I was going to make some kind of comment about how fucking stupid it seems to me that millions of people around the US are glued to their TV sets this evening, watching the largest, dumbest employees of two corporations run around in circles and bonk one another on the head in order to see which group can capture a larger share of the total sports merchandise licensing income in FY 04. And, in the process, I wanted to get all preachy about how fake battles such as this are probably best saved for peacetime, when so many of our fellow Americans arent just trying to survive Then, it dawned on me that I’m almost beside myself in anticipation of the new season of Survivor, which is supposed to start right after the steroid-fest. As I don’t really have a way to reconcile those two thoughts, I’ll move on to something else.
Steroids: I did happen to catch George Bush (who, during his last State of the Union address, decided to take a heroic stand against the evils of performance enhancing drugs in professional athletics) being interviewed during the pre-game show. Apparently, CBS didnt have the same problem with airing a few minutes of him speaking about his initiatives that they did with running the 30-second MoveOn.org ad which suggests that all might not be so great in Bushs America. As the folks at MoveOn ask:
Is it because of the massive favor CBS just got from the Bush Administration a law which allows it to grow much bigger? Or is it just because CBS, which overwhelmingly favored President Bush in its political giving, doesnt want to air an ad that questions his policies?
While I wont be watching the Superbowl, I will be watching the ads. Tivo is recording them all for me right now, as I type this. Back in the olden days, when I was considering a life in academia, this was the most important day of the year. All of us in the American Culture program would run around like the hillbillies in that town that Paris Hilton took over. We were absolutely wild with excitement. Wed all spend our afternoon feeding videotapes into our VCRs. As people in the apartments all around us would be hooting and hollering, we’d be intently focused on what we saw as the subtext of Budweiser ads. Wed all come in the next day, after having dissected every single ad, trying to impress one another with our theories. I miss those days. I miss being able to leap into a room and say “Did it occur to anyone else that the references to archetypical mother figures were up almost threefold this year?
OK, Im going to go and see if Survivor is on yet I know that Linette probably wont approve, but I was thinking that perhaps we could just decide to name the baby after whoever wins this Survivor Tournament of Champions. It would take a lot of pressure off of us.
