There must be more pleasurable ways of measuring the evanescent moments we have left in this life than standing in line at the DMV or being put on hold by your Internet provider’s help desk. But one of those ways is not in watching the Super Bowl pre-game show. Never having seen one, I can’t say for sure. Still, from reading an account of this year’s program, I can only surmise that it must be what then-FCC chairman Newton Minow foresaw in 1961 when he called television a “vast wasteland.”
“One of the worst pseudojournalistic jobs on earth must be interviewing stars on the red carpet,” wrote Richard Sandomir in yesterday’s New York Times. Second-worst is being assigned to watch the Super Bowl pre-game show and then write about it.
My friend Bob Barthelmes has the right idea. For XLV years, he has assiduously avoided watching the Super Bowl and all things related to the game. He and his wife take to the outdoors to enjoy the solitude that a day with 111 million people indoors in front of a TV affords. It is as if a neutron bomb detonated, vaporizing the people but leaving everything else intact.
The funny thing is, Bob can bluff his way through the next day, discussing the game as confidently as any fan who sat stupefied by the so-called action on the field and the crass commercialism surrounding it, having gathered all he needed to learn from that night’s late news and the next day’s papers.
And all the while he was spending a pleasurable day walking in the woods.
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