As I made my way to Super Bowl LII in Minneapolis, Minnesota earlier this month, my thoughts negotiated feelings of unique luck and fortune within. Attending the greatest sporting challenge I thought my team would never win — Philadelphia Eagles fans are gluttons for disappointment — coming to terms with this luck became an observance of the obvious absurdity of the main event.
Flying into the freezing tundra, I thought more, about what this event represented, historically, but more so what its present incarnation says about us; what it stands for. Fittingly I’d finished reading Sebastian Junger’s Tribe as the plane cut through the American afternoon, an awakening essay on the origins of humans sticking together, and how we’ve lost a lot of that connective fiber from which we built empires, because of the rise of individualism and property ownership. I pondered the lessons on community and solidarity Junger lays out. In compliment to his immediate thesis, I recalled Ben Fountain’s immersive, pensive, sharp-witted 2006 Super Bowl fiction, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which I had read a few years back, but thought of regularly in the countless fits of football fandom since then.
Fountain’s story takes you through the bowels of the Super Bowl machine, tracking the movements of a celebrated military unit during an appearance at the eponymous act, on it’s great stage, but also among its enthralled, drunk spectators, in the executive suits with gold ringed and pearled ownership and their retinues. A unit whose valiant exploits in the Middle East are being celebrated in conjunction with a display of bright lights and pop music extravagance their operations on the other side of the world made possible — according to spin. I’ll stop there at insinuating the parallel,for fear of going down the “kneeling” rabbit hole.
The Super Bowl is an event assembled from large exemplary parts industrial, commercial, social, customary: consumer excess, a grand architectural edifice of glass and steel, dedicated to that Scandinavian part of American ancestry, the newest plastic composites and light emitting diodes, tented media snow globes inhabited by tarted persons babbling on about other persons, bright light narcissism, and of course money exchanging hands everywhere for merchandise, food and beverage. Informing the french speaking world of last year’s fifty first edition of the event, Europe 1 aptly called it the match de tous les superlatifs (The match of all superlatives). There was a pregnant fix of cameras projected on the jumbotrons of fabulously rich boxer Floyd Mayweather, a fur coat the pedestal of the thousand watt smile of a man whose very sobriquet is the word money.
Through the eyes of Fountain’s protagonist, the amalgamation of all the money we have fought and worked to acquire in the history of American society is packaged for celebration in this great big ribbon festooned box, the stadium. It’s an offering back to those persons, places and occurrences that ensured our dominance in a three hundred year old zero sum game of war and commerce. That’s a view of it, soberingly drawn through the mess of glad handing, veneered self-satisfaction and raucous cheering. It’s a cynical perception, but when participating in extreme behavior, a la football fandom, one easily thinks in extremes.
Ultimately, together, one perceptive bit of fiction and one ladle of sociology punch preoccupied my enthusiasm, in a healthy way. What to make of futile passion? At worst, it gets me cheering senseless and a toe stub from excitement, or an evening of sulking. At best, it’s a celebration of commitment to a common cause, of a group of people driven to a goal through honed physical prowess and studiousness; an enjoyment of a kinetic tête-à-tête, strategies put in motion between generals, their sergeants, corporals, and specialists.
Focusing on the easy military analogy for the sport helps come to terms with the sociological absurdity of its zenith. And damn was it enjoyable watching it unfold.
