Superb Owl Symbolism

I tend not to give much of a fuck about sports. I rarely have much positive to say about my home city of Philadelphia. But when the Eagles are in the Super Bowl, I am a hardcore fan bursting with hometown pride. It was a delight to see the birds stomp all over and disgrace the Kansas City Chiefs. As was Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show. Taken as a whole, the Eagles’ unstoppable drive and perseverance, and Lamar’s unapologetically defiant performance, were about more than sports and music.

This year’s Superb Owl was a metaphorical rebuke of the neofascist takeover of our country. One team was, if not explicitly, representing the MAGAts, while the other, not explicitly but through character and past actions, representing the resistance, the side of good. The orange Turd, despite knowing even less about football than I do, and knowing not a goddamn thing about anything to do with athletics in general, clearly declared a favorite; the side with the bitch-ass quarterback who, if not a MAGAt himself, is blood and kin to them, and seems just fine and proud with that circumstance. The Eagles, for diplomatic and economic reasons, cannot be vocal in their political opinions, but it’s been pretty clear where they’ve stood as an organization, and many as individuals, for the past several years.

Given that the Chiefs were the favorite to win among many prognosticators, that this would have been their third consecutive win in a row, and the fourth in the last five years, it was a clear case of the underdogs bucking the establishment, rebels fighting authoritarianism. Is that an over-romanticization of a game in which enormous men prance around and pummel each other for, at most, an hour of play that gets stretched out by time-outs, meanderings, and advertisements to fill half a day? Sure. But the message was there, for those that chose to hear it. The orange Turd seemed to, as he fled the stadium at halftime after his chosen winners proved to be consummate losers over the first two quarters of interceptions, weak plays, and turnovers.

Of course, he may have also bailed because he didn’t appreciate the music. While Lamar didn’t say anything politically specific against the current US regime, and kept his lyrics PG for the easily tizzied middle-American cracker class, some viewers still picked up on the subtext of the verbal and visual messages in his performance. More than anything, I believe, what he said and demonstrated was that who he is and what he represents are not going away, that they’re a part of this country, that they’re important, and that they’re very fucking popular. That last part may be what rankles MAGAts most. They apparently couldn’t contain their drunken abusive hissy fits to their homes and had to wail their ignorant discontent to the world. Their superficial grievance, rather ironically in light of (Uncle) Sam Jackson’s commentary, was that the performance was too Black. Several claimed that they couldn’t understand any of what Kdot was saying, which may have been for the best. A few very eruditely used different synonyms for garbage or excrement as descriptors in their critiques. What seemed to irritate their anuses most, though, was simply the fact that a Black artist was performing, because how dare he, after Trump won the election, and the fascists took power. They seem to believe that winning a political victory through deviance, deceit, and luck means that they won everything, that theirs is the only culture that matters, that they no longer have to sit through entertainment they don’t understand or appreciate. Their belief that everyone should cater to them, and that theirs is now the majority opinion is belied by the fact that multi-platinum album selling, twenty-plus Grammy-winning, Pulitzer Prize-receiving Kendrick Lamar is actually pretty darn popular, and his was the most-watched halftime show ever. Sure, at least some of the hundred-million plus viewers just didn’t bother to turn off the tv for twenty minutes (and the over fifty-seven-million Youtube views could all be flukes) and were thus assaulted by outrageous Blackness which sent them all to pieces, but the likes of public exhibitionist Lauren Boebert and pedophilic sexual predator Matt Gaetz are not about to win any popularity contests against Kendrick, and their music taste is undoubtedly wretched.