Since his words were indecipherable to millions watching, one wondered why, in the heart of Silicon Valley, the AI bunny wasn’t serving up a simultaneous translation. The answer: the goodly shepherds of the internet at Microsoft and Meta and other prelates of the high-tech curia don’t let AI traffic in smut, at least not on Super Bowl Sunday.

The fury of Monday morning moralists, like that of the suspiciously named Republican congressman from Tennessee, Andy Ogles, tickled my own curiosity. He got hot under the collar—and perhaps the belt, too—at the tale of the tape, as, for example, at the 1:38 mark when Bad Bunny sang the line “Mi bicho es cabrón”—“My dick is hard.” That was just one of a long litany of supposed FTC no-nos that followed over the next dozen minutes.

This shouldn’t have been surprising even to outraged Ogles. This Bunny, who is the first-ever male of the species to grace the cover of Playboy, wears sex positivity on his sleeve, whether his abundantly tattooed forearm is bare or demurely clad in pressed white linen.

All around him, a dynamically choreographed dance party had broken out at a beachside house in Puerto Rico, whirled into the stadium not by an out-of-season, off-piste tropical storm but by the much more powerful forces of global capitalism.

The show was full of clever visual call-outs of the exploitation and neglect suffered by his native island under the boot of the colonizing behemoth to the north: male models cut sugarcane; nimble dancers scaled power poles and flirted with transformers to draw attention to the devastation to life and infrastructure wrought by Hurricanes Irma and Maria back in 2017; Bad Bunny waved a Puerto Rican flag with a white star on a triangle of light blue rather than the darker shade behind the U.S. stars, this color match being a mark of enforced fealty to conquerors.

Enacting his island’s resilience, Bad Bunny crashed down through the ceiling of the pop-up beachside retreat. He not only survived the calamity but also popped up from it dancing and smiling and singing. Later, he embodied his trust in humanity by falling backward from a high ledge several meters (not yards!) down into the waiting hands of revelers below. Woven into the tapestry of the spectacle was a lightning wedding over which he presided, an act of love and a signal of regenerative faith in the future.

Super Bowl headliner alumna Lady Gaga stuck a manicured thumb into the eye of heteronormativity in her reprise of “Born This Way” in plain English. Fellow Puerto Rican Ricky Martin offered a searing rendition of “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii” (also heard on Bad Bunny’s just-released album), a plea against statehood like the one forced on that island in the Pacific.

At the end, the Bunny broke into a Bad Benediction, uttered in English: “God Bless America.” Some—but definitely not many—may have seen the ghost of Irving Berlin shed his tuxedo and start into perreo—that hip-swiveling, close-grinding dance of reggaeton. Backed by Black, Brown, and White flag-waving dancers from every nation in the Americas, Bad Bunny proceeded to recite the name of each country (said in Spanish) in the hemisphere from south to north, including the “United States” (in English). As the euphoric beat from the surrounding cane fields crescendoed toward utopian paydirt, he spiked the football and issued his thanks to all.

Against the seemingly impossible shade of blue conjured by the Golden State just before sunset, it was all love and light, eros and ecstasy, wedding white and Caribbean color—the sight and sound of itdrunk in by some 133 million believers.

At the same time, from a subterranean studio stocked with an audience of a few dozen (their cheers boosted in post-production) and beamed toward a faithful MAGA few came the “All-American Halftime Show.” This beast was the spawn of right-wing disgust at the selection of Bad Bunny for the national ritual. The simulcast was launched under the banner of TPUSA, which sounds like the surname of a Czech luge rider or a mustachioed Romantic composer from Prague, but actually is the acronym for Turning Point USA—a “movement” for “freedom” and “truth” and “family” and “sacrifice” and “greatness,” founded by the late Charlie Kirk.

The grim spectacle was rumored to have been pre-taped in Atlanta, but might as well have been broadcast from Abu Ghraib. From the TPUSA black site came fury and flames, howls for punishment and cries of pain emitted by acid-and-gravel-etched voices harried by impotently beaten drums and guitar phalluses, strummed most violently at the start of these MAGA rites in an ersatz Jimi Hendrix “Star-Spangled Banner.”

After the guitar trio had sawed up Francis Scott Key, his body having been emergency-FedExed from California (now renamed Melanomia) to the MAGA morgue, Brantley Gilbert entered the BDSM dungeon. The titles of his selections said it all: “Real American” and “Dirt Road Anthem” (“Dirt Road” can be slang for anus, but never mind). Like the rest of the All-American playlist, these were odes to hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-smoking, lawn-mowing, TV-watching, dog-loving, church-going, gun-wielding rural folk and urban cosplayers like Kristi Noem. The boozing and gasping in these songs are relentless, the most reliable buddies being “the king in the can and the Marlboro Man,” as smoke pours out of the cracked window of the pickup. When something harder is needed, it’s “Jack [Daniel’s] and Jim [Beam].” Brantley sang into a microphone welded with big brass knuckles. No Bad Bunny or liberal lady was going to wrest any solos or stage time from this singing troll.

Another barrel-chested, leather-jacketed brawler called Lee Brice, biggie-sizing his hurt at being so misunderstood, complained that “being country in this country nowadays is hard.” These were melodies and men the Proud Boys could indeed be proud of.

There was no wedding.

Kid Rock did not rock.

He babbled at high decibels in heavy metal tongues in “Bawitdaba,” whose lyrics, in a moment of paradoxical clarity, grab for a bottle of Southern Comfort. As he shrieked and skipped about like a man possessed—more likely (said oddsmakers in Las Vegas) by Satan than Jesus—rectangular screens showed close-ups of the American flag as the stage spewed fire.

Returning later under his real name, Robert Ritchie, he did “Til You Can’t.” I wish he hadn’t.

A closing film offered a flag-wrapped tribute to Charlie Kirk.

I thought of the Horst Wessel Song. It commemorates an SA brownshirt who was assassinated in 1930 by members of the Communist Party in his apartment in what was then the Große Frankfurter Straße in Berlin, and since World War II has been called Karl-Marx-Allee. After Hitler took power two years later, the Horst Wessel Song became the mandatory coda to the national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”:

Raise the flag! The ranks tightly closed!
The SA marches with calm, steady step.
Comrades shot by the Red Front and reactionaries
March in spirit within our ranks.
Clear the streets for the brown battalions,
Clear the streets for the storm division man!
Millions are looking upon the hooked cross (swastika) full of hope,
The day of freedom and of bread dawns!
For the last time, the call to arms is sounded!
For the fight, we all stand prepared!
Already Hitler’s banners fly over all streets.
The time of bondage will last but a little while now!

The jaunty parade-ground melody goose-steps right out of the 19th century and frightens still. The TPUSA call-to-arms rumbles and frets way down in its pre-apocalyptic bunker.

In the Situation Room of Musical Patriotism, recently relocated to a safe house in an unnamed European country, I turned my attention back to the screen showing the game. Protecting the sanctity of the Super Bowl was only a pretext. I waited for the Blackshirts of ICE to storm the stadium and get the Bunny.

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