I’m a fairly big sports fan who remains one despite having a lot of trouble with many of the more reactionary, patriarchal, jingoistic, and hypercapitalist aspects of sports culture. Ultimately the appeal of the good things outweighs the bad for me most of the time, which is why I keep coming back. However, anymore the Super Bowl (and the presentation and socio-politico-cultural orientation of the NFL in general, of which today is just a hypertrophic caricature) is just a bridge too far for me.

It’s all god and country and militarism and All-American white male supremacist propaganda, presented so schlockily that the contempt for the audience is almost palpable, and it becomes hard to believe these people are for real, or that any even mildly sophisticated consumer of modern entertainment could take this shit at face value without laughing. Seriously, it’s slowly turning into Neocon / Teabagger camp. It’s like Fox is approaching it the same way they do churning out agitprop for their army of Teabagger rubes.

Elaborating upon these themes, you’ve got wonderful things like treating serial rapists like upstanding citizens after they do the bare minimum of PR triage work required to get back into the good graces of the white male ex-jock and jock-retainer establishment who are the arbiters of such things. Oh yeah, and ignoring the fact that we’re more or less watching gladiatorial combat that is likely to permanently disable many of the participants after their short careers are over, and which fails to even provide them with adequate health care in their retirement, even though it’s an enormous cash cow and those costs would amount to a rounding error of the league’s total revenues.

It has been a slow drip-drip thing for me. Watching a lot more international soccer, and seeing how things can be different in terms of the presentation and packaging of big-time televised sports (you can do it without relentless meta-hype and hours of “analysis” featuring 8 neckless dudes screaming past each other! And even without stupid CGI robot graphics and pointless ‘splosions! And without insulting human interest profiles that inevitably devolve into puff pieces on how serial rapists are actually really good dudes! Who knew?) was part of it. Keeping up with the debate over concussions and long term neurological damage in the context of the upcoming NFL labor conflict was another. The difference in how the Michael Vick and Ben Roethlisberger situations were handled and the stories that evolved around them was yet another. And of course all of the culture war nonsense over the various (almost completely innocuous and lame, except for Prince, who is fucking PRINCE) halftime shows over the past few years. The ludicrous misogyny of the commercials last year was kind of a breaking point, and all of these things have got me looking at the NFL with a fairly jaundiced eye anymore.

With all that context, the Super Bowl begins to look more and more ludicrous and harmful. It’s not even good on its own terms as a spectacle anymore. And it’s almost never very good as a game-qua-game or as drama, which is what draws me to sports to begin with. And even the ads mostly suck and resort to lazy stereotyping at this point, which was sort of the last good reason to pay attention at all if eveything else failed. Has it always been this way, and I’m just noticing it more? Wasn’t it once a bit more cutting edge and sophisticated than this, in terms of seeing itself as a global media spectacle?

Anyway, if the Super Bowl is the great spectacle of High American Capitalism, it’s really sad and depressing evidence of how far we’ve fallen, and how lazy, decadent, hateful, violent, and pitiless we’ve become as a culture. USA! USA! USA!