FEBRUARY 13, SUNDAY

SUPER BOWL BLUES

Last night was the Super Bowl, the National Football League Championship, a huge event in American life, rivaling Christmas and the 4th of July, and a celebration of everything American. In years past my son, Tom, and his family at 15 Melrose Avenue have made a party out of the Super Bowl. Tom built a four foot by three foot Snackadium, a miniature stadium with the stand filled with all kinds of snacks. He invited neighbors and their parents. The adults all sat in the living room in front of the TV and chatted and half watched the game while the children, when younger, roamed the house, dressing up and playing games and having squealing fun. There was plenty of beer and plenty of food and we all had a great time.

Last year the pandemic cancelled the celebration. But this year as the pandemic is either waning or we wish it was, I was invited with the mother and daughter of the neighbor family and the daughter‘s boyfriend. The food was all ready, the downstairs enormous TV was on with the pregame show when half an hour before the game started the neighbors called. In the pregame covid check the boyfriend had tested positive. We were down to a four person celebration and a lot of food.

For the first half Caroline, my granddaughter, joined us downstairs. For the tense and exciting second half she went upstairs and sat with her mother and it was just my son, Tom, and I watching. If I hadn’t come he would have been alone. Our team, the Cincinnati Bengals lost in a squeaker. I drove home.

But just as much anticipated for weeks as much as the game, was the half time show. Kathy, Tom‘s wife, and Caroline came down to watch it. We watched the new tv ads, a highlight of Super Bowl halftime, and rated them for impact. But the musical show was the main event. It is always an extravaganza with a set that fills the field and hundreds of dancers and fireworks.

This month is Black Awareness Month, as it is every year in February, but this year the singers were all Black rappers and the dancers were all Black. It was a very hip show.

Except for one old man who couldn‘t make heads or tails out of it. I couldn‘t understand the words of the songs, I didn‘t recognized the songs as songs or the music as music. Caroline kept asking her father, “Remember this song, remember this song, remember this song.” Some of them he remembered. I was clueless. I wasn’t offended by the music or irritated or questioning, I was simply so much an outsider that I was unable to respond.

As Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre rapped I realized that I had tuned out of American popular music after college, when I heard plenty. I tuned out after the Kingston Trio, Nat King Cole, Marian Anderson, before Elvis Presley and the Beetles. I tuned out sixty years ago. I am out of it.

I realized that Kathe and I hadn’t listened to American television shows for the last forty years, since All in the Family. Kathe liked English television shows on PBS and later on Britbox and Netflix, especially British mysteries and detective shows. I did watch sports. But even my rapt attention to sports faded over the years. I often watched the sports my son watched, Carolina basketball, in solidarity with him. After Kathe died I watched almost no TV and when I went to Greece in October I cancelled You Tube TV, or thought I had. When I returned I didn’t reconnect. I wasn’t interested in TV. I thought I was saving $70 a month, until last week when I saw a charge for $69 a month on my credit card and discovered that I had only paused my subscription and that I had paid $210 over three months while thinking I had no subscription and without turning the TV set on once.

But as I thought about the super bowl half time show last night. I realized that my $210 mistake was really a sign that I was completely tuned out of popular American culture.

This morning I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Brian Broome, “Change is Constant and I’m Struggling to Keep Up”. Broome recounts how he has recommended comedy shows from the 90’s to younger colleagues and the shows left them cold. They were no longer funny, they were mean spirited. He realized how much he was out of touch with young people. He is 51.

I am 84 and I am out of touch, maybe a little less out of touch than some people since I taught young people in their early twenties until I was 70. But I am really out of touch. I was out of touch then. Last night showed me how much out of touch I am. I couldn’t even recognize the rapping at the super bowl as being music, let alone songs.

I thought about this last night and this morning. I thought about the generation after generation mentioned in the news over the last thirty years: millennials, generation X, generation Z, generation alpha. These have whipped by so fast that I never knew which was which and had to look them up on Wikipedia.

I can’t imagine that change has this been quick throughout history, but in the 21st century it seems that the minute you are with it you are out of it.

I think of the way that technology has enhanced my life but also the ways that it changes so rapidly, with nothing having a lifespan of more than three years, with all the methods of storing photographs now obsolete and having to be redone. I think of most people my age giving up and rejecting technology altogether settling for the level of cell phone they have reached and refusing to continue.

And finally I realized why so many MAGA people are old white males, just like me. Change has come too fast, the generations whip by us and we can’t keep up. The world turns upside down because of technology and then turns upside down again, jobs disappear and the new ones that pop up are unrecognizable. Finally, when we are faced with an musical extravaganza we don’t even recognize it as being music.

If you are going to expect us to welcome the brave new changing world rather than digging our heals in and refusing to budge, nostalgic for the good old days, you will first have to understand why we are the way we are and then find some way to ease our transition. But don’t mock us for being fools, we don’t like that and will fight back.

I think back to the post I wrote yesterday about MAGA people hanging on to traditional values and the need to understand each other. I think last night I discovered one more reason for MAGA nostalgia and the need for the young to understand the old and to listen to us and accept us and to help us in our transition rather than being angry at and bewildered by our refusal to change and willingness to let Trump lead us to the promised land.