Dance the Halftime Away

I watched the Super Bowl last night, because of course I did.  It’s a sport I’ve been slowly losing interest in for a decade or so, featuring two teams I had no real preference between, but it’s still interesting and it’s my one day a year where I eat whatever I want no matter how salty or otherwise off my approved Middle-Aged Man food list.

The commercials were fun this year.  Lots of mash-ups.  A few clever ones (my favorites being the Reese’s Take 5 one in the office and Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day reprise), a couple of heartwarming ones (I loved the one right at the beginning, with the kid running the football across the country and into the stadium), and none that made me scratch my head and ask what the hell they were thinking.

The game wasn’t bad either.

I watched the halftime show, which I don’t usually do.  Not sure why I did this year.  Perhaps it was simply too much effort to get off the chair after all that food.  Who knows.  I rather enjoyed it, though, to be honest.

This seems to have become a controversial opinion.

I have no idea why.

Well, yes I do.  People apparently don’t have enough to worry about in this crisis of oncoming Fascism we’re living through this week so of course they’re going to jump all over an entertainment event with a smaller entertainment event in the middle.

The racists are all up in arms because a national sport played a game in a largely Latinx city and had the audacity to gear the halftime show accordingly.  I can’t tell you how much fun it has been today to see the theatrical anguish of the damaged white snowflakes lamenting the fact that performers spoke Spanish in a state where people were speaking Spanish literally centuries before anyone thought to speak English.

I can always tell who has failed their history classes by who complains about people speaking other languages in this country.  Warms my heart, it does.

The right-wingers are complaining about the subtle digs at their extremism – the fact that they spoke Spanish and played Latin music at all, for one thing, and the not terribly veiled reference to kids in cages on the borders for another.  But right-wing extremists have run roughshod over everything that has made this country decent and moral for nearly a quarter of a century now and they deserve to be called out as the destructive force they are.

And the pearl-clutchers are entirely up in arms over the fact that the women at the center of this performance were confident in their bodies and not draped in choir robes from head to toe.  Could lead to dancing.  Did, in fact.

I confess it did make me feel bad for Janet Jackson and the grief she went through for her halftime performance those many years ago.  She was ahead of her time.  But anyone who can watch the regular NFL cheerleaders go through their paces without qualm and then complain about the outfits last night is clearly not someone who needs to be taken seriously.

Folks, it was entertaining.  It made its points.  Shakira, at least, looked like she was having fun (J-Lo looked like she was trying to levitate through sheer focus, which is not the same thing at all).  Both of them put in a physical performance that would have been impressive in people half their ages and which I doubt any of the players in uniform could have matched.

It kept me entertained through halftime, and honestly it’s kept me entertained all day today too.