Oh, Beautiful for Spacious Skies makes me feel icky

I don’t watch the Super Bowl as a rule, but I like the Packers; the Steelers not so much.  However, both are old school football, and that counts.  What I like best about the Packers is that the team is owned by their town and it’s the smallest market in the NFL and that proves something.  I don’t like the reverse welfare system which turns team owners into (insert choice expletive here), who then feel perfectly justified in behaving badly (Redskins owners and various others) because they’re successful, and they think they got what they have on the strength of their own virtues.

Needless to say, I’m pleased that the Packers won and that they won gracefully, with heart and passion and skill.

Now on to the rest:

1. I liked the Volkswagen/Darth Vader commercial the best, and I hated the Groupon commercials.  The Go-Daddy commercials are ignorable and futile.

2. Lea Michele singing ‘America The Beautiful’ was mawkish in the extreme and ridiculously overproduced.   Singers feel compelled to add trills, runs and flips in this desperate age.  Just sing the damn song.  That said, I hate this song: it’s boring.  It’s also a stupid paeon to Americanism.  It makes me feel icky inside with its saccharine and bland goofiness.  I also hate the religistic stab in the back of it. (Yes, I made up the word.)

3. I like the national anthem.  In the national gut-check that the Super Bowl has become, this song is a reminder that the republic began in blood and fire and defiance.  The other thing I like about it is that it’s hard to sing and even harder to sing well.  It’s hard to organize all the flood of vituperation I feel for Christina Aguilera.  She was a tarted-up tween ghastly gross bucket of FAIL.  I’m all for female empowerment, but this was wrong on too many levels to count.  I could begin with the bleached blonde hair, continue on to the all-black mush of ensemble, include the lips (Ghaa!), and that’s the first phase.  Second phase: I don’t think she was singing as much as she was caterwhauling, and I’d sooner listen to cats howl and scream: she was dreadful.  And last, and this may be a cheap shot: Get the words right.  This was a national moment.  Yeah, and at the same time, that’s making too much of it.  It’s just a football game.  But get the words right.  I feel a basic sadness that this attention-hog of a person got her moment in the spotlight and was deeply unequal to the moment.  It’s tempting to turn this into symbolism.  It’s not, but I would still like to see Saturday Night Live make fun of her.

It was a great game.  I’m glad that dirtbag Roethlisberger lost.  I’m unhappy that public figures who have done terrible things have an opportunity to continue in the spotlight to ‘redeem’ themselves.  It’s creepy; he’s creepy.