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A Martian psychoanalyst observing the US
Superbowl on TV would be shocked by the vicious
animal spirits emanating from that spectacle, starting with the triumphal
trumpet blasts borrowed straight from the old 1950s Hollywood epic movies
echoing the prideful mis-steps of ancient Rome,
along with the by-now clichéd CGI trick in the opening credits of
gleaming metallic heraldic insignia spun into a military cordon of stars so
as to protect the tender collective ego of this anxious nation. America wears
its zeitgeist plastered right on its sweaty forehead.
Everybody knows that the commercial
messages between the play-action amount to a national Rorschach test, and
this year's collection made us look more psychopathic than ever - starting
with the advertisement for the Chevy Silverado: Fade in on a devastated
nameless American city, the buildings smashed, the streets littered with
debris, a gray ash coating over everything, and no living creatures in
evidence.... A newspaper headline proclaims "2012 Mayan Apocalypse...."
How reassuring! Wait! Something stirs behind a heap of rubble... it cracks
open... and out drives a plucky American male lumpen
"worker" dude behind the wheel of a gleaming giant pickup truck. He
is soon joined by other men and their trucks, all of them blithely unfazed by
the end-of-the-world.
A curious scenario. What's the take
away? I wondered, of course, where these plucky fellows would look for their
next fill-up in the devastated landscape. Surely the service stations would
miss the next scheduled fuel truck delivery. Are American men not expected to
think beyond the immediate moment they are in? Are they on an intellectual
level with lemurs and Holstein steers?
The Superbowl
pageant is a window into the condition of American manhood, and the view is
pretty pathetic. It's a picture of men who feel so weak, insecure, and
fearful that they have to compensate with fantasies of limitless destructive
power. Ads for several new movies and (I think) video games followed the
Silverado apocalypse romp. There were unifying themes throughout. All
depicted the problems of life as 1) coming from outside our own society (or
world); 2) in the form of aliens who wield mystifying technological
destructive power; and 3) leaving a few human remnants on a smoldering
landscape after a cosmic showdown.
These onslaughts from elsewhere in the
universe always end with superior American guile and the latest technology
defeating the purblind invaders. The aliens are vanquished by Apple
computers, Air Force stunt pilots, and a little extra help from God Almighty,
who is surely on our side. From these realms of engineered grandiosity, we
slip in and out of the grinding ground game in Lucas Oil stadium in
Indianapolis, another pseudo-military operation loaded with acronyms and
jargon intended to confer an illusion of control and competence.
The reality out there in
"flyover" land is an audience of diabetic fat men in clownish
loungewear slouched on sofas in foreclosed houses enjoying stupendous
portions of cheesy and lard-laden foodstuffs between cigarettes and beers.
They have a lot to worry about and they have no idea how they might overcome
their financial, familial, and medical problems. The real onslaughts
besetting the nation in realms such as banking fraud, money in politics, peak
oil, climate uncertainty, and economic contraction are at once too complex
for the diabetic fat men to comprehend, and grossly misreported in the public
arena, were Cable TV and newspapers work the levers of propaganda for one
client or another.
Then there was the grotesque half-time
extravaganza featuring Madonna, which was a weird parallel commentary on the
state of American womanhood. Pretending to be ageless and indomitable, the
old trooper performed a variety of standing crotch-locks on her Praetorian
guard of hoofers and then stumbled more than once on the ridiculous bleacher
stage-set that looked as if was designed to trip the performers up. Message
to American women: be sluts as long as you possibly can because there is
nothing else for you in this culture. I couldn't help thinking that American
chanteuses of yesteryear - say, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Carole King
- sang about adult problems and emotions with a greater thematic range, and
would never have subjected themselves to such a display of pitiful
narcissism. (Did anyone notice that Madonna's corps de ballet all wore her
monogram on their loincloths?) America needs a prayer, all right, but I don't
think they'll find it by calling Madonna's name.
Meanwhile, in whatever remains of the
Real World, we have a couple of things to be concerned about this week. One
is the ultimatum tendered to Greece by the Lords of Euroland
to make a deal or die-dog-die. Last time I checked, they had until 11 a.m.
today Berlin time to reply... and nothing happened.
The other matter is the pending possible
robo-signing settlement with the TBTF banks, which
is designed to let them off the hook for any and all future lawsuits in this
matter if they pay a penny-ante fine. This latest ghastly trespass of the rule-of-law
is a joint project of the Obama White House and 50 states attorneys general
in an epic act of perfidy. You can read about it at Yves Smith's excellent Naked Capitalism blog.
Your country is being stolen from you. I
hope you are getting ready to re-occupy it with your bodies and minds. Don't
plan on giant magical robots flying to your rescue.
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