Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Within the Octave of the Superbowl


Mack Hall, HSG


 

Within the Octave of the Superbowl

 

In ye olden Puritan colonies ye olden local police were charged by the magistrates and the clergy to verify church attendance on Sundays, even to checking the houses and businesses of absentees to make sure they really were sick, and not simply avoiding sermons of such transcendental length that even Methuselah might yawn and check the ol’ sun dial.

 

In our times the powerful purveyors of beer, fizzy-water, and cardboard calories might be tempted to petition the several states to ensure that every householder in the land is in prayerful, purchasing-power (a widow’s mite won’t cut it anymore) devotion before the Orwellian telescreen on Super-Bowl Sunday unless there is a valid excuse, such as being dead.

 

Yes, the Octave of the Superbowl is here, and all unnecessary work is suspended for a week in observance of this Great Liturgy of the Republic.  Long before the Game Itself, children and adults alike dream of the merry violence of unionized millionaires bashing each other in taxpayer-funded stadia for the profit of a small oligarchy of owners.  Attended by a praetorian guard, airships, amazonian vestals, liturgical directors, referees, commentators, line judges, hired musicians, dancing bears, dispensers of comestibles, lights, colors, sounds, smokes, and tiers of worshippers in their made-in-China vestments, the Superbowl is a display of excess and distraction that would make even the giddiest Babylonian king envious.

 

All over This Great Land millions of fowl are sacrificed to the gods, and their smoking body parts rendered up on the Altar of Consumption under the transfiguring name of buffalo wings.  Yes, no matter what anyone says, Americans are a people of great faith – in spite of all evidence they believe that on Superbowl Sunday buffalos have wings just as in Ordinary Time they believe that paint stripes on a pavement will keep two cars from crashing into each other

 

Superbowl Sunday is such an essential liturgy of Americanism that those few who recuse themselves from this Holy Day of Obligation can be subject to questions about their morals.  Not to have a favorite team is to shame one’s family, especially Grammaw in her made-in-China Green Bay ensemble, and not to know the names of the competing gods in the Super Bowl is to invite McCarthy-ite suspicion about one’s religious fidelity and national loyalty.

 

At the end of the game – or Game – the faithful of the losing gods are in such despair that they feel the only way they can restore their faith is by the ritual burning of other people’s cars.  Curiously, the faithful devotees of the winning gods also burn other people’s cars, but in celebration of the increased strength of their gods.  Understanding the anthropology of primitive peoples is always a challenge.

 

After The Game, the human sacrifices begin, when the Chosen Stadium itself is as bare as a Christian Altar on Good Friday: dark, empty, forlorn, devoid of hope.  The gods themselves, when they are or are broken in body, are abandoned.  Some have been known to die alone and homeless, with none of the millions who once cheered them in attendance.  For there are always new gods and new places of worship in the cycle of diversions.

 

For now there is Mardy Graw, and the burning question of whether the made-in-China beads were deflated, and whether The Plastic King may or may not be righteously baked into the cake.

 

-30-

 

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