Jeffrey Blehar of National Review Online ponders reactions to Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show.
I switched off the game early because it was so boring, so I didn’t watch the halftime show when it was on. Instead, I “Twitter-watched” it — watched the reactions of others online. And what I saw spill forth was a Rorschach inkblot spreading out in real time: Was it political? Was it mild and inoffensive? Was it an entertaining hoot or a bizarre failure? All I know is that everybody was fighting bitterly about the cultural import of a guy who self-identifies as a vicious hare — which I assume is about as seriously as we should take him — and the angles were almost entirely predictable based on partisan priors. …
… When I finally checked the thing out myself, I had three takeaways: (1) My conversational Spanish is way rustier than I thought. (2) Golly, Puerto Rican women sure are lovely. (3) Whoever choreographed this should work on the next major stage production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Seriously, hundreds of humans dressed as tall reeds and sugarcane stalks? …
… With no particular dog in this hunt, I’m ultimately left musing with idle sadness upon how every public event in American life now takes on an obligatory political valence. Bad Bunny isn’t for me. Maybe he is for you. (Though I doubt it, if you’re my typical reader.) Why must this be a topic of specifically political import? For that matter, why were we once upon a time debating the “meaning” of Taylor Swift?
The ugly truth: because cynical actors have realized they can make money off of controversializing entertainment. Mr. Bunny is prime among them: When the Super Bowl gig was announced, our fearsome Lepus leapt into this wholesale with a confrontational initial press conference — and then he played it relatively safe, even as others poured out pre-prepared rants online.
And this is the modern condition. This is who we are now — what our technological addictions have made us into.
