Intimations of Immortality and the Problem of the Super Bowl

In general, I am opposed to nostalgia. As an impulse, it usually strikes me as weak-minded, to be avoided at all costs. When we are young, the world appears to us to have great hidden meaning and an almost magical power to enchant. As we get older, we begin to see into the workings of things and discover how much of what we once took for magic and meaning is in fact a confidence trick animated by commerce. It’s a melancholy but natural evolution, fertile ground for the poets, from Virgil to Wordsworth to Proust and Joyce. To ignore the ancestry of this process, to say “no, the world of my youth WAS magical, and now the world has gone to shit,” is to willfully close one’s eyes to the human condition.

With that as a preface, I confront The Problem of the Super Bowl.

For me, the Super Bowl represents everything that is diseased in America, everything that threatens to consume us and reduce our spirits. It’s the pinnacle of the advertising age – the summation of all of our efforts to make a science of selling things to each other. How thorough and inescapable that science has become, the ways in which it seems to have colonized literature and art and music and sports and every single thing that we say or do or need in our lives… this is the source of an immense anxiety in our culture today, and yes, the source of a gnawing nostalgia, one that No Mas trades in as much as anyone else.

This nostalgia yearns backwards to a time when that science was in its infancy, when its algorithms were flawed, when it was stumbling forward blindly to the ultimate realization of its power. When you look back at sports in the media in the 60’s and 70’s, you see just the dawning of an awareness, equations being frantically drawn on a blackboard and just as quickly erased before your eyes. No one knew quite yet what they were holding in their hands, and that ignorance frequently led to wildness, chaos, absurdity, all of which in retrospect is enormously pleasing.

William Carlos Williams famously wrote, “It is the anarchy of poverty that delights me,” a line that has proven controversial, in that Williams, who himself was not poor, is seen to have been literarily slumming it, idealizing poverty from a safe distance. It’s hard to argue with some essential truth of that criticism, but as I read it the point of this line is a question of aesthetics only - because poor people cannot afford to control every aspect of their environment, Williams says, that environment takes on a shape of its own, a shape that ironically almost always proves to be richer and more nourishing than those manicured spaces of wealth and design.

Which brings me to the Super Bowl, the most manicured space of them all, nine or eleven or however many hours of television pomp and circumstance in which not a single second is unaccounted for, not a single moment unplanned, nothing left to chance except for the game itself, and yet somehow that minor offering to the gods feels miniscule in the midst of the unforgiving physics that govern the proceedings at large.

What blandness that physics yields, what stultifying absence. I can’t decide how much of my disgust is a product of the small-mindedness of nostalgia, and how much is a genuine awareness of something that has been lost and is seemingly unrecoverable. But I do know that if any one thing can be said to guide our obsessions here at No Mas, it’s the search for and celebration of those sports and athletes and characters, past and present, that manage to exist outside the military industrial complex of the Super Bowl and all of its bastard children. We celebrate them as we celebrate the glaciers or the rainforests or the beauty of an endangered species – sadly, because soon we fear they all will be gone.