by Tom Pantera
Columnist

Thank God our long national nightmare Sunday only lasted about 30 minutes.

As a media person, I always view with a mixture of amusement and sympathy those times when live television goes off the rails. I’m amused because nothing is funnier than watching television people attempt to fill time when there’s really nothing to fill it with. All old TV hands know how to do that, although it was pretty obvious from the banter during Sunday’s Super Bowl power failure that some do it better than others (somebody should have stuffed something into Shannon Sharpe’s mouth). But I have sympathy at the same time because such time-filling is hard to do well (once again, Sharpe, because). What was funny was when one of the commentators described it as a second halftime, because you could hear sponsor’s aneurysms popping all over the country.

Still, it’s a measure of how seriously we take The Big Game that news reports were chock-full of pieces on the power failure. Reporters pursued the reasons for it with all the zeal of Republican congressmen picking at Benghazi.

I have a mixed relationship with the Super Bowl. My Vikings lost it four times, of course, and about a third of the time the game is so dull that it could put sleep-aid makers out of business. But when it’s good, as it was Sunday, it’s good. It’s the kind of game that you don’t have to have a rooting interest in to enjoy.

But the hype, and even the tone of the thing, is a bit much. It’s very American: too long, too noisy, too portentous, too much. Every little detail about it is marketed to within an inch of its life.

Even the marketing is marketed. It’s probably the only show on television where the commercials get as much ink as the show itself. For what it’s worth, I thought the commercials were noticeably better this year. I loved the Oreo ad and while the ad featuring the Minnesota Rastafarian got a lot of criticism, I found it pretty funny. The low point, as always, was Go Daddy. That company’s ad agency seems to find new ways to offend every year. I have a pretty strong stomach, but the image of the supermodel and the tech geek playing tonsil hockey just about sent the ham sandwich I was eating into low earth orbit.

This was a weird year to watch The Big Game, what with football’s intrinsic violence becoming a part of every story from medical news to the gun control debate. I even read a piece in Slate.com saying that football was dying and good riddance. Somehow, the writer ignored that for all its problems, the NFL remains a license to print money. As long as that’s true, it’ll stay around.

Football is the only sport I really watch. Baseball is, to me, like watching paint dry. I never played basketball or hockey, so the subtleties of those sports escape me. Football I get, although the way some commentators talk about it, in jargon-heavy nonsense that makes it sound like engineering, drives me nuts. I wish somebody would slap Chris Collinsworth.

But as much as I like watching football, the atmosphere surrounding it – best shown in coverage of the Super Bowl – makes me nuts. The militarism and macho is so extreme it’s almost a parody of itself. When they show the big opening, when the players take the field amid screaming and fireworks, I always catch a whiff of “Triumph of the Will,” the classic Nazi propaganda film centered on a huge rally.

It’s such a blatant commercial for the bigness of our country, its people and its pastimes. They show soldiers in Afghanistan watching the game and the crowd cheers lustily; one wonders whether it wouldn’t be better if, instead of flashing pictures of them on a scoreboard, we as a country made some sort of real commitment to taking care of them when they come back. But such sentiments have no place in The Big Game; hell, when Bob Costas had the temerity to discuss gun control at halftime after the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide, the right-wingers went ape. You’d have thought he crapped on the flag live and on-air.

I’m not saying the distraction of the Super Bowl is a bad thing or wrong or unnecessary. With all the problems this nation has, a four-hour break to watch guys run into each other isn’t necessarily the worst use of our time.

But Lord, do we really need hours of pregame coverage (which follows weeks of pregame coverage). Do we really need an overproduced, pyrotechnics-heavy halftime show that eats up a half hour? Do we really need all the heart-warming stories about how some defensive back has clawed his way up from nothing to make more money than most humans on earth for a highly specialized skill that’s useless outside of its one domain? Do we need to wade hip-deep through a river of crap just to watch the game?

I mean, think about it. It takes a certain suspension of disbelief to root for your hometown team, which is made up of guys who stepped into your hometown for the first time when they took the job – and will leave quickly for wherever else they can get more money. Even if that’s somehow important, how important is a game between two teams that don’t even represent your hometown? Fun, thrilling, interesting, maybe. Important, no.

It’s a game, for God’s sake. Its popularity and the place it has in American culture may say something about us, but in the end, it’s a game. I wish more people would remember that.