Reagan Idolatry, the Super Bowl and American Fascism

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.


-H.L. Mencken

The Super Bowl pre-game party nacho cheese dip had hardly been touched before the FOX Republican propaganda megaphone, taking full advantage of the largest viewing audience of the year to exhume the rotting, smirking carcass of Ronald Wilson Reagan and park it in the luxury suites at Jerry Jones’ Texas Palace like some sick morphing of Weekend at Bernie’s and Groundhog Day. Or maybe it was one of those forced worship sessions of long dead ideological leaders that were regularly dredged up by despots, murders and U.S. puppet banana republic dictators and their Eastern Bloc Communist counterparts. The Super Bowl, already being the most grotesque public consumption of the rotted fruits of bastardized American looter capitalism is the ideal place to honor Ronald Reagan, an odd synthesis of warmed-over nostalgic yearning for a bygone past that never really existed (outside of TV that is) and pure corporate marketing that would give Don Draper a hard-on and has the newest version of the product, Barack Obama likely spending many a sleepless night in trying to tap into that same sort of serendipitous magic that has made Reagan second to only Jesus Christ in our putrescent Empire. A putrescent empire that was on full global display on Sunday, in what very well be the Empire’s Last Supper party.

It was a full two years since the King David Petraeus strutted out to midfield, to stand upon the NFL logo in Tampa in full dress regalia to flip the coin for Super Bowl XLIII, at the time the gold standard for American fascist shamelessness. Now the deification of the Gipper, on the world’s largest HDTV screen and broadcast to billions is the ultimate con job, at a time when the ruinous nature of the scurrilous policies and pandering to half-wits drunk on Jesus juice poured through the blessed American flag are on full display for the monstrous failures that they always were (see the streets of Cairo) it is truly a crowning moment for America. Despite his Reagan idolatry, Obama, the new Pope of Hope has nothing on the finely-tuned public relations machine that has turned Ronald Reagan into a transcendent life form even while his criminally degenerate carcass is  roasting on a spit in bowels of Hades. Perhaps he can invite Nancy Reagan to the White House for a seance and a game of Ouija, with Obama already on record as admiring Reagan and now splitting time with the old dead phony on the cover of Time Magazine, Reagan’s stock is as high as ever and with generations of indoctrinated suckers, schmucks and chumps he is salivating at a shot at grabbing a ride on the gravy train. If one thing can truly be said about BOTH Obama and Reagan is that they are exquisitely marketed corporate products, teflon slick shit salesmen for the oligarchy with a built in customer base clamoring for a messiah.

Yesterday in frigid Arlington, Texas the national orgy of gauche consumerism, idiocy, militarism, celebrity worship and a little football mixed in took place and with a global viewing audience in the low hundred millions, FOX also made sure to kick up the fascism a notch or three. Never shy about wrapping their propaganda in a flag and getting right into the faces of Americans that Goddamn it! We are more fucking patriotic than you!, the early Super Bowl coverage was a magnum opus for that conniving foreign pig Rupert Murdoch, water-carrier for the fascist Republican party. From the FOX blowhard demagogue Bill O’Reilly interview with Obama, through the blood boiling intro by Gordon Gekko himself featuring scenes of flag worship insterspersed with historic iconic images of 9/11 first responders raising up ole glory among the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center (and of course shots of The Gipper) and continuing on through a gut churning shot of still at-large war criminals George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice partying in Jerry Jones’s suite it was a Roger Ailes production for the ages. Nicely timed to coincide with what is now going to likely become an American holiday, Reagan’s Birthday, hell, give it a while and the cult of Reagan will have him right up there neck and neck with Jesus Christ. The Michael Douglas video has to be right up there with one of the most dastardly pieces of propaganda ever made for the diabolically cunning mixture of American exceptionalism, war worship and raw post 9/11 fascism interspersed with clips of FDR, JFK and the decidely anti-war Martin Luther King. Goebbels would have gotten a boner watching it.

The cult of Reagan has a kick-ass public relations machine, always has and always will, thanks to the love child of tax chiseler Grover Norquist The Reagan Legacy Project that was created with a duty to promulgate the big lie of Reagan the Great and a dedicated army of flacks, shills, foot soldiers and clueless dopes and sycophants whose fervor towards Dutch as a messianic figure is right up there with worshippers of Mao. There is nary a conservative running for office who can go three minutes without invoking the name of the hallowed Reagan as an inspirational figure despite the fact that the GOP post-Gingrich and now owned by the Alaskan murder inciter Sarah Palin would oust the real Reagan about a quickly as they would send Barry Goldwater and Dick Nixon packing for their anti-American liberalism. We live in a society that today has been tipped on it’s head, turned inside out and then pushed through the looking glass where illusion is reality, war is peace, slavery is freedom and pretty much damned near everything works exactly in the opposite way that it should. A large amount of credit goes to the cult of Ronald Reagan that emerged from the rubble of Vietnam and Watergate, took on career parasites like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney as power-crazed, bittermen with a bloodlust to avenge the takedown of Nixon, engaged in a longtime period of hot and nasty fornicaton with the Religious Right and with longtime Eastern Establishment operative and former CIA director George H.W. Bush playing hardball in the backtround hijacked the country. The now rising force of the Ronald Reagan Centennial takes the false idol and using emerging technology, the near total corporate fascist takeover of the U.S. government and an increasingly dumbed down public (Dostyevsky once famously said that one could judge the degree of civiliation by entering the prisons in a society, here in USA we could easily do the same by watching the Super Bowl commercials) to push for actual godhood for the Gipper, the idea is being floated that his ghoulish mug should be featured on Mount Rushmore. The pre-kickoff Reagan video that was shown before Super Bowl XLV is the logical next step towards the United States of Ronald Reagan.

The Cult of Ronald Reagan’s Aged Government Cheese

BIG, HARD MASS; A BLOCK OF ORANGE-YELLOW PROCESSED “USDA CHEESE FOOD” ISSUED BY “DA GUBMENT” United States GOVERNMENT to aid needy families by supplementing their food resources. Used for making Grilled Cheese Sandwiches and Macaroni & Cheese but ALSO CAUSES severe, bowel obstructing constipation, silent but deadly stinky gas, and / or “the runs” diarrhea in those who are lactose intolerant


-Government Cheese Definition: The Urban Dictionary

Ronald Wilson Reagan was a fraud while he walked the planet and as all myths and legends, his iconic status years after he was officially planted the falsehoods only grow stronger. As in the old western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance starring another dude ranch desperado named Marion Morrison but more famously known as John Wayne, the classic line is “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The ultimate phony, was of course John Wayne, a rabid right-wing freak whose celluloid heroics belied the truth that while starring in multiple war movies never actually fired a shot in anger while in the uniform for his country and while being a rip-snortin, Injun bashing iconic American cowboy was a tenderfoot. The western imagery would come to serve Reagan well, is there a more famous picture of the old charlatan than the one of his leather-faced, beaming smile shining out from out from under a cowboy hat? It was such a great shot that after his death in 2004 both Time and Newseek featured the exact same picture on the cover of their weekly editions. Later, George W. Bush would also go to the bread and butter of the cowboy mythos, prior to his successful 2000 presidential bid (thanks to a rigged Florida vote and an assist to the Supreme Court) Bush’s image makers purchased a piece of ranchland in Crawford, TX and began to cultivate the image of their ass kicker in a Stestson. The whole cowboy thing was bullshit of course, just as it was with Wayne and Reagan; Bush though took it to the next level in that he was actually afraid of horses, did you ever see a picture of him riding one? Give it to Reagan, he blew Bush away when it came to being a real actor. Ronald Reagan would grab hold of the tits of the false legend of the great western manly man and milk the bitch for all that it was worth. Note that Reagan curried favor with the risign menace of the uber-fascist right by turning fink and ratting out leftist Hollywood peers during the great scourge of the McCarthy years that served as a shining example for today’s “unpatriotic” jihadists in screaming traitor at anyone who dares to question the growing authoritarianism of the U.S Empire, now with Obama as caretaker.

