Super Bowl XLIV: Battle of the Brands

Remember when the Super Bowl was about the nobility of the sport? The NFL Films archive, with its arsenal of grainy footage deployed to great nostalgic effect, suggests there was such a time. But no matter how soft our focus is on the past, we must surely agree that football, taken literally and without prejudice towards its entertainment value, does not bear the hallmarks of a noble activity. If only we were content to know that it is more of an allegory than anything else: each state gets their team (several if they’re rich, zero if they’re poor) and battles take place between them throughout the season, until at last there is a final battle to decide the champion.

The urge to dominate is innate to the American psyche, and even in times of peace we want war-like events. We like these fake wars so much we have ended up giving more of our attention to them than to the real ones. The irony is that lately the accoutrements surrounding the Super Bowl are what fascinate us most of all. And rightly so––common lore is “that the Big Game, with a few exceptions, is always a blow-out and an unmitigated anticlimax”. The game has become a footnote to the commercials, as evidenced in this compilation:

2010 marks the 44th year of the televised tradition, and the commercials will once again trump the game, but not just because of the talking animals, special effects, inspirational Gatorade montages, and pneumatic women. The organization Focus on the Family is set to air a $2.7 million ad promoting their conservative stance on abortion, and will feature college quarterback Tim Tebow with his mother, who decided against the procedure in favor of giving birth to the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner. This is the first time in the event’s history that an endorsement of such a factious topic outside of a political campaign will share a platform with major corporate sponsors, and the impact this will have is up for much debate. A few discussions can be found here, here, and here.

For those who do consider football something august and representative of America’s virtues, this interweaving of religious morality into an inherently secular event must be logical; the sport is right up there with apple pie as one of the most quintessentially American phenomena, so it might stand to reason that the country’s national pastime would also reflect its Christian values. It is no secret that the majority of football fans lean to the right politically, so why all the fuss about an ad that will simply be preaching to the choir? It is a matter of principle, of course. And ultimately about one team against another. But as a recent Times editorial points out:

“The would-be censors are on the wrong track. Instead of trying to silence an opponent, advocates for allowing women to make their own decisions about whether to have a child should be using the Super Bowl spotlight to convey what their movement is all about: protecting the right of women like Pam Tebow to make their private reproductive choices.”

As a non-governmental entity, CBS, who will air the event this year, has every right to accept or reject any and all promotional pitches within FCC guidelines, and in the case of Focus on the Family, the network is simply accepting money from an organization that happens to have the right amount of it (in a bad economy standards tend to shift). To dispute it would be to dispute the First Amendment and the entire free market system in this democracy, and there are much larger battlefields than the Super Bowl on which to do that. The actual social impact of this unaired yet already infamous ad will be marginal. Can 30 seconds of propaganda dissuade people from having abortions? Probably. But it won’t be much different from other forms of product advertising which promise virtuousness through one brand over another. And in our society, as we’ve constructed it, this type of activity is perfectly kosher. No matter how much that sucks.