Spectacle of the Spectacle

Yes, I watched that Super Spectacle. And then the half-time spectacle within the spectacle.  Then there were all the mini-spectacles interspersed throughout the night.  I watched the whole thing with the sound turned up.  So it all washed over my eyeballs and filled my ears.

I "read" it as one grand narrative.  The Apotheosis of Pop Culture.  Guy Debord only had an inkling of this phenomenon. "The decline of being into having and having into merely appearing."

Did Guy know how seductive it would all be?  And weird? There were so many angles, and wormholes.  Sex, violence, humor, absurdity, cynicism.  The religion of selling stuff, and buying stuff. None of it was "offensive," all of it was palatable. And most of it was amazing.  Sort of boring too.

Everything you know is right! Yawn! Amazed and bored. You are the perfect American. The perfect denizen of POP.  

There was a game.  It was the excuse for it all. There was brutality on the field, a mechanized, choreographed mayhem.  They kept score too. And the half-time show was a martial display of Amazon woman in S&M gear, taking high-end pole-dancing to a fine art.  It was magnificent. And ridiculous. Simultaneously.  Numbing too.

Super-pumped and primped Gods and Goddesses strutting across the screen for our pleasure.  And then the power went out.  So perfect.  A reminder that this POP culture monster we have created still lives in a world where gravity holds.  Pop Culture rules the planet, we have comodified everything we can touch, and even those things we can't, but there are things on this little blue planet that are not inexhaustible.  

"In the darkness you shall know the truth."  There are things in this life that you can't see, that you can't own...

The Spectacle as mirror.  It was all there. Mind-boggling. And mind-numbing.  Super!