halftime

Now that the weekend dust has settled and we're back in the work week, the most significant take-away from Super Bowl XLVI seems to have been the commercial Chrysler ran at halftime.

With an obvious bow to the shrine of St. Ronald, the two-minute, politically-charged "Halftime in America" semi-documentary is narrated by a grizzled, grandfatherly Clint Eastwood, who at 81 is still photogenic enough to appear on camera, but curmudgeonly enough to do the voiceover. It's a tired cliché, this analogy of "the football game of life," but in this case it works well enough to rouse Republicans from their dreams of grinding down peasants and workers to object strenuously to what they see as Chrysler's "pro-Obama" stance, a quid-pro-quo for the auto industry bailouts of 2009-2010.

See more at the Christian Science Monitor site.

Personally, I don't find the bounce-back rhetoric as reassuring as Clint Eastwood apparently does, and the "roar of American engines" just reminds me of the amount of oxides of nitrogen and unburnt hydrocarbons those engines will release into the atmosphere. I don't know if the Democrats put Chrysler up to this, but the news both of them still need to find out is that the future isn't going to look anything like the past, and life is not a game.

I still like better the proles in flannel shirts who survived the Mayan apocalypse in their tuff Chevy trucks. I must be cycnical.

Speaking of the past and speaking of halftime, Sunday's halftime show took us back 30 years to the sights and sounds of the early 1980's, as a bottle blonde cougar hoofed through a highly vigorous and entirely meaningless frenzy of movement, accompanied by a platoon of dancers and acrobats, to the busy, staccato audible-wallpaper sounds of synthesizers and chattering drum machines. It was a puzzling, incoherent performance, like the national consciousness at the moment.