No Bread and Circuses Today

 

My family won’t be watching the Super Bowl today. We decided we have better things to do.

 

Now, the NFL died to me sometime around 2017 or 2018, I think (I haven’t been keeping track and can’t be bothered to confirm the exact season). You know, when the whole kneeling thing started. I didn’t watch a single game for several years, and that includes my beloved New York Giants as well as any playoff games or Super Bowls.

 

This unofficial boycott lasted until about 2022 or so. We moved down to Texas which has such a football culture. My brother-in-law tried to get us into watching college ball, but it just didn’t stick with me. Funny story with that – and one I can’t write about without being canceled. And as a diehard Giants fan, I can’t rightly root for the Cowboys. So that season I think we just watched the Super Bowl. Rams, was it? Or was it Tom Brady’s Bucs? Can’t remember; these things all seem to mishmash into each other.

 

Then early this past fall with the horrendous Giants having something like four primetime appearances in the first five weeks we started watching them again. After that, not so much as both the Giants and Jets were a little south of mediocre all year and not often broadcasted this part of the South. We watched some post-season games; since my wife spent her first eight years of life in a Detroit suburb, we rooted for the Lions. Naturally, they did not advance to the Super Bowl.

 

The whole thing has an astroturfed stink to it, doesn’t it? I mean, that obnoxious Kelce guy and the NFL embarrassingly fawning over all things Tayor Swift. You absolutely knew the Chiefs would be in the big game. Go to YouTube and you’ll find any number of videos about the current state of NFL refereeing, horrible and conspiratorial and hypocritically subjective. They’re like Goodell’s evil minions, the NFL commissioner’s praetorian guard. And the league still panders to the left-wing wokeism from the late 2010s. It’s all so overtly manufactured and it’s all, ultimately, meaningless.

 

So instead of watching the “festivities” drone-like, hive-like, NPC-like, we’re going to do something different this year. Yeah, we’ll still have the appetizers coming out of the oven full-force later today (potato skins, mozzarella sticks, jalapeno poppers, etc.) but we’ll eat them watching a classic from by-gone days: 1977’s Star Wars, the original, the one-and-only, untainted by Disney and DEI. I’m actually really looking forward to it. Last time I saw it the little ones were really little.

 

If you want to subject yourself to Taylor Swift – I mean, the Super Bowl – more power to you. I was once in your shoes. Actually, for most of my life. I’ll be on Tatooine and the Death Star this evening.