Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

I was at my bathroom sink the other morning-- as I am every morning-- shaving. For some reason I don't completely understand, shaving becomes a more difficult activity in winter months than in other seasons. The radio was on and I was told the following information: "90 million people watched the Super Bowl." For over 40 years, the Super Bowl has been an annual event in American popular culture, cooked up by the football folks to drag out the football season much longer than it has any right to be. The Super Bowl represents for me, in purest form, everything I dislike about our culture-- the crowds, the noise, the violence, the hyper-masculinity, the tawdriness-- like Las Vegas on steroids, if it already isn't.

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It is estimated that over 300 million people live within the borders of these United States. (Is this too many? When my late father was born, there were only 100 million. How can a populace triple in one lifetime? This seems excessive.) I did the arithmetic: if what I heard was in fact true, that meant that 210 million people did not watch the Super Bowl. I was among them, that rare time when I wind up in the majority. I was watching the television; my selection was a rerun of La Cage aux Folles, aired on a public broadcast station. I couldn't recall if I had seen this film before. It passed the time, but I found it all a little thin. I would have preferred something with Mary Astor or Vera Helena Hruba Ralston. Oh well.

Using the logic of the anti-gay-marriage crowd, I pondered this idea: why not have the people vote on the Super Bowl? With a simple majority, we could pass a Constitutional Amendment that would outlaw this football orgy. In which case it might go offshore, which would be fine by me. So much of what is unattractive about our culture heads overseas anyway, why not this event? Would a simply majority vote to outlaw the Super Bowl? So few citizens vote in our primary and general elections to begin with, and many are now required to use paperless touch screens, it might be an exercise in futility. Still, if many states have authorized votes to make same-sex marriage a violation of their constitutions, can't we put up to a vote the Super Bowl? Hip-Hop music? The Fox Network? I have my shopping list-- don't you? Thus the scary abyss of majoritarian culture.

Defeat love

Here in my adopted state of Massachusetts, there is still an attempt to get our fair legislature to authorize a state-wide vote making same-sex marriage a constitutional taboo. It all seems a bit jejune to me, but the battle lines are drawn. One day, while our fair representatives sat in Constitutional Convention, which they are required to do every once in a while, a pro-marriage demo circled the State House. The next day, in the newspaper, there was a picture of one quean holding a sign. The sign read: "We Didn't Vote On Your Marriage." Next to him was another quean with another signboard; his read "You Really Should Get Another Hobby," a reference to the rabid anti-gay-marriage troops. The whole affair begins to look like something that fell out of a Juan Luis Borges story wrung through a Protestant American writer. But maybe Borges had the eye-- he who went blind!

I have a local friend named John. He married his partner Stan when the opportunity became available. The nuptials got a big spread in the Sunday New York Times some months back, about as big a spread as that for Tony Kushner's marriage. The other day I asked John what would be his marital status if the fair legislators authorized a vote by the good citizens to constitutionally forbid same-sex marriage and a simple majority of those very good citizens did! John didn't know. No one knows. Would his marriage to Stan be grandfathered? Would the ban annul existing legal marriages? Can you be married and not married at the same time? What else does the anti-marriage crowd have on their shopping list? Vote now. We move into territory less Borges and more Dred Scott decision. And why, oh why, is this Constitutional mania, driven by the anti-gay-marriage frenzy, such an obsession in the Unites States? Other nations have moved to expanding marital rights without this outpouring of bile and venom.

I have my own analysis, which is anchored to the history of individualism in America and the centrality of religious faith. I always find it shocking to read the stats which reveal how many of the good volk have a personal conversation with the Nazarene, believe in this, that, or the other. It all strikes me as a failure of civilization, which brings me back to the Super Bowl again.

But as I get older, as older I must get, I have decided that these features of our society-- super-sized individualism (how else can you explain a person like Howard Hughes, a citizen Gore Vidal once referred to as "a genuine American shit"?) and religiosity-- are here to stay. Too bad. They get in the way of our being a more tempered nation. Instead we have children in schools with guns, religious zealots screaming at military funerals about homosexuality, non-funding or defunding of essential services, the erosion of the middle classes and the backhoes shoveling billions of dollars onto the superrich. Even Borges couldn't make this up, hard as he might try.

I also heard on the radio that we are in a new era of bipartisanship. Anything that has the word "bi" in it, these days, probably indicates progress. So in this spirit of good feeling and fellowship, I would like to reach out to the other side and propose thus: back off your anti-gay-marriage jihad and I will let you keep your fucking Super Bowl. I will be the Henry Clay of social harmony-- and, next February, rent another Vera Hruba Ralston movie. She really could ice-skate!

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com