But this all plays into something much bigger, the necessary destruction of the scourge of the Ronald Reagan idolatry among Americans because let’s face it, every stinking rotten problem that we face today originated with Reagan. The Egyptian uprising that is roiling the Middle East is directed at the puppet dictator and thug torturer Hosni Mubarak whose presidency began during the early days of the Reagan administration. The economic crisis and coming global collapse can be attributed to the deregulatory looting spree presided over by Reagan whose corrupt cronies flipped the latch on the gate and unleashed the pigs, how very apropos that Michael Douglas would be the one giving the benediction at Super Bowl XLV yesterday, “Greed Is Good” as proclaimed by his Best Actor award winning Gordon Gekko was the ethos of the Reagan era. The police state that has decimated traditional American liberties and is now a money-sucking monstrosity run amok in the fear sodden era of post 9/11 America had roots in the Reagan administration with Ollie North and his REX 84 progam that laid out plans for the suspension of the Constitution and the implementation of martial law including the roundup of American dissidents. The Continuity of Government (C.O.G.) programs that would be implemented as an emergency on 9/11 by embeds Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in defense against Reagan’s “freedom fighters’, the Mujahadeen who were ostensibly behind the plot and to this day provide justification for both the Homeland fascist police state as well as the ongoing and never-ending wars abroad. The deregulation under Reagan may have had many an American shrieking in approval as if cheering on their team in the Super Bowl when their hero emphatically fired striking air traffic controllers and issued his open declaration of war on the unions that were so instumental in building a middle class that once the envy of the civilized world has now had it’s back broken by three decades of plunder and undermining of the very legal protections that built it. You name it and it either had a genesis in the Reagan administration or was made much worse during those years.

Ronald Reagan’s single-handed defeat of those evil Commie bastards and the winning of the Cold War is the single greatest myth of those eight years after the post-Vietnam/Watergate era when America cavorted with it’s failings, began to recognize the worms in the apple and rather than to become a better nation chose the wrong fork in the road. The toppling of the USSR and the Gipper getting credit is like adage about Paul Revere’s horse: the horse did all the work and the guy riding it got all of the credit. Note that Mr. Reagan’s messianic anti-Communism (he was linked to the notorious World Anti-Communist League or WACL – an organization so extreme that it was shunned by the John Birch Society) that had roots in a festering, deep-seated contempt of egalitarianism among the elite had as much to do with this falsehood than anything that Reagan himself actually did.

Reagan’s Early Contibution to the Phony Tea Party Movement

Buying The Myth, Selling Our Souls

The idle rich, the chiselers, the corporatists, and of course the Wall Street grifters were looking for a champion and in Dutch they found one and they crowned him for his efforts. The hatred of having to share the wealth contributed to the wars at home against labor and the middle class as well as a series of brutal U.S. backed extreme right-wing regimes putting down `leftist’ movements in Central America. The horrors of the torture states and blood soaked counterinsurgencies sponsored by covert CIA operatives and cowboys like Ollie North are an ugly blight upon our history that will never be removed.

The Reagan era also institutionalized the freewheeling style of fuck you anything goes vulture Capitalism that has gutted today’s economy, destroyed our manufacturing capability, wrecked the regulatory agencies that were created to keep corporations and Wall Street looters at least somewhat honest and the environment clean, seriously undermined the public education system, crippled organized labor and made the Social Darwinist race to the bottom line the nation’s economic religion. CEO’s became folk heroes and the poor were shamed into blaming themselves for losing the birth lottery.

Ronald Reagan also blamed government for all social problems, he often invoked the crowd pleaser that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. Truthfully Reagan and the so-called conservatives love government – as long as it is government that works to further their own self-interests and to keep the rabble in their place. Reagan style government consists of an exponentially growing military machine, a surveillance industrial complex, agencies that bestow taxpayer money to radical religious groups (Christian Socialism), corporate welfare and an enforcement arm that allows the government to meddle in every aspect of the lives of Americans who don’t share the same `values’ of the ruling elite.

Reagan style conservatism wants to invade citizen’s homes, regulate what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms, meddle in the education of their children by deliberately undermining the public educational system, promote a virulent state favored religion that has been hijacked by fanatics, destroy social programs like Medicare and Medicaid and of course that crown jewel of leveling the playing field Social Security. Reagan was able to successfully dupe the people that big government was the problem, the unspoken caveat being that only those governmental agencies that served the people, held industry accountable and protected the rights of the American worker were evil. Big government is even better when it is used as the foundation for a police state that acts to crush dissent and political opposition to Anti American, neo-fascist policies.

And the Star-Bellied Sneetches were exalting the coronation of their new king from the very beginning. In January 1981 the Washington D.C. air was filled with the musk of greedheads in heat, their delight in having a fox as the henhouse gatekeeper bordered on orgasmic. Haynes Johnson’s excellent book on the entire sordid Reagan era, Sleepwalking Through History describes the atmosphere at the inauguration as follows:

It was an outpouring of wealth and privilege. At National Airport, corporate jets were parked wing to wing on the tarmac. The airport was unable to accommodate the private planes seeking space. They touched down, dropped off invited inaugural guests, then departed to bring back more. One group of Indiana Republicans traveled to Washington in an elegant railroad car once owned by J.P.Morgan. Limousines were the preferred symbol of status. “They give you a feeling of pride and accomplishment,” explained a Republican national committeeman from Salt Lake City, “They give you a feeling of enthusiasm for your leaders”

So brisk was the limousine business that all available ones in the capital were quickly leased. Calls went out to dispatch others from as far south as Atlanta and as far north as New York. They poured into the city, vanguards of a new era bearing special inaugural plates with names of the corporations that had leased them. Gliding up to museums and galleries and other public buildings, they discharged women in designer dresses and diamonds and men in formal wear. Society page writers, with press entry credentials to the private festivities, strained for metaphors to describe the display of affluence. Hotel coat racks, laden with mink, “looked like furry beasts.” At Sunday brunches in Georgetown, “furs swallowed the beds.” At a black-tie-and boots Texas party, “a perfumed herd of thousands drank beer and wore emeralds.”

The catering business had never been better. “There are ten times as many parties this inaugural as last time” said Jeff Ellis of Ridgewell’s, a firm that had been waiting on Washington’s social-diplomatic set for generations. Ridgewell’s alone served more than four hundred thousand hors d’oeuvres during the pre-inaugural parites. “I’ve never seen anything like this” Ellis remarked happily. “These people have really fine taste. Rather than shrimp salad, they want the whole shrimp.”It was the costliest, most opulent inauguration in American history, and some of the scenes gave credence to critics who likened it to “a bacchanalia of the haves”.

