Everybody Loves a Winner, Indeed

“Everybody loves a winner,” sang Linda Ronstadt on her 1973 album Don’t Cry Now.“ But when you lose,” she added, “you lose alone.”

One might add: especially in America.

A current case in point came Sunday night, during the Super Bowl post-game ceremony. After the game ended, and we all came back from commercial break, the public address announcer at Lucas Oil Field in Indianapolis introduced NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

As a long-time sports fan, I’ve watched such ceremonies many times before. What I expected was for the commish to begin by commending the losing Patriots on their effort. Only then, with the agony of defeat acknowledged and softened, would the winners be congratulated and praised.

Not so, in this case. Goodelll didn’t even mention the Patriots. He started by thanking the league’s fans for their support. This was understandable and appropriate — especially considering that the NFL season began belatedly because the owners had locked out the players in a labor dispute.

From expression of gratitude to the fans, however, Goodell didn’t make the obvious next move. That would have been to recognize the second-place Patriots for a remarkable season that ended one play short of the championship.

Goodell didn’t do that. He ignored the Pats completely and moved immediately to laud the winning Giants for their victory.

What a perverse culture we have to permit such behavior.

And, by extension, what a challenge ex-offenders have, trying to reenter society after being labeled as “losers” because they went to prison.

American Football, American Incarceration

To the rest of the world, football is soccer. Why American football is called football here, when kicking the ball is actually an unusual occurrence, is I suppose a question for historians of the game.

My interest at present is to throw out a totally speculative theory that may help explain the outlier status America occupies internationally in the size of its prison population. In case you didn't know, ours is gargantuan, unlike any other country in the developed world.

Could it be that our passion for the violent game of American football, with its frequent, terrible injuries, has something to do with the ideology of inflicting pain on so many millions of people through (in my view) excessive incarceration?

In other words, does one type of American exceptionalism (quasi-religious devotion to American football) contribute to another (off-the-charts incarceration that makes us a nation of jailers)?

This question crystallized in my mind when I happened to read that Philadelphia Eagles' quarterback Michael Vick was knocked out of last Sunday’s game with an injury – and wasn’t the only QB to have suffered this fate. In the St. Paul Pioneer Press, right next to the Vick story (“Eagles lose Vick to injured rib, chest”) was the account of the Chicago Bears’ Jay Cutler going down as well. “Giants KO Cutler, bully Bears,” was the boxing-speak headline about that football game.

What triggered my speculation, I think, was that Vick only recently returned to the NFL after serving 21 months in federal prison for animal cruelty. He had gotten the starting job for the Washington game because the quarterback who opened the season for the Eagles had – you guessed it – been injured.

We live in a culture swathed in superfluous violence. Why should we be surprised that incarceration rates are astronomical? Or that the death penalty lingers on in most of the states, like a specter haunting the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?

The Sacred and the Profane in a Super Bowl Ad

Super Bowl commercials have long been a leading American cultural indicator. Understandbly, they aim for the mainstream. If you’re shelling out millions per minute, you’d better be pretty sure you’re connecting with a wide swath of consumers.

Many of the commercials are wonderfully comic and inventive. For Super Bowl 44, for example, I couldn’t help but smile at the parody of the long-running television series Lost, which my wife Diane has followed into more labyrinths than Theseus could ever have imagined. Bud Lite offers itself as the elixir that can somehow get the people trapped there for five years off the island. Low-calorie suds as deus ex machina.

Sometimes, however, when you’re aiming at the lowest common denominator, taste goes out the window. A misguided attempt at humor can become downright offensive to certain sensibilities. Such was the case tonight, for me, with an over-the-top, open-coffin pitch for corn chips.

Doritos has been a durable junk food brand for as long as I can remember. But what kind of nihilistic culture shows someone faking his own death so he can max out on cheesy comestibles filling up his coffin?

In the commercial, a man reclines in Epicurean comfort in a coffin stocked with Doritos, listening to his own funeral. The sheer weight of the excess of chips tips the coffin over, revealing him to the assembled mourners. The reports of his death were greatly exaggerated, as Mark Twain quipped years ago.

In a culture in which there was a mainstream belief in the Resurrection of the Dead, such a scene would be not just ludicrous, but practically unthinkable.

What would I have aired instead? For me, it would be an ad from HarperCollins for N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope.