Nationalism: Enough is Enough. Over the past five months I have snickered at the overt signs of patriotism and the ridiculous amount of American flags, but secretly I thought that our nation banding together was an amazing sight to see. Recently, my secret tune has begun to jibe with my more vocal remarks.
The Superbowl pushed me completely over the edge. As others have discussed, the presentation as well as the halftime show were all over the top. Luckily, I missed the faux signing of the Declaration of Independence but I most certainly saw the cutaways of naval officers “pressing buttons” to bring up player photos and positions. The whole thing was just absurd. (And yes Jenny, my disdain for Bono’s merry clan grows daily and I will one day reach your status.)
On a similar note, I thought that monster.com’s choice of providing 30 seconds for Guliani to speak was anything but noble. “The war is tough but we are strong—now go find a job online!” Just plain wrong.
And also, the U.S. recently convinced the Olympic Committee to allow us to fly a tattered flag from the Twin Towers in place of a normal flag. Our friends at NextDraft have eloquently explained the problems with this:
“First, allowing one country to carry in a symbol of their choosing (no matter how close it may be to the symbol they were intended to carry) might open the door for requests by other teams to carry in their own important symbols. Second, the I.O.C. has a serious concern that the Utah games will become too patriotic. While each Olympics has its host country there should be, in essence, no home team.”
The decision to pursue this by the US Olymic commission is unsettling to me. It may serve as a reminder, but I think we’ve had more than our fair share of reminders. It is truly time to let most of the public displays be put to rest.
02/07/02 2:26 PM
i think the most egregious thing in the halftime show - the thing no one else seems to catch - is that they cut off the list of victims from the WTC-proper after the c's. I sort of found it moving at the beginning, but I don't know, there are more appropriate songs than "The Streets Have No Name," and cutting it off was so incredibly tacky.
I'm still naming my firstborn son The Edge, though.
02/07/02 3:35 PM
Awesome. Yeah, I agree. I think they should either have done a sampling of names or none at all. It would have been impossible to show them all in 20 minutes.