It was indeed a feeding frenzy, a gathering of pigs at the trough to worship at the altar of unfettered greed based dogma of monopoly capitalism and this was six years prior to Gordon Gekko’s oft-repeated commandment that “Greed Is Good” was chiseled into stone inside the temple of the moneychangers. The Reagan administration went for the throat right out of the gates. The return of the wealthy elite and robber barons to power and prominence was facilitated by the ability to distract and deceive. Karl Marx was only partially right when he stated that religion was the opiate of the masses, it is but that was prior to the advent of television and when the two are combined the potency is jacked up to the highest possible level, like black tar heroin. The elitist power brokers knew this and with his Hollywood background Ronald Wilson Reagan was the perfect front man for the myriad of their ideological schemes and voodoo economics that would wage war on progressive society and deal a staggering blow to fairness and equality in the land of plenty. It was the great national regeneration decade and that fabulous and almighty leader was our champion, the iconic president who would make things right, who would deal harshly with those bastards in Iran unlike his milquetoast predecessor, who would restore the national glory and make us that shining city on the hill. After a prolonged darkness clouded by nuance it was morning in America again, black was black and white was white it was Pleasantville in the US of A and as the they say in the movie “what’s outside of Pleasantville?” – it was perfect, it was Americana and it was Ronald Reagan was our national treasure.Were Jerry Jones at the time anything but an obscure social climber yet to ascend to the summit of the American capitalist money pile before he bought the Dallas Cowboys then he would have been there to worhip his hero firsthand rather than to just drool over the fawning tribute broadcast on his grand stadium’s gargantuan HDTV.

Yes indeed, those were the days, the 1980s, the demarcation point from reality and the base camp for our national descent into the abyss of post the 9/11 world of fear and globalist economics. But I am getting ahead of myself here. The Reagan years were the period when America went back to the future in pursuit of that mythical period of greatness and nostalgia that Kevin Phillips wrote about in Post Conservative America. It was a time where a nation wounded by the twin betrayals of Vietnam and Watergate failed the test and rather than gathering together to shape a future that would prevent the amoral interest of a greedy ruling class and their corrupt system from ever again resulting in such disaster we as a nation looked into the mirror and were horrified at the monster glimpsing back, we were in denial and in desperate need of a return to better days. As Phillips so aptly put it:

“More precisely, the 1980s must be considered a decade following a twenty-year period of turbulence in which the American people lost their first war, saw a number of prominent leaders assassinated, their first President forced from office, their currency at one point lose 95 percent of its value against gold, and generally came to feel that their “Heaven-bless’d nation” was somehow no longer favored.”

The possibilities were infinite, an increasing prosperity for the well to do and government cheese for the rest. The days of ketchup as a school lunch vegetable, Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk, Rambo and Chuck Norris exacting blood vengeance in Vietnam to finally WIN the war, Sonny and Rico, stylishly kicking ass clad in Armani, Marty McFly and Doc Brown time tripping in a flying De Lorean, J.R. and Alexis flaunting wealth and power, MTV in every household through the miracle of cable, televangelism exploded and took the first steps towards allowing video preachers to become political kingmakers and the personal computer became a force that would eventually transform every aspect of our lives and society. We were mesmerized by the images on the tube, the VCR made available fantasy at the fingertips in your very own living room and the bread and circuses made it all the easier to ignore the looting and dismantling of the infrastructure in the background.

Again I quote from Johnson’s Sleepwalking Through History:

“In the eighties the symbiosis between Reagan and television raised new questions. Was it possible the predominant values of success, winning, fame, and fortune that television transmitted into American homes had begun to manifest themselves in the character of the country? Were Americans becoming what they saw? Were they being held hostage by the miracles of their own technical inventions? Did their repeated exposure to fictional happy endings create an appetite for more of them in real life and make it more difficult for them to face lifes realities?”

“Reagan affected television and the viewing public in two significant ways. First, and most important, was the power of his own soothing personality. Both he and television offered new opportunity for diversion and helped breed a new passivity in public life. Under Reagan’s lulling spell and the television trance, increasing numbers of Americans became spectators instead of participants. Politically and personally they were couch potatoes.”

Couch Potatoes Who Bought The Myth and Continue to Do So.

They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and class less and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see

-John Lennon –
Today the cheese dip has been eaten and the leftover lil smokies and meatballs put away, the hangovers ministered to and those who are still employed in this dessicated land of once plenty shuffle off to work. The Super Bowl is over yet the Reagan myth endures and will continue to endure for as long as it serves the needs of those who in the words of the late Hunter S. Thompson stand for nothing but:

… the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it.”

Grand poobah host Jerry Jones’guests including the aforementioned war criminals Dubya and Condi have now departed the mothership of the stadium that has yet to generate a sufficient bidder for corporate naming rights. In an interesting footnote there were 400 poor schmucks who shelled out big bucks for tickets to the big game and then were denied access to the JerryDome, the additional perches were solely added to ensure that the attendance record for the great game would be set in the temple of Jerry and then commoditized as just another selling feature. Welcome to Chumpland!

As for the Super Bowl itself it was amazingly under-whelming for a 31-25 score that would indicate much more excitement, truthfully it was blasé beyond belief. That it was played inside of a climate-controlled tomb with ugly turf that made it hard to tell the difference between the playing surface and the green jerseys of the Green Bay Packers and a top attribute that is the world’s largest indoor Jumbotron probably played a part. I suppose that the FOXed up coverage that was more focused on pimping phony patriotism and the big lie of the Reagan legacy along with millions of dollars in shitty commercials that glorified misogyny, drunkenness, debauchery, consumerism, junk food, movies, homoerotic finger-sucking, baby smashing, cars that nobody but the rich can afford to buy (or qualify for financing for) and the endless promos for FOX’s electronic buffet of idiocy. And then there was the sales job that continued to exalt American exceptionalism, the war machine and the violent culture that supports it, this is why FOX is so very valuable to the oligarchy. Newt Gingrich understood that back when he took 4.5 million dollars from Rupert Murdoch for a book deal back in 1994 – the same year that the fledgling network hit it big by securing broadcast rights for National Football League games.

I suppose that it is somehow poetic justice that the Super Bowl XLV winner, The Green Bay Packers are technically a socialist entity, public owned and now, for the day at least honored heroes in Ronald Reagan’s America.

EE

American Bacchanal

The Super Bowl has come to be the perfect representation of America in all of its grossest excesses and bombastic pageantry. An annual epic display of wretched overindulgence, debauchery, drunkenness, gluttony, glitz, idolatry and greed and an overkill of hype in the true American tradition and electronically exported to the rest of the civilized and uncivilized world alike through the miracles of modern technology. Despite the continuing assault on the mythical American Dream by the establishment the citizens of the republic/empire will continue to be distracted by the same Bread and Circuses (p nem et circ ns s) that our precursors in Rome eagerly and ignorantly succumbed to as their own society was laid to waste right in front of their blind and apathetic eyes that had become fixated on cheap diversions for their daily lives. To the victors go the spoils and the victors are the networks, advertisers and league who all reap marketing bonanzas off of the unofficial national holiday. The winning team has to settle for bragging rights and a silver plated phallic object known as the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

The game and its all out accompanying hype have since the early days become a showcase for consumerism and raw capitalist hubris. The game is no longer accessible to the average fan other than on televisions that incidentally have their heaviest sales in the weeks leading up to the festival. The game long ago became too expensive for the normal fan, luxury suites and parties are packed with slimy corporate Republican douchebags, power brokers, celebrities and the Jack Abramoffs of the world seeking to parlay free Super Bowl junkets into multi million dollar deals. Initially slow to catch on Corporate America didn’t always see the Super Bowl as the immense marketing and schmoozing bonanza that it had the potential to be, early games were neither heavily promoted nor watched by a large sector of the public, the game or two weren’t even formerly called Super Bowls but eventually the advent of technology allowed Wall Street to see the game for the golden plated cash cow that it really is and the political forces came to the same conclusion. The ultimate perversion was in the nascent FOX network’s acquisition of NFL television rights for NFC games, it was what made Rupert Murdoch’s fledgling propaganda mill into a legitimate force.

