Because You Never Asked

     (This essay is one of the first written in this series, its vintage being somewhere around 1993. As I put it up on the web more than a decade later, there now seems to be little doubt as to America's imperial, aggressive, post-Cold War identity. If this course of action cannot be reversed, I fear great upheavals for not just America, but the world in general.)

     Although I have always been athletically inclined as both a participant and an observer, the Super Bowl has more relevance to me as a cultural wind vane indicating the state of the American psyche at a given moment. The Super Bowl is one of those common denominator things, involving as much of a single culture's people as anything can. As an athletic event it is beginning to insult my intelligence with its SUPER HYPE, SUPER PLAYERS, SUPER ANALYSIS, SUPER COMMERCIALS, SUPER BEER, SUPER-MICHAEL-JORDAN-BUGS-BUNNY-NIKE-REEBOK-BUD-BOWL-BULLSHIT. Nothing so trivial as a football game could possibly warrant all this.

     This year's edition was a perfect example of the rudderless state of America's post-Cold War identity, coming perilously close to what might be clinically described as schizophrenic. Consider this program: we open with the steroid crazed aggression known as football, a game played by creatures so big, so fast, so brutally fierce, that the rest of us mere mortals might wonder if these beings are really members of our own species. (Perhaps it is time to create a new evolutionary category for such life forms; "Sado-Maso Carnivoman"?) This is a sport that seeks the total physical annihilation of one's opponent, a primal battle for turf resulting in knee caps, shoulders, elbows, ribs and other assorted bodily parts ending up in places they didn't start out in. Anything short of death or permanent paralysis is desirable. What we are watching is World War I without the trenches and poison gas .

     After an hour and a half of this mayhem, we break for the halftime show, this year featuring .

     . an effeminate pop star --- actually, we're not too sure what his preference is, even his gender is somewhat muddled --- who surrounds himself with thousands of downy-skinned children singing of love, peace and beauty, and it's all so touching and sensitive, a SUPER HOWDY DOODY SHOW and Michael Jackson (you guessed it, didn't you?), who's only conceivable role in a football game would be that of an upright, is SUPER BUFFALO BOB.

     Being that the game was in L.A., I personally feel a tribute to the Los Angeles police officers who subdued Rodney King would have been a much more appropriate theme, but I don't make these Big Beer decisions. After 40 minutes of this twinkly bliss, we clear the army of rosily dimpled youth and their 100-pound Pied Piper off the field and bring back the .

     . corn fed, steroid crazed behemoths, who will give us two more hours of Carthaginian waste and destruction.

     I ask you: didn't this all make a lot more sense when we had a Gulf War to fight or a Communist threat looming over us? For the past 50 years this nation has premised its existence on being ready to fight. It was our focus, our rudder, our identity. What to do now without a well defined enemy?

     Tune in for the next Super Bowl. Maybe we will have a real enemy by then and we can have a real Super Bowl, with jet fighters, patriotic massings, and wounded war heroes from sea to shining sea .

     Post Script: As I put this essay up on my web site in October of 2004, my grief in seeing it be prophetic could not be greater. How little we've learned over the years.