Writer Jaime O'Neill used the boring 2019 Super Bowl — as a metaphor for American culture

04 February 2019

An older person's perspective

Jaime O'Neill wrote that:

[I]t's perfectly logical that I would be a bit bummed out as half-time drew near with Brady and the Patriots ahead by three points in a game that was about as exciting as getting a haircut.

I'm an old man with a tendency toward depression, a guy who majored in English, with a lifetime of rather gloomy reading under his belt.

[M]y golden years have been badly tarnished by the fact that they coincide with the presidency of a mean and nasty amoral idiot supported by a big tribe of similarly mean, nasty, and amoral idiots running the gamut from mega rich to dirt poor.

Imagine my excitement at the prospect of that half-time show, with that line up of musicians that included Maroon 5 and the fur-enwrapped Big Boi, brought to us by Pepsi, which is water with sugar and cola flavoring.

The euphoria is almost too much for a man of my years to bear.

Yes

The game's outcome was predictable, given that the lackluster Rams shouldn't even have been in it. To add to yesterday's snooze-inducing torture, there were its companion and monumentally braindead advertisements.

Of the halftime show

O'Neill continued:

I later wandered back to the living room to check out the half-time show, to watch about three minutes of that shit before returning to this keyboard feeling like hung over, though I haven't had a drink in a quarter of a century.

It was such a drain on the spirit, all that glitz and all that money expended on such a burble of nothing . . . .

During the show, Adam Levine stripped off his shirt to reveal his torso of intricate tattoos. Evidently, this was necessary (in Levine's mind) because he and crew had so little else of artistic worth to offer.

The moral? — After the game's presentation of culturally indicative vacuity . . .

. . . cosmic aliens would arguably be doing the Universe a favor, if they exterminated us on sheer principle.

Even the game's best-crafted advertisement (by Kia — for its Telluride model) equated unrecognized human merit solely to its ability to build an SUV that purposelessly splashes through creek water.

As Youtuber "gentellabs" commented:

It was basically saying their lives are worthless except for having partially assembled a mediocre car.

That's yesterday's takeaway. We are fodder for the Great Corporate Machine that brainwashes us into passive, easily entertained, avaricious serfdom.

My dark sense of humor smiled at the 2019 Super Bowl's artless display of American culture's unimpressive core.

Fortunately for the rest of y'all, Jaime O'Neill and I will be quietly dead soon. I grin at that, too.

PeteFree.com

Writer Jaime O'Neill used the boring 2019 Super Bowl — as a metaphor for American culture