The fiercely protective NFL uses an iron fist in the licensing and strict enforcement of use of name in local advertising, the National Football League enforces it’s trademarks more mercilessly than members of the Tony Soprano mob and on any given Sunday local law enforcement officials throughout the country are sent on missions to flea markets to confiscate and destroy all unlicensed league and team merchandise. There should be an organized boycott of all NFL team apparel, why should anyone pay top dollar for an official jersey that may or may not have been made by foreign sweatshop labor. In caving in to celebrity idolatry and wearing this crap people are not only pumping cash into the bloated NFL beast but also offering free advertising the equivalent of walking around with a sandwich board. Would anyone pay sixty bucks and up for a shirt that advertises Subway, Burger King, Wal Mart, Haliburton, Exxon-Mobil or any other corporation?

Corporate hacks and advertisers aren’t the only grifters who use the Super Bowl as a forum for scamming and commercialism, merchandising tie ins, travel schemes, ticket scalping and any other myriad of scams both legal and illegal are typically at their highest levels in the run up to the big game. TV sales are their highest levels as Americans scramble for that perfect new electronic false deity to place on the living room altar just in time for kickoff. In the weeks preceding the game retailers normally see record alcohol sales, especially in beer, a beverage hawked throughout the game by the big three (Budweiser, Coors and Miller) with commercials often featuring much sexual innuendo. Gambling degenerates have their biggest day of the year and bets are placed on everyting from the winning team to the point spread to which player scores first or even wins the coin flip. What you don’t hear about unfortunately is that due to the increased amount of alcohol consumed nationally on Super Sunday there are also spikes in episodes of domestic violence (womens shelters are swamped), alcohol related arrests and alcohol related vehicular accidents. The biggest winners are the networks who can have their cake and eat it too due to their ability to run commercials plugging their upcoming lineup of exploitative trash television. CBS launched it’s megahit Survivor series and FOX pimped it’s hit ‘24’ action show that is really a clever vehicle for propaganda and indoctrination regarding terrorism, fear and torture state advocacy. Ruppert Murdoch’s ode to the Bush-Cheney junta’s dramatic vision of totalitarian society now in it’s fifth season of fueling the undercurrent of fear running through America like a poisoned river. Will this be the year when advertisers seek to tap into the pure American mainline crack cocaine high of evangelical ‘Christianity’ and the millions of potential customers? Will this year’s soft drink commercials feature Jesus and Moses instead of the standard celebrities and computer generated animated figures? Stay tuned. Once all barriers fall nothing will really be able to remain sacred anymore.

As America progresses along on it’s incremental metamorphosis into an ultra religious, fascist, police state one can only wait until the first Super Bowl is held in New York City in a brand spanking new stadium that will be built with taxpayer money with the promise of hosting the ultimate game dangled like a carrot in front of a donkey. There will be the inevitable 9/11 tie ins including a state of the art reenactment of the devastation of the twin towers during a halftime show that will feature ‘patriotic’ music by country western stars Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood among others. There will be military marching bands, honor guards, flyovers, gospel choirs and the new mass reality television sensation of summary executions of several prominent liberals and other enemies of the state. It will be our very own Nuremburg rally, God Bless America, Free Market Capitalism, the military industrial complex and most of all The Super Bowl itself! It will be pure viscral pomp and cirumstance on a grand scale that not even Leni Reifenstahl herself could have envisioned in her wildest dreams.

But I Digress….

This year’s host city is Detroit the former ‘Motor City’ prior to the collapse of the American automobile industry is not the typical site, only the third Super Bowl to be held in a cold weather city since the game’s inception and an obvious carrot to the owners of the woebegone Detroit Lions for their construction of the new Ford Field where the game will be played. Detroit incidentally is the only U.S. city to hold the dubious distinction of honoring former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, even presenting him with the key to the city but this was a long time ago in a different country before he crossed the Bush family which in turn has double crossed the nation. Motown is a bitterly cold Midwestern hell in early February but in terms of entertainment value will represent an improvement over last year’s host. The 2005 circus maximus was held in Jacksonville, FL, the capital of strip mall evangelical churches and a city with a notorious shortage of usable quality hotel space other than the ubiquitous Motel Sixes, Motel Eights and truckstops that flank local highways. The NFL and local chamber of commerce had to arrange for numerous cruise ships to be brought in for the week in order to accommodate the high rollers. The gripe factor couldn’t have been higher for those looking for a good time unless the game were held in Mobile, Birmingham, Nashville or some other NASCAR fixated hick mecca where the only thing outnumbering meth labs are fundamentalist churches.

This year’s matchup is between the sixth seeded AFC Champion Pittsburgh Steelers and the NFC Champion Seattle Seahawks and only God himself knows what the fucking commericals will be but rest assured they will all be ranked come Monday morning and I will dutifully be weighing in with my opinion.

The Steelers, 15-1 last year only to go down in flames in the AFC title game are bearing the media mantle of ‘destiny’s darlings’, don’t believe it. This team is good and had they not lost QB Ben Roethlisberger to an injury for several games would have finished better than 11 and 5 on the regular season and potentially hosted the AFC title game, which may not have been the best situation given coach Bill Cowher’s 1-5 record in home championship contests. It took a convenient crippling of Cincinnati QB Carson Palmer, an amazing overcoming of a stacked deck and the NFL’s determination to see Indianapolis, Peyton Manning and Tony Dungy in the Super Bowl and then the fulfillment of the old adage that ‘you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’ in Denver where four Jake Plummer turnovers stamped the Steelers’ ticked to Detroit where they can finally ‘win one for the thumb’ and send future Hall of Famer Jerome ‘The Bus’ Bettis out in style with the Vince Lombardi Trophy in his first Super Bowl appearance. Despite the diffuculty of their journey Pittsburgh definitely belongs.

Seattle stamped their ticket to Motown by thankfully routing the perennially overrated Carolina Panthers, I just don’t know how much more hype comparing mediocre journeyman QB Jake Delhomme to three time SB winner Tom Brady that I could have stomached and fortunately due to the Seahawk ass whipping I don’t have to. As far as my official prediction goes I am picking the Steelers to win fairly easily, let’s say by a score of about 37-16 or something along those lines. Although Seattle’s run was very impressive the majority of their wins were against teams in the weak sister NFC and they did play in the worst division of that conference and easily rolled up six wins against chumps the likes of the Cardinals, 49ers and Rams (they are the NFC version of the Indianapolis Colts who also were beneficiaries of being in a bad division) and could very easily have been upset by the Redskins in their first playoff game. I am going with Pittsburgh for the following three reasons and none of them included the hackneyed and overused by the lazy fucks in the MSM ‘Team of Destiny’ or ‘The Bettis Bowl’…they simply are the better team because:

1: They are battle tested, hardened and on a mission. They will not be just happy to be in the game which is a danger to the perennially underachieving Seahawks.

