The American game of baseball is the game of the masses. One of the reasons it matches the European and worldwide appeal in a sporting event category like soccer, is it’s simplicity and minimal amount of equipment – a ball, a glove, a baseball bat, a simple uniform. American football is a game that needs a lot of expensive protective gear – crash helmet, shoulder pads, breakaway shirts and padded pants. Football in my father’s day was just a pigskin and a thin leather helmet. A distant relative in the 1920’s used to play professional major league football for the Frankford Yellow Jackets in Philly and made a whopping $25 a game. No steroids needed back then – just real old fashioned testosterone!
The modern American Gladiator sport needs sponsorship. $$$. $$$, whether from a public supported institution, high school, college, university or in the case of professional league - a hand in the taxpayers’ pockets. Special tax set ups, tax breaks, stadiums built with taxpayer’s hard earned tax dollars and for who – a bunch of upper middle class types who can afford the expensive season tickets -that you can only literally inherit like an aristocratic title. Then from the game, spectators drive immediately out of the city where the poor have paid for and built the stadium – and drive as quickly as possible back to the safety of gated white burbs. It is the American Way. (bow your heads)
As for who is the best in terms of teams, they have playoffs after playoffs until somebody is lucky enough to get to challenge one other in the biggest Pagan game of them all – the Super Bowl. I say pagan to be nice. Because if the truth be told, the Super Bowl is like the gayest thing around (but you didn’t hear that from me.) The game reminds me of the Pentagon with its cost overruns and a bunch of generals with a thousand medals on their chests telling the world the best way to mistreat humanity on the other side of the globe. (a game plan?)
I don’t watch the Super Bowl in general. It’s a young thing, a party thing, a neighborhood, pub atmosphere thing where gluttony and drunkenness while shouting for your favorite team is a proactive copy of a New Year’s Eve party. Not in my league anymore for entertainment or ability to drink a third rate swill posing as beer from BUD – now a foreign owned company.
As for rooting for millionaires in modified male drag costumes, it just doesn’t make sense. The cost overruns at the Pentagon are kinda like what they now pay show biz performers – so called athletes for performance these days. It is an anachronism out of the real old days of real American prosperity. Hell, these days, even Obama is stuck with a used Oval Office rug from W because things are so bad economically for some. (a tattered rug, by the way, with a few holes from someone chewing on it)
They have got the reality shows on TV these days. Why do we need sports? It used to be the only excuse guys had to touch one another in our very homophobic past.
Of course, there is the camaraderie and the slapping of the butts and the hugging but the more I look at American football as a spectacle, it is like one big game of frottage, French for, Urban Dictionary for – dry humping. (the new rage for kids who have no access to sane birth control)
So the TV networks pay billions of dollars to put on this annual circus created in the middle of the cold war, sell thirty second commercials for millions of dollars and most of the commercials are for the traditional male only things of cars, beer and products delivered by bikini clad teenagers.
The commercial advertising end is something out of a thirty year ago fantasy male magazine called Playboy. Of course it is now an American tradition. I should get with the message and pretend I is a good loyal A-merican. Nothing more apple pie than the Super Bowl dude! Yeah right. And or apples treated with DDT?
So in the mood of American myth about what is right, wholesome, kosher about the American myth in the middle of an economic depression - they want to use the beers commercials as a setup and prelude to send a subtle PC message to women that abortion is not pro-life. A women’s right to choose the use of her own body is a sin. A “pro-life” commericial – how wholesome. How PC (far right) to present it, fully incensed, in the High Holy ceremony of the American Sports Pagan Temple of American Myth!
This far right Christian religionist/political message is an acceptable message to sell along with the alcohol, corn ships, and Pizza Hut? Get with the Far Right Christian fundamentalist program girls. It is the only Christianity allowed by liberal CBS these days? Taking $ide$ boys?
No, but seriously folks, the Super Bowl is like the gayest game in town. Queer eye for jocks - max. It is a bubble fantasy, a Halloween for adults with costumes, gluttony and drunkenness, the adult orgy version of that children’s fantasy holiday.
On one level, a game is just a game dude. On another level, the guys and gals with season tickets are sitting at home using the Super Bowl as some sort of High Latin Mass of White approval, a reaffirmation of themselves in the universe. Sitting there and along with a 1955 illusion of white cold war America with Dwight Eisenhower’s, all male, all white heterosexual pro-nuclear war cabinet in charge, Mormons and all. (the G.O.P. – Gay Ole Party?)
Pass the chips and dip please.