Super Bowl D: America’s Bread and Circus! (Part I: overview)
It is fitting that the Super Bowls are measured in Roman Numerals, as the American Empire is the closest thing we have to the venerable Romans. American football is our Gladiatorial combat, the bread and circuses which sustain us in our battles against the Chinese and quantitave easing, our variants on the Huns and the sinking drachma. We also don’t slaughter the losers, who now merely undergo traumatic brain injuries, muscle tears, and the occasional paralysis, retiring to a future of used car dealerships and mid-level branded steakhouses. Onwards and upwards!
Interestingly, football has mirrored the Gladiatorial games in taking up an increasing share of the citizen’s free time. Games used to be only on Sunday (replacing staid religious services for American mindshare) and then expanded to Monday. This season we’ve enjoyed Thursday games, and the occasional Friday night skirmish. Football’s America’s favorite thing, a proud pageant reaffirming our primal selfhood in local, tribal rivalries. It’s important that nobody else in the world plays this game well. The World Chamion of Football will always be American. As our global primacy fades and the middle class slowly loses its purchasing power, they will still have the animus of their local football team to inhabit, if only for a season.
Super Bowl and Commercialism: made for each other!
Why did the Super Bowl become an advertising mecca? First, football is fast-twitch, short-term, impact sport, decided in a single intense conflict, interspersed with a snowy pregnancy of silence. Unlike baseball, basketball, and hockey where a series of seven games determine the outcome, football blows its load at once, in a Peter North ejaculation of glory. There are also fewer games, so each matters proportionately more: 10x more than baseball, 5x more than basketball or hockey. Given the violence of football, more conflict would be both brutal and non-remunerative for the players, who budget their lifetime value in a calculus of strained sinews and pulled tendons. It’s high intensity, it’s one game, and over. If you don’t like it, you only have to tune in once to feel a part of something special. It’s like the high attendance of church at Christmas, only with even pricier product placement.
Football’s jagged, staccato rhythm is ideal for ad absorption. The game is comprised of a series of plays lasting 15 seconds or so interspersed with periods of rest and analysis. This rhythm makes it ideal for maximal absorbtion of ads, lasting about the same time as the pause in between plays. Ads do not interrupt the flow of proceedings like in the rhythmic undulations of basketball, the terse meditations of baseball, or the positional tactics of soccer. Like rough sex, football is a game of violent interruptions, and into that oh-so-satisfying wound are poured our targeted consumer desires: cars, beer, and DisneyLand. Harder, mickey, harder! (Dodge) Ram me like a Clydesdale!
Join me this Sunday evening for a comprehensive analysis of the ads we watch, and the time we live in. I may even comment on the game itself, for fun. But our communal kneel at the atavistic altar of American consumerism…that’s serious business!