2: Don’t forget that this team was 15-1 last season and has basically the same players less the underachieving Plaxico Burress, the chronically injured Duce Staley but has another year of experience under the belt for QB Ben Roethlisberger whose inevitable collision with the rookie wall just happened to coincide with last year’s ugly home championship game loss to the Patriots.

3: The Steelers are the more physical team and will be doling out punishment on every play, a franchise tradition since the days of the formidable ‘Steel Curtain’ Defense.

Does Seattle have a chance? Sure, they have won 15 games to this point, have the NFL’s leading rusher and are very well coached by Mike Holmgren who stands to benefit from the very opposite of the major factor that ultimately did his Green Bay Packers in back in 1997 when they lost to John Elway’s Broncos 31-24. The media is constantly stroking the Steelers and pretty much downplaying Seattle’s chances….a trap that bit the fat man in the ass once before and believe me, he is aware of this and will use every motivational tool in his arsenal to his team’s advantage. I would love to see a great see-saw, cliffhanger of a game as much as the NFL and the advertisers but alas the Seahawks are a soft team and this is the worst possible match-up that they could have been saddled with in Detroit.

The Steelers roll and finally get the long elusive ‘one for the thumb’.

ED ENCHO’S SUPER BOWL HISTORY

I: Prior to all of the mega-hype and the television explosion facilitated by Pete Rozelle’s network deals and the phenomenon of Monday Night Football this was just an ugly game between the champions of two underexposed leagues, the established NFL and the rebel AFL. Vince Lombardi’s reigning NFL kings the Green Bay Packers thumped the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 in a win that was so easy that backup cheesehead receiver Max McGee was able to shrug off a pregame night of intense drinking and a commode hugging hangover to catch 7 Bart Starr passes for 137 yards and two TD’s against a woeful Chiefs defense that again sucks to high heaven forty years later. This one was so low profile that it wasn’t even named Super Bowl.

II: The Green Bay Packers’ 33-14 rout of the Oakland Raiders was anti-climactic after the cheesehead win over the Dallas Cowboys for the NFL title in frozen Lambeau Field in the now classic Ice Bowl game. A sign of the times and lack of popularity of the game was that the Grambling State University played both the national anthem and half time shows in the days before the game became an American cultural icon. This year’s half time performers, The Rolling Stones released Beggar’s Banquet in 1968.

III: The game that grabbed the establishment by the balls and gave them a good, hard squeezing as the AFL champion New York Jets led by ‘Broadway Joe’ Namath stunned the heavily favored Baltimore Colts 16-7 in Miami. The brash Namath would use his ‘guarantee’ of a Jet win and then backing it up as a springboard to both fame and fortune and eventual infamy when he drunkenly slobbered over Suzy Colber on national television three and a half decades later. A symbol of the sixties counterculture Namath grew his hair long, drank heavily, fornicated with relentless abandon backed it up on the field and put a huge bug up the asses of the regressive morons who would eventually register as Republicans and lead the venomous culture wars of today.

IV: The AFL makes it two in a row as the Kansas City Chiefs thump the hapless Minnesota Vikings who will soon become purple perennial Super Bowl losers and the punchline of jokes 23-7 in a game as ugly as they get. This was the last game before the merger of the two leagues.

V: This year’s edition was a poorly played, low scoring debacle in which the Baltimore Colts Jim O’Brien kicked the winning field goal with the clock winding down and lift his team to a 16-13 victory despite 7 turnovers, the opposing Dallas Cowboys had 4 of their own in the game now known as the ‘Blooper Bowl’

VI: God’s original coach Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys crushed the Miami Dolphins 24-3 in Tulane Stadium and shed the derisive tag of ‘next year’s champions’ who never could win the big one. In a bit of trivia future Chicago raving lunatic coach and Super Bowl XX winner Mike Ditka closed out the scoring for the Cowboys with a 7 yard td catch.

VII: The AFC Champion Miami Dolphins survive a matchup with George Allen’s over the hill gang Redskins 14-7 despite a hideous botched field goal by kicker Garo Yepremian who then scooped up the ball and launched an errant Dilferesque pass that was picked off and returned for a ‘skins touchdown. The fish held on to finish 17-0, the only perfect season in NFL history and the old men are still popping the corks of their champagne bottles as the last unbeaten team goes down with each passing season. Tony Dungy’s Colts made them sweat a bit but the mutinous loser Peyton Manning would have choked it away in the playoffs anyway.

VIII: The Miami Dolphins make it two wins in a row by mashing the Minnesota Vikings into the turf of Houston’s Rice Stadium behind the blitzkrieg attack of Larry Csonka who would roll up 145 yards on the way to a 24-7 victory, a textbook demonstration of smashmouth ball that was so efficient that Dolphin quarterback only had to throw the ball seven times, completing six but when you are facing a rushing defense as reminiscent of swiss cheese as that of the Vikes he could have probably have gotten away with taking the afternoon off.

IX: The Vikes make it two in a row and three overall by losing to the Pittsburgh Steelers 16-6 in the first of four wins for the nascent dynasty. Minnesota’s downfall (other than getting off of the plane in the first place) was in not learning a lesson from the previous year’s loss and shoring up their run defense which allowed Steeler RB Franco Harris to rumble for 158 yards. Purple People Eaters? More like Purple Pussies, Barney could have started at defensive tackle and been an improvement as a run stuffer.

X: The Steelers make it two in a row by riding a great performance by WR Lynn Swann (4 catches for 161 yards and a td) who was listed for doubtful after suffering a concussion in the AFC championship game and beat the Dallas Cowboys 21-17 in Miami’s Orange Bowl. In trivia notes, the group Up With People performed at halftime and game film was eventually used in the movie Black Sunday.

XI: The Vikings go a perfect 4 for 4 as Super Bowl losers as they go down meekly to future uber television analyst John Madden’s Oakland Raiders 32-14 this time getting trampled for 266 rushing yards by the Raiders’ two-pronged attack of Clarence Davis and Mark Van Eeghen and the passing duo of Kenny ‘the snake’ Stabler and Fred Biletnkoff. The game was the first to be played in Pasadena’s Rose Bowl and the halftime entertainment/advertisement was a performance of Disney’s ‘It’s A Small World’.

XII: The clock strikes twelve for the Cinderella Denver Broncos and the ‘Orange Crush’ defense whose 12-2 run captivated the Mile High City as they are destroyed by the Dallas Cowboys 27-10 in the first Super Bowl to be held in New Orleans’ new Superdome. Led by former Cowboy quarterback Craig Morton who completed as many passes to his former teammates as the guys in orange (4) the Broncos turned the ball over eight times to the ‘Doomsday Defense’ and the Cowboys held the ball for over 38 minutes in this ugly rout that was mainly notable for the Broncos’ first step in their quest to catch up to the Vikings in the futility hall of fame.

