Tag: super-bowl

I have zero interest in American Football, but I was curious about the Super Bowl Halftime Show that this year was performed by Bad Bunny, his guest artists and a host of performers. So I watched it…

I thought it was outstanding – the performance, the choreography, the camerawork – a showstopping celebration of Spanish culture and community. I don’t speak a word of Spanish, but I didn’t need to – I was smiling at the pure joy that radiated from everyone involved.

Needless to say, Trump and his MAGA followers hated it. Trump posted on his Truth Social account that:

The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER! It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence. Nobody understands a word this guy is saying…

Odd, that, since Spanish, so Wikipedia tells me:

…is a global language with 519 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 636 million speakers total, including second-language speakers. Spanish is the official language of 20 countries, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the world’s second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese; the world’s fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); and the world’s most widely spoken Romance language. The country with the largest population of native speakers is Mexico.

It’s also, according to Wikipedia again:

…the second most spoken language in the United States, after English. Approximately 45 million people aged five or older speak Spanish at home, representing about 14% of the U.S. population. Broader estimates place the total number of Spanish speakers—including native speakers, heritage speakers, and second-language speakers—at around 59 million, or roughly 18% of the population.

I particularly liked Bad Bunny’s saying “God Bless America” – and making clear that his America consists of the entire continent and its islands by naming all the countries that go to make up America. That was a unifying statement at a higher level than anything Trump has ever done. Trump seems only intent on dividing us, including society itself in the USA, at every opportunity.

If anything is an “affront to the Greatness of America”, it is Trump and his administration. I suspect that what he would have wanted for a Halftime Show would be a modern-day version of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.