...is not a piece I'll be writing.
It's not that I'd have to overcome my silly tendency to want to see the game as somehow symbolic of … something, rather than simply as a football game. (And symbolic of what, exactly? Do I connect the Patriots with reliably blue New England and the Falcons with the reliably red South, and then see the Patriot's improbable come-from-behind victory as some kind of political omen? But then what happens when I remember that the Patriots are goddamn serial cheaters and I hate them?)
It's not that I couldn't find a way to see the game divorced from the greater currents of social energy that surround it. (Though those currents sure were forcefully, unavoidably on display, weren't they? Did you notice how every commercial either spoke of the power and goodness of multicultural unity or else sought the safe refuge of pure absurdism? How avowedly political Lady Gaga began her halftime performance with a totally non-ironic mash-up of "God Bless America," "This Land Is Your Land" and the Pledge of Allegiance? Watching the game within its televised context and extrapolating from there, you might be forced to conclude that here was a society in turmoil, if not actual crisis.)
And it's certainly not that there weren't a thousand fascinating examples of flow of energy during the game.
It's that a proper TTW analysis of the Super Bowl would involve actively empathizing with the Falcons, and I'm just not going to do it. There's enough going on in my world as it is. Whatever the Falcons players are feeling right now, they're gonna have to suffer through it without my participation.