On Sunday night, Americans had two options for the Super Bowl halftime show. The official NFL show was headlined by Puerto Rican artist Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (aka Bad Bunny). Joining him were Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, and a slew of Hispanic supporting artists. Meanwhile, Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Charlie Kirk, hosted an alternative “All-American Halftime Show,” which included performances by Kid Rock, Lee Brice, Brantley Gilbert, and Gabby Barrett. While watching the game and deliberating which halftime show I should watch, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had seen this film before.
I was five years old when the “Greatest Super Bowl of all time” (according to Sports Illustrated writer Peter King) took place. Although the game was great, it is the memory of the halftime show that lives on. Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson scandalized audiences with a sensual performance of “Rock Your Body”—which ended in Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” the birth of YouTube, and a national conversation about decency in broadcasting. Kid Rock’s performance of “Bawitdaba” was overshadowed by #nipplegate.
Although I was too young to see the debacle live on TV, it presented two distinct visions of American culture with which I would become painfully familiar as a foreigner in my formative years. The first was the cosmopolitan world of artists like Timberlake, Britney Spears, and Ricky Martin. This group seemed sexy, cool, vital, forward-looking, and, most of all, fun. They were the cultural force that handed Obama the presidency. They could also be literary and high-minded, reading publications like the New Yorker and The Atlantic. This was the type of America I wanted to be a part of.
The second was the lowbrow and parochial world of trailer-park rock, of Insane Clown Posse, Limp Bizkit, and Nickelback, of country music, NASCAR, and Bible-thumpers—those mocked in the film Idiocracy. This was the group that had brought Bush and Cheney to power and had supported the war in Iraq. They barely read, if at all. They were too busy watching Fox News and WWE matches. This group didn’t seem to have any fun. From the outside, they looked perpetually angry and bitter. This was the America I didn’t want to be associated with.
People will rightly call these descriptions and distinctions simplistic and condescending. They have been used to put down and ignore the needs of real Americans for decades. The cultural world of Middle America has its own complexities and shows of excellence. I eventually grew to love it, especially its position as a resistance of globalized liberal culture, a middle finger to the out-of-touch cultural elite.
The world of Timberlake and Britney Spears turned out to be fake. Its calls for liberalization and the unmooring of people from their respective “patriarchal” and “oppressive” moral and cultural traditions didn’t lead to happiness or flourishing. Britney ended up in a mental institution and took America along with her. The party did not—could not—stop at the club. It went all the way to the Supreme Court with Obergefell v. Hodges and into our institutions with legally mandated DEI programs.
In 2016, with the arrival of Donald Trump and the birth of the new, online right, something seemingly impossible happened. Conservatives were now on the side of the renegade. They were standing against the old and stultified establishment. Bronze Age Pervert and the edgy, unorthodox podcast Red Scare offered young people an opportunity to be on the right while feeling like they had a seat at the cool-kids table. For the first time in a generation, voting Republican was no longer cause for embarrassment. Whatever their merits (or lack thereof), the forces of cultural creation seemed to be amassing on the right. Conservatives were becoming jolly warriors.
This short-lived experiment seems to have died along with Charlie Kirk. TPUSA’s halftime event represents the retrenchment of the cultural lines of the Bush era. The performances of three nobodies and one has-been do not inspire confidence in young people looking for a cultural home. TPUSA and the right in general went back to presenting themselves as a less attractive alternative to the main event. Watching Charlie Kirk’s memorial service felt like witnessing a celebration of conservatism; watching the All-American Halftime Show did not.
I will not pretend that Bad Bunny’s performance was high art, because it wasn’t. Unlike many Americans, I have been aware of Bad Bunny for nearly a decade—ever since I heard him at the club in Mexico City rapping about killing his enemies and smoking pot along with now MAGA darling Nicki Minaj. Any appreciation of his music by me or my friends was, in part, ironic. He was, and continues to be, vulgar and plebian. Listening to his music as a Spanish speaker does not enhance the experience. Now, the liberal American cultural sphere has adopted him as a wholesome figure of “Latino” unity. Even some conservatives have bought it. (A couple of quasi pro-family references and a wedding during the halftime show were enough to do the trick.) Despite all this, the people in the show and those watching it seemed to be having fun. The same can’t be said for TPUSA’s event.
Now that I’m older, my opinions on foreign policy and immigration are not shaped by the perceived coolness of the Super Bowl halftime show. I hope this is also the case for others on the political right. Optics matter, however. And the optics of joylessness, resentment, prudishness, and dreariness are the optics of losers.
Sipa USA via AP
