Aesthetics and Ugliness and Super Bowl LVI

Maybe it's just me, but for as long as I can remember Super Bowl commercials have been a primary rather than secondary reason to watch at least one game of football per year. This year the Super Bowl commercials seemed to feature two distinct patterns worth commenting on. One was the conspicuous absence of white people. The other was the conspicuous absence of beautiful people. And not only were there few to no beautiful people, there were also just a lot of decidedly weird looking folks.  Like no one wearing masks in a stadium located in one of the most mandate-happy counties in America, the prevalence of people of color and also ugly people should tell us something about the sort of country we live in now. Is this the United States of America anymore? One could fairly ask what sort of country but a divided one has more than one anthem in the name of racial justice. So also, the whole affair should tell us at least how the NFL and corporate America and NBC see us, and want us to see ourselves. And maybe just like cementing racial divides with selective and segregated patriotism on the basis of melanin, corporate America wants you and I to see ourselves and our country like they do - as ugly and misshapen and odd. We are eccentric, off-beat, and maybe a little deranged.  Admittedly, I don't watch the NFL more than once a year, nor even every year. But the suddenness of this shift in the look and feel of the 2022 spectacle is a little jarring.  I wouldn't put it past the whole lot to suppose this is how you head off a resurgence of Make America Great Again sentiment - and more to the point, voting.  The joke's on them, though. With any luck and by God's grace, the negative association and optics backfires and they only cement our negative opinion of them and their taste rather than our view of ourselves and our national heritage or destiny.