XIII: In Miami Pittsburgh goes 3 for 3 in a rematch with the defending NFL champion Cowboys in a wild offensive show. The Steelers were led by QB Terry Bradshaw’s 318 passing yards and four touchdowns, the Cowboys were equally impressive in racking up 31 points but falling short in a 35-31 loss that was as entertaining as it was wild. The Cowboys were the first team to wear their road jerseys despite being designated as the ‘home’ team although it didn’t cause a collective media orgasm like this year’s game where the Steelers rocked the sports world by doing likewise. The halftime show was an infomercial sponsored by Carnival Cruiselines. The Cowboy’s smack talking LB Thomas ‘Hollywood’ Henderson created controversy when he held court on media day to boldly proclaim that Bradshaw was so dumb that he couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the letters C and A and we know how that one turned out with Bradshaw winning the MVP award for his performance. Henderson would eventually have the last laugh despite a bout with drugs as he would go on to hit the $ 28 million jackpot in the Texas Lottery while Bradshaw would have to be content with being a clown on the FOX NFL pregame show for a living after football.

XIV: The Steelers make it a perfect 4-0 record in Super Bowls as QB Terry Bradshaw is able to overcome three interceptions in order to lead a comeback victory over the upstart Los Angeles Rams 34-19 in Pasadena much to the delight of Terrible Towel waving members of their road contingent and the chagrin of the hometown crowd.

XV: The Oakland Raiders win their second Super Bowl by riding a 3 touchdown day by MVP quarterback Jim Plunkett to an easy 27-10 triumph over Dick Vermeil’s Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans. The Raiders’ Rod Martin intercepted three of future ESPN analyst Ron Jaworski’s errant passes and Vermeil turned on the waterworks on his way to his coming retirement to the broadcast booth. The Raiders were the bad boys of lore as John ‘The Tooz’ Matuszak tore up Bourbon Street on his way to tearing up the Iggles. This was the first game of the Reagan era and therefore the demarcation point of American society, the stirring pre game tribute to the Iranian hostages who were released from captivity as the Gipper was sworn in (allegedly the result of dirty double dealing by George H.W. Bush in cutting a deal to prevent an October Surprise to boost Jimmy Carter’s popularity prior to the election) and the patriotic horseshit overkill that is so much a part of everyday society became an integral part of the zeitgeist.

XVI: The first game to be held in a cold weather city as the San Francisco 49ers face the Cincinnati Bengals in matchup of two teams coming off of huge turnarounds, the ‘niners were 3-13 and the Bengals 6-10 the previous year. The Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit was the site of the establishment of Super Bowl legend Joe Montana who led his team to a 26-21 victory and the first of his eventual four rings.

XVII: Washington’s John Riggins ran roughshod over the Miami Dolphins with a 166 yard, 2 td MVP performance for the Redskin’s first Super Bowl win. The Skins would score 14 points in the fourth quarter on the way to a 27-17 win that put the cap on a season tainted by a 57 day player strike that wiped out seven games. This game could also be remembered for all of the gut churning nausea induced by host network ABC’s continual hyping of their lousy paramitilary action series the A-Team during nearly every commercial break. “I pity the fool” would become a household phrase during the show’s ensuing five year run. A big fan was first lady Nancy Reagan whose thrill of the decade was sitting on the burly star Mr. T’s lap.

XVIII: In the first Super Bowl to be held in Tampa’s ‘Big Sombrero’ the Los Angeles Raiders thoroughly embarrassed the NFC Champion Washington Redskins 38-9 behind a swarming defense led by Howie Long, Lyle Alzado, Ted Hendricks and Matt Millen that harassed quarterback Joe Theesman all day, sacking him six times and subjecting him to a pounding that had him dancing on happy feet all afternoon long. The Raidahs scored both on both a blocked punt and an interception return in the first half and then jumped on the back of running back Marcus Allen whose 191 yard, two touchdown day earned him the MVP. The most entertaining moment of the day however was Ridley Scott’s (Alien, Blade Runner) great ‘Big Brother’ commercial for Apple McIntosh that is renowned as one of the best if not the best advertisement ever for it’s great production values.

XIX: If you ever want a testimonial on the fleeting nature of fame and the rarity for a chance at an NFL championship just ask former Miami Dolphin Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino, a man who would become the most prolific passer in NFL history but came up a loser in his only Super Bowl appearance. Marino’s second season was perhaps the greatest in NFL history with 48 passing touchdowns (a record that stood until it was broken by another prolific loser Peyton Manning’s 49 in 2004) and 5,084 yards but it ended in an ugly 38-16 defeat to Joe Montana’s San Francisco 49ers in Palo Alto, CA. In a classic display of the now commonplace and utterly shameless political stagecraft that perpetuates the cult of the almighty leader, President Ronald Reagan himself participated in the coin toss via satellite from the White House.

XX: Chicago Bears’ punk quarterback Jim McMahon moons a helicopter and allegedly calls all New Orleans women “sluts” and all local men “ignorant”, the ‘Super Bowl Shuffle’ became a pop culture phenomenon and the Mike Ditka led Bears demolish the New England Patriots 46-10 in a lopsided game where the legendary Walter Payton is deprived of the opportunity to score a touchdown by marketing sensation William ‘The Refrigerator’ Perry, the mammoth 335 pound Chicago defensive tackle who would sign and endorsement with McDonalds, ironic given that today the 800 pound gorilla of the fast food industry is trying to combat the image that their food is the unhealthy crap that it truly is by featuring a new salad line in response to sagging sales and the great movie Supersize Me . Payton would be offended by the callous actions of Ditka until his dying day although he had too much class to acknowledge it publicly for the indignity that it truly was…then again why expect anything other than boorish behavior from Ditka?

XXI: The ballast laden legend of the greatness of Bill ‘The Big Tuna’ Parcells began with this 39-20 trouncing of the Denver Broncos and John Elway in Pasadena. Future CBS announcer and Giants quarterback shredded the Denver defense for an NFL postseason completion record of 88 % completing 22 of 25 darts for 3 touchdowns. This game would begin an ugly stretch of bridesmaid status and undeserved national ridicule for Dan Reeves’ Broncos.

XXII: The Broncos make it two ugly losses in a row, topping the prior year’s debacle by blowing an early 10-0 lead to ‘God’s Coach’ and the Washington Redskins who rode the arm of perennial underachiever Doug Williams and previously unknown RB Timmy Smith to a whopping 35 point second quarter and coasted to a 42-10 win, had Gibbs not called off the dogs the Skins may very well have been the first NFL team to score in the triple digits against the bumbling Broncs.

XXIII: The famous ‘John Candy’ game where 49er quarterback Joe Montana spotted the soon to be deceased fat slob actor in the stands and used the Orca sighting as a motivational ploy to calm his offense for the eventual comeback that would cement his legendary status as well as beat the Cincinnati Bengals and the Ickey Shuffle 20-16. Also of notoriety was the bad omen of Cincy head coach Sam ‘Wicky Wacky’ Wyche finding starting fullback Stanley Wilson on the floor of his hotel room john shaking, sweating and in the throes of a huge overdose of Bolivian marching powder after allegedly leaving a team meeting to find his playbook. Sure Stan, just tell it to Miami Vice. Also this year marked the premier of the fabled Bud Bowl I as a commercial.

