The Spectacle

By Crispin Sartwell

All the world is in thrall to American popular culture. The Super Bowl halftime show beamed out across the nations of the world, and to all the ships at sea. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan tuned in, perhaps understanding for the first time the true meaning of their liberation.

The American tradition of popular music is the world's richest. Take a moment to consider the following list: Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holiday, Otis Redding, Peggy Lee, Janis Joplin, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Rogers, Hank Williams, Lucinda Williams.

When it comes time to showcase our aesthetic riches again to the world, we turn aside momentarily from "Jacko's" pederastic legal entanglements, and dress up his sister in red lingerie and black vinyl armor, a sort of fascist armadillo. She bounds about mumbling incoherently, if that (one suspects the mumbling was lip-synched). Nelly comes on and "says," over and over, "It's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes." Then the genius of Justin Timberlake is applied to ripping off Janet's outfit.

The feculent ego known as "P Diddy" emerges from backstage and says: "I'm the definition of/Half man, half drugs." Then he's surrounded by strippers dressed as cheerleaders who proceed to chant "Hey Diddy, you're so fine/You're so fine you blow my mind/Hey Diddy!" "Diddy," we can safely assume, wrote that, which in this case means he inserted the word 'Diddy' into a pre-existing song.

MTV's halftime extravaganza - a mind-numbing assemblage of huge meaningless special effects, talentless schlumphs, simulated decadence, and extreme musical puerility - was a devastating indictment of American music and American culture. There was not a single moment of artistic meaning, nor a moment free of bombastic titillation. There was not a single moment that had any connection to the human: even the sexuality seemed androidal and pneumatic, perhaps brought to you by "36 Hour Cialis" ("erections that last more than four hours, while rare, require immediate medical attention"). Are these folks trying to incite and justify the Jihad?

Then of course, there were the "much-anticipated" advertisements, including the barrage for "Cialis." Perhaps the pressure to deliver something memorable in a 30-second ad that cost $1.5 million has brought a whole industry into a moral and creative crisis. Cedric the Entertainer got a bikini wax in the name of Bud Light. Bud also explored horse flatulence in detail (it was a good preview of the halftime music). In a movie ad, Ven Helsing fought Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein in thirty seconds, continuing the replacement of the profound human psychology of horror with the machine psychology of computer animation.

The reasonably compelling football game became nothing more than a frame for an infinite witlessness.

If you have money, bombastic spectacle is easier than art. One thing that has become clear about America: we have the cash to indulge in any and all possible forms of excess and corruption. The spectacle of the Super Bowl was a display of infinite, pointless, undeserved wealth and what it does to people. But beneath the elephantine emptiness of our culture there still lurks art, truth, power, vitality.

I want to book next year's Bowl. I'd say: cut down, scale back, think about beauty, dignity. Think about moving the people you're connecting with. But I know I'd be talking to computer animations. I'd offer to book the great blues band Rod Piazza and the Mighty Fliers, or the hip hop poetry of Atmosphere, or the southern rock truth of the Drive-By Truckers.

They'd just stare at me blankly, and recruit another s&m armadillo.

Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives."