So as you obviously know by now, it was a heckuva game last night, unlike so many Super Bowls of yore. Because the Pats were undefeated and it all fell apart, last night goes down in the lengthening history of the Super Bowl, I think - up there with Namath and the Jets beating the Colts, really. Unexpected - but somehow, the right thing.
The ads were sort of lackluster, I thought. But perhaps most striking - in the long run, maybe even moreso than the game - was the Declaration of Independence intro that just preceded the kickoff. If you didn’t see it, Fox Sports had a whole lineup of past and present football greats - Jim Brown, Peyton Manning and Tony Dungy, Ronnie Lott, LaDanian Tomlinson and more - reciting, line by line, the Declaration of Independence.
It was sort of a non-sequiter at first. What does this have to do with the Super Bowl? But then, maybe this is the sanctification of the Super Bowl. It’s long been a sort of unofficial American holiday. Maybe this is how we make it official; a patriotic event on par with the Fourth of July, in its own modernistic way.
My second reaction, though, was suspicion. This was Fox, after all. And I began to think maybe it was some right-wing thing, a sort of half-veiled “These Colors Don’t Run” jingoistic nonsense.
The longer it went on, though, the more it became clear it wasn’t that - or, at least, couldn’t be that. Because the Declaration of not a conservative document as we know conservatism today. The sight/sound of Jim Brown saying that All Men are Created Equal - emphasis on the all - underscored this. All men - that includes black men like Brown, though it obviously didn’t at the time the Declaration was penned. The definition has changed to become plainer than it ever was. And so now we may embrace those same words specifically because they mean more than they were meant to. They are all-inclusive. All men - that includes gays. It includes Muslims. Does it not even include illegal immigrants?
All men; inclusive even of the most despised minorities. Again, not a thing Thomas Jefferson or the rest of the Founders intended, but this document and others they bequeathed to us have transcended whatever it was they meant. That is the beauty of it.
And so I still have no idea what the NFL thought it was doing. But whatever it is, however it might have been intended - it too, like but more important than the Giants’ win, was the right thing.