XXIV: John Elway and Dan Reeves hit the trifecta for embarrassing big game losses when they ran into the buzzsaw of Joe Montana and Jerry Rice’s San Francisco 49er machine. Pity the poor Cleveland Browns who once again lost the AFC title game to their personal bogeyman Broncos only to sit at home sadly dipping Doritos in bean dip and crying into their beer over Denver’s failure to show up for kickoff. The 55-10 decimation still remains as the worst ass kicking in the history of a game that has had it’s fair share of them. This dog was over nearly immediately local N’awlins legend Aaron Neville finished singing the Star Spangled Banner. French Quarter bars were swarmed well before the Broncos were able to cut into a 41-3 lead and my fat ditto-head childhood friend Rocky broke down in drunken tears in the Super Dome parking lot after a sorry finale to a nightmare weekend that included being felt up in a Bourbon Street gay bar over watered down beer and a bowl of soupy red beans and rice.

XXV: The 25th anniversary edition of the Super Bowl in Tampa will be remembered not only for the blatant nationalist/patriotic militarism on display due to it falling in the middle of the Gulf War to kick Saddam Hussein’s ass out of Kuwait but for another display of kicking that will forever live in infamy in the hearts of Buffalo Bills fans on their way to their first of four straight big game losses. Poor Scott Norwood became the biggest sports goat since Bill Buckner when he missed a potential game winning 47 yard field goal allowing the Giants to eke out a 20-19 win in what was one of the most well played games in the history of the Biggest Kahuna of them all and further enhanced the legendary status of the Big Tuna Bill Parcells who was revered as if he were the second coming of Vince Lombardi until it became apparent that he has never won dick without Bill Belichik who has won three of his own titles without the annoying, fickle lard ass who was his previous boss.

XXVI: In the first Super Bowl to be played in frigid Minneapolis, MN Buffalo Bills running back Thurman Thomas lost his helmet, was subsequently held to 13 yards rushing and quarterback Jim Kelly chipped in with 4 interceptions as the K Gun offense misfired and Buffalo went down quickly and quietly to Jesus Gibbs, Mark Rypien and the Washington Redskins 37-24 in a game that only appeared close on the scoreboard due to two late Bill touchdowns in garbage time.

XXVII: The 1993 edition of the game was played in Pasadena, CA after being pulled from original host site Tempe because of Arizona’s racist stance against recognizing Martin Luther King Day that was eventually shot down by voters giving the Phoenix area a shot three years later. The return of the Dallas Cowboys to the Super Bowl after years of mediocrity was only the second biggest story of the day other than Whacko Jacko who performed his trademark crotch gyrations at halftime in what would be the waning days of his reign as the self proclaimed ‘king of pop’ and just prior to the continuing allegations of child molestation immersed the little freak in years of scandal. The game itself proved that the third time was definitely not the charm for the Buffalo Bills who were annihilated 52-17 as they self immolated under the weight of a record nine turnovers. The final score actually could have been worse had the showboating Leon Lett not been stripped of the ball as he was going into the end zone for a touchdown on a fumble return.

XXVIII: The Buffalo Bills tie the Denver Broncos and Minnesota Vikings as the most losing Super Bowl teams of all time all three being a collective 0 for 12 in the big game as the Dallas Cowboys take the rematch game of last year’s contest 30-13 and Buffalo actually led at halftime 13-6 before facing an Emmitt Smith onslaught as Jimmy Johnson’s Cowboys scored the last 24 points in Atlanta for their second straight title and with a young team could have set records were it not for their petulant owner Jerry Jones who chafed at not getting enough credit for the team’s success, it had to rankle him that Johnson wasn’t exactly fond of the entourage on the sidelines including at times Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar among other Jones cronies. Then a slight at a post game party led Jones to run Johnson out of town and in an insult to the impeccably coiffed little Napoleon Jones went so far as to bring in the hated Barry Switzer as a replacement, allegedly snippily referring to Jimmah as “the little cunt”. What could have been an NFL record run of Super Bowl wins ended in disaster, Dallas would go on to win one more Super Bowl two years later but oh what could have been had egos not interfered with business.

XXIX: Coming in the aftermaths of local race riots in host city Miami this butt ugly game was yet another of the ridiculously over hyped and under competitive routs in the history of the biggest game on the planet. The San Francisco 49ers and Steve Young together emerged from the shadow of Joe Montana to drop a 49-26 ass kicking on the upstart San Diego Chargers in a game that was effectively over at halftime. ABC had the broadcast rights and rolled out not only the tired and stale Hank Williams Jr. for an ‘Are You Ready for Some Football’ pre game show followed by the ‘singing’ of the national anthem by national sweetheart Kathie Lee Gifford prior to the double whammy of her clothing line’s exposure as the product of sweatshop labor and the even more embarrassing revelation that perfect hubby Frank of Monday Night Football fame was possessed of a cheatin’ heart when it was revealed that he was banging a TWA stewardess and the ensuing scandal led to an ugly public electronic confessional on the Barbara Walters show.

XXX: Tempe, AZ finally got it’s shot to host a Super Bowl after the failure to recognize MLK day cost them three years prior and it ended up being a hell of a lot better contest than most would have imagined. Megalomaniac Dallas Cowboy owner Jerry Jones’ big ‘Fuck You’ to former coach Jimmy Johnson by winning a title with Barry ‘Bootlegger’s Boy’ Switzer at the helm couldn’t have been accomplished without the assistance of the Cowboy’s most valuable player and it wasn’t Deion Sanders. Pittsburgh Steelers QB Neil O’Donnell who had been an accurate and fairly mistake free passer all season long imploded in extremely ugly fashion on the national stage throwing three of the worst interceptions in the history of Sun Devil Stadium and that includes the Jake Plummer years. O’Donnell single handedly not only gave the game to Dallas on a silver platter but also made a lifelong friend in mediocre Cowboy cornerback Larry Brown who was allowed to parlay his two picks into a lucrative free agent deal with perennial sucker Al Davis and the Raiders where he inevitably was exposed as the loser that he always was. The Steelers dominated everywhere on the scoreboard where they eventually came out on the wrong side of a 27-17 score thanks to O’Donnell’s lousy performance. The absence of the usual smack talk from the Dallas locker room in the aftermath speaks volumes.

XXXI: The Green Bay Packers returned to the big game after a three decade absence and were able to parlay a flurry of big plays as well as a huge special teams performance by MVP Desmond Howard whose 244 return yards including a 99 yard touchdown on a kickoff return to take the wind out of the Patriots’ sails after a Curtis Martin run had cut the Packer lead to six was the difference in this one. Local favorite Brett Favre made the most out of his triumphant return to N’Awlins a city within spittin’ distance of the family home in Kiln, MS and came away a 35-21 winner in his first Super Bowl appearance. Richard Jewell lookalike Mike Holmgren (the coach of this year’s NFC champ Seattle) bested the Big Tuna whose New England team couldn’t overcome their inept special teams play or four Drew Bledsoe interceptions in the fat man’s last appearance in the big game.

