Actually Rather Super After All

To expand upon what my esteemed colleague wrote last night, football is absolutely a “dominant example of our country's ethos”, and that might not be a good thing. I would never argue that football has not supplanted baseball as the national sport (baseball, perhaps, retains the rather ephemeral and more or less uncontested epithet of “national pastime”). I would, however, say that this sea change in the popular “culture” reflects somewhat poorly on our national character.

To the extent that the United States of America has a culture, its biggest festival is not July 4th or any of the half-dozen or so peripatetic postal holidays, the actual dates of which have become subordinate to the need to have each of them fall on a Monday. No, our Pan-American Festival is the Super Bowl, which unifies and exalts all things quintessentially and preeminently American. As George Will once wrote, "Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” The Super Bowl adds to this definition two more of the less flattering aspects of our society: a relentless blitz of exceedingly clever commercials, and the consumption of vast quantities of rather unhealthful food and beverages.

But lest we become jaded and cynical, let us not forget that at its core, the Super Bowl is the yearly culmination of a game played passionately by young men. It is marked by triumph and tears of happiness. At field level, the Super Bowl is a celebration of innocence, not of fallenness. Even amidst the fart jokes and the wayward nipples, the advertisers are starting to catch on to this fact. Think of the delightful Clydesdale commercials, or that really superb ad where the people have metamorphosed into their avatars, constantly connected to their digital devices. It takes a Coca-Cola mistakenly apprehended in a soda fountain to bring the young lady back into reality. This ad is conservative, for it affirms the value of place (and of soda fountains!). This ad is quasi-Heideggerian in that it expresses serious reservations about the effect of technology upon human persons. And, I would maintain, this ad is Catholic, since it affirms the importance of sacramentals: physical substances serving as vessels of grace.

And lest we forget: once again, the game was terrific.