Last Sunday’s Super Bowl game was exciting, unlike most other Super Bowls. But I cannot stop thinking about the mind-numbing, horrendous half-time “entertainment” and a couple of tasteless commercials.
The half-time show featured high decibel music, dancers writhing suggestively and lights flashing continuously and seemed endless. The target audience was obviously adolescents, since several thousand flooded the field and screamed nonstop. Janet Jackson looked like a tarted-up, smaller and more feminine version of her brother. The male singers were unshaven and wore undershirts as outer garments. One repeatedly clutched his crotch and at the end of his duet with Jackson, grabbed her chest and exposed her breast displaying a pastie-covered nipple. It was a multi-million dollar demonstration of the worst of American pop culture.
Some commercials were clever and even entertaining. I have become so inured that I was able to tolerate the penile dysfunction commercials, the car commercials that promoted speed and power and were silent on safety, and the junk food commercials. But two commercials were disgusting. I am all for freedom of expression and pushing the artistic envelope and I love novelty and experimentation. But a commercial that features a flatulent horse? To quote the late Jack Paar, “I kid you not.” The scene was a young couple in a buggy. The product was some beer the name of which, thankfully, was purged from my memory by the grossness of the commercial. Mid-commercial the horse made a you-know-what in the girl’s face, causing damage to her hair and face that was graphically portrayed.
The other commercial that was equally offensive sold potato chips. An elderly couple in a nursing home maliciously tripped and pushed each other up to get the bag of chips. It is humor from the bad old days when an alcoholic’s stumbling and slurred speech were considered hilarious.
Why was I so bothered by this all of this? The Super Bowl has an enormous international TV audience. America’s image is currently under attack worldwide. Is what I saw Sunday the image we want to project to the rest of the world?
-Henry J. Pollard