Immigration

You really have to understand how huge Shakira’s performance was for the Middle Eastern community. She had belly dancing, a mijwiz and a derbeke, performed “Ojos Asi” which was one of the few Shakira songs to have Arabic in it, did a Zaghrouta, all love on the biggest stage

— Danny Hajjar ???? ???? ???? (@DanielGHajjar) February 3, 2020

What is going to produce the most protests over this halftime show?

— Alyssa Rosenberg (@AlyssaRosenberg) February 3, 2020

Moral panic from one of the lead organs in support of a President noted for banging porn stars. https://t.co/BjVzhULtn3

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) February 3, 2020

I love that the actual final score is a tiny little sidebar below all of the hyperventilating. pic.twitter.com/zQfP4xS6a2

— Schooley (@Rschooley) February 3, 2020

Look, when the alternative ‘entertainment’ is the kind of sad, defensive jingoism Dave Roth mocks…

Please join me in celebrating football and America. https://t.co/LKVFh4T2e4

— David Roth (@david_j_roth) February 2, 2020

… When Fox has the broadcast rights to the Super Bowl, as it does this year, you had better believe those horns are going to be in play. This year, as in past Fox years, you’ll hear some patriotic tootling and snare drum rum-dum-dumming playing under footage of various NFL personalities reciting the Declaration of Independence as they walk through historic buildings, or while surrounded by troops and first responders and military hardware, or while towering over youth football teams. In 2008, Michael Strahan and a bunch of New York firefighters in their dress uniforms did their part while standing over the still-raw pit at Ground Zero. Usually it takes a long time for a tradition to become a tradition, and even more time after that for it to become opaque and abstract and rote in the way that traditions do. Fox’s determination to make Super Bowl Sunday a celebration of America skipped a bunch of those steps. It started out confusing and overdetermined and then pretty much stayed that way…

After two decades of leveraging and re-leveraging the actual thing that has value here—a game, in this stupid and beautiful and preposterous sport, that people really do want to watch together—this is the celebration we’re left with. More than that, there’s the sense that it can only get bigger, broader, bloatier, that the people invested in staging it can only ever do more. Not because the show isn’t big enough, and certainly not because anyone is demanding more of this politics-of-no-politics pomp, or more fife-and-drum goonery, or more and more desperate reiterations of those first panicked gestures towards purpose and togetherness. The audience is less important than the gestures, and the gestures long ago supplanted and replaced the message they sought to convey. It can only get bigger, and only ever becomes more uncanny as it grows. The same could be said of the NFL in many ways, but all of this delusion and desperation together produces something wildly abstract and stilted; there’s an uneasy but undeniable comedy to the way it all expands without ever quite growing. All this trouble, for all these years, all because some powerful people were frightened that doing less would look like admitting defeat.