Last night was Rick and Erika's last night as our house guests here in Fountain Hills. Since it was also the Super Bowl, I decided it would be a good idea to buy some premium rib-eyes at the supermarket and grill them on our backyard Weber bar-b-cue. Actually it would Rick who would wind up doing the honors of cooking. Not only is he a far superior chef than I am, but he very much enjoys it. It was a pleasure to have him in the kitchen for the last week.
Toward the end of the fourth quarter of the game we were getting a bit hungry, so we decided it was time to start the coals. By the overtime came around, Rick was on the patio by himself, tending to the steaks. When the game was finally over, I had to go outside and tell him. Later he told me he was glad to left alone outside to tend to the grill.
Red wanted to watch the post-game, including the trophy presentation, so we paused the DVR while we ate our steaks and enjoyed a bottle of wine. Afterwards we started the telecast again and watched the celebrations and highlights while we sat around with tablets and laptops, surfing social media.
Rick and I indulged in the new American past time of sharing Tweets about the game that we had discovered in our feeds. Despite my anticipation of political messages in the commercials and the half-time show, the latter which never materialized, I was stunned by the degree to which so many people had politicized the game itself.
Of course I knew that Tom Brady, the quarterback of the New England Patriots, was a Donald Trump supporter. Likewise the coach and owner of the team This would be a knock against the Patriots in the minds of many on the Left, I realized, but I figured that natural team loyalties would dictate most of the social media buzz.
Whew. Was I ever wrong! There seemed to be no end of tweets by folks who had chosen to cast the game last time as a replay of the 2016 Presidential election, with the Atlanta Falcons representing Hillary and the Patriots representing Trump. Many Righty posters gleefully shared Lefty tweets from half-time, when the Falcons were blowing out the Patriots, and then reveled in the schadenfreude of the rage induced among the same posters by the unprecedented comeback by the Patriots.
Likewise there was many Lefty tweets expressing something akin to the same mixture of rage and despair as on the day after the recent election. Atlanta was Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ, all rolled into one. Tom Brady and the Patriots were White Supremacists and Nazis. They represented evil. "Punch Tom Brady" became a meme.
Of course there were many tweets that played off humorous analogies with the election. For example, there were ones claiming that the Falcons vote the popular vote, and that Jill Stein was challenging the results on the field.
As I read off some of the best tweets to Red and our guests, I said, "I didn't want to care about this game, but I guess I have to."
Like I said, I didn't see this coming, at least not to the degree it played out. I had thought last year's Super Bowl was racially charged, as it featured a white southern-drawling Republican-voting quarterback playing against a very dark-hued quarterback who by his rhetoric and and style was almost the poster child of Black Lives Matter. This year's game had two white quarterbacks! But in the end that didn't matter. Among other things, as many Lefties on Twitter pointed out, Atlanta was both the "blackest and gayest city" in the country.
It's hard to see that the Super Bowl can ever be the same. The commercials have reached Peak Social Justice, even celebrating flagrant illegal immigration, gratuitous gay acceptance, and putting forth the notion that girls are valuable inasmuch as they compete and succeed in the traditional realm of boys' activities (so much pressure on them!).
I wonder what it will be like a year from now. In any case, I now have a two-year-running tradition of watching the Super Bowl with Rick, the biggest football hater that I know. After the game, I repeated the question from the previous night, that having just watched the game, whether he could name, for a theoretical million dollars, at least one NFL player besides Tom Brady and Colin Kaepernick. He fumbled for a moment and came up with the last name of the Falcons' quarterback. Only the last name, however. "Ryan?" I said that was good enough. He wins the million.
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