XXXII: John Elway and the Denver Broncos finally get the monkey off of their backs by winning their first Super Bowl over the much hyped Green Bay Packers in San Diego by a score of 31-24. The wild card Broncos were given absolutely no chance by the media and punditry given the line on the Packers as 11 ½ point favorites to continue the NFC’s 13 year run of dominance and were stroked all week long while the Broncos were virtually ignored. The game however was a different story as Denver played inspired ball from the get go and the Pack had no answer for their running game. This one had all of the signs of becoming a super rout early on with the Packer defense led by the incredible mountain of run stuffing fat and John Madden favorite Gilbert Brown being run over by Terrell Davis but a migraine headache sidelined TD for a quarter and allowed the cheeseheads to get back into the game. The resulting see saw battle made for one of the best and most entertaining games in years and didn’t end until a Brett Favre pass was broken up on fourth down in Bronco territory with under a minute left. John Elway would finally have his title and shed the tag of not being able to win the big one. The funniest line of the day goes to NBC’s Dick Enberg who observed late in the fourth quarter after the MVP Davis had run for his 3rd touchdown and was on his way to a 157 yard day “Gilbert Brown is down again….and he’s not getting up”.

XXXIII: Big time ‘Family values’ guy and Atlanta Falcon defensive leader Eugene Robinson celebrates his earlier receipt of the ‘Bart Starr Award’ for high moral character by ditching his wife and kids for a serious trolling expedition through Miami’s sleazier parts in search of a blowjob and was arrested by local vice cops (no word ever came out on whether he propositioned Crockett or Tubbs) in an embarrassing incident that stunned teammates and set off a paparazzi frenzy. The distracted Falcon cornerback played the game in a cloud of shame that was evident when he was burned on an 80 yard touchdown toss from Bronco QB John Elway to Rod Smith that in another embarrassing moment was nearly missed by the FOX network’s inexplicable blunder in switching from a commercial timeout back to the game. In his last game Elway is the MVP as he wins his second consecutive title and perhaps even better humiliates former Coach Dan Reeves in a 34-19 payback for ruining the early years of his career what a way to go out in style.

XXXIV: The triumph of both long suffering Dick Vermeil and Georgia Frontiere as well as the canonization of Kurt Warner, the born again Christian grocery clerk turned NFL MVP with the winning St. Louis Rams. The media predictably swarmed around Warner in a feeding frenzy and went into overkill mode with the multitude of maudlin human insterest stories over his football salvation. The network television crew featured shots of his homely, butch looking wife throughout the game who was dressed in an ugly blue synthetic fur boa that appeared to have been scrounged out of a dumpster behind and East St. Louis Salvation Army thrift store. The powers that be jobbed the Tampa Bay Buccaneers by overruling an obvious Bert Emanuel catch in the waning moments of what could have been a stunning upset of the media darling Rams and given the league a nightmare matchup of two of the league’s best defenses in what would be a cure for insomniacs everywhered. This one was actually a pretty exciting game that went town to the last play and a huge stop of Tennessee Titan’s WR Kevin Dyson at the one to give the Rams a 23-16 victory and allow the emotionally unstable Vermeil to break down in tears during the post game celebrations. Also Baltimore Ravens all pro linebacker Ray Lewis is involved in an ugly murder outside an Atlanta nightclub at a postgame party.

XXXV: Mainly notable for the triumphant return of the maligned Trent Dilfer to Tampa as the winning Super Bowl quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens. This was to have been the local Bucs home title game and the Glazer family fought the NFL long and hard to keep the pirate ship replica in place in the end zone rather than to remove it and use the area for extra seats. Tampa Bay finished as a 10-6 wild card team due to head coach Tony Dungy’s decision to make a political statement in starting the rancid Shaun ‘Burger’ King at QB which would eventually cost the Bucs dearly in the playoffs. In the SB the Ravens defense made mincemeat of the woeful N.Y. Giants in one of the worst games in the long and sordid history of non-competitive showings. Alleged murderer Ray Lewis won the MVP award but not a trip to Disney World out of fear that he may have shanked Donald Duck or Goofy. The final score of 34-7 is in no way indicative of just how bad a game that this one was.

XXXVI: The first post 9-11 New World Order Super Bowl saw a classic upset of an overrated and over-hyped media darling team as well as the rise of a new dynasty when the huge underdog New England Patriots stunned the heavily favored ‘Greatest Show on Turf’ of Mike Martz and Jesus Warner 20-17. Pats coach Bill Belichik began his ascent up the mountain and into the pantheon of coaching legends by simply coaching good ball, allowing the megalomaniac Ram coach Mike Martz to self destruct by arrogantly neglecting to use his greatest weapon by feeding the ball to running back Marshall Faulk in favor of instead placing the game in the hands of former grocery clerk Kurt Warner who threw the rock like he was back in Iowa chucking cans of creamed corn. A buzzer beating Adam Vinatieri field goal won it for New England in one of the best games ever. The most memorable moment of the day would however belong to rock superstars U2 whose outstanding halftime performance included a sincere and stirring tribute to the victims of the WTC and Pentagon attacks to a rousing rendition of the classic ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ in the days prior to when Karl Rove and his slimy rat fuck goons exploited the tragedy at every opportunity for political gain.

XXVII: The long suffering former NFL joke Tampa Bay Buccaneers resoundingly thumped Al Davis and the Oakland Raiders 48-21 in a game not nearly as close as the score indicated. New Buc coach Jon Gruden couldn’t have embarrassed ‘The Godfather’ any more had he buttfucked his former boss at midfield during the halftime show. Manic depressive Oakland Center Barrett Robbins won the ‘Eugene Robinson Award’ as he was the distraction of the year after wandering off on a drunken Tijuana rampage. Knocking back straight shots of raw tequila and taking in the legendary donkey show somehow don’t equate to a positive pre game preparation and the manic depressive Robbins was sidelined for what would be the biggest game of his life, not that it mattered to the Raidahs. The best moment of all was that the national anthem was performed by the Dixie Chicks who would soon become the scapegoat for right wing scum throughout the land as the attack on Iraq commenced and the lead singer of this lousy pop country trio dared to say in front of a foreign audience “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” Of course this was met by outrage in der homeland as well as many right wing radio sponsored cd burnings…hmmm. The only worse turnaround from nationally revered celebrity to nationally reviled infamy would have been if the Manson Family Singers sang God Bless America prior to Super Bowl III in Miami eight months prior to their notorious bloody murder spree.

XXXVIII: The infamous Janet Jackson pierced nipple incident juices TIVO sales and sends the morality police into apoplectic rants against the decline of secular society, the fleeting millisecond second glimpse of a tittie was far more outrageous to the national morality police than the general repugnant nature of the tasteless commercials featuring farting horses and ubiquitious potty jokes. Is this a great country or what? The Patriots reclaim their championship mantle by using another last second field goal by iceman Adam Vinatieri to beat the upstart Carolina Panthers 32-29 in one of the most entertaining games in the series history. There were 37 points scored in a wild fourth quarter and both quarterbacks Tom Brady and Jake Delhomme had huge passing days with 300 yard, 3 touchdown games.

XXXIX: The return from injury of WR Terrell Owens was this game’s biggest story and the Philadelphia Eagles finally in the Super Bowl after three straight NFC title game losses actually played well enough to have a chance before QB Donovan McNabb started blowing chow through his faceguard late in the fourth quarter and head coach Andy Reid’s poor clock management led to a 24-21 loss and the third title in four years for the New England Patriots. Super Bowl records were set for complaints about the host city: Jacksonville, FL the strip mall church capital of America and cruise ships had to be brought in for the high rollers due to the city’s lack of hotel rooms that weren’t part of the Motel 6 franchise.

FEEL THE HYPE !