In a match without history, the Seattle Seahawks dominated Super Bowl LX, defeating the Boston Patriots 29 to 13, but the winner of the American football final was the Puerto Rican Bad Bunny: fresh from three victories at the Grammys last Sunday, including the one for Best Album, the Debi Tirar Mas Fotos superstar who last year interrupted his US tour to avoid exposing fans to the threats of Ice took to the Levis Stadium in Santa Clara, California his ‘pink casita’ and a message of unity: “Together we are America, the only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
Only Donald Trump could be offended, as he had announced the day before: «It was the worst show ever, a slap in the face of America. Nobody understands a word and the dance is disgusting especially for children”, said on Truth the head of the White House who followed the game from Mar-a-Lago having chosen to desert the Super Bowl “due to the distance” from the West Coast but also due to the NFL’s choice to assign half time to an American citizen who sings only in Spanish. Trump had said that he would follow in streaming the pro-Maga concert of the elderly rocker Kid Rock put on by Charlie Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA: a medley of ‘golden oldies’ and country music concluded with the appeal to the spectators to dedicate their lives to Jesus, perhaps to make amends for the resurfaced words of an old song of his whose theme was relationships with minors.
For America, the Super Bowl is a great secular celebration which, like Thanksgiving, should unite a divided country. In taking the pulse of his ‘State of the Union’, the Puerto Rican Bad Bunny has recreated a real village in the stadium populated by stars such as Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, Cardi B, Pedro Pascal and Jessica Alba, but also people taken from real life, a Los Angeles taqueria and, from Brooklyn, one of the last remaining Puerto Rican social clubs in New York. There was also a child to whom the former supermarket cashier Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio gave the golden gramophone from the Grammys: to many it evoked little Liam Ramos, deported from Minnesota to Texas, a drama that in recent weeks has moved half of America. Family values in focus: a couple celebrated their wedding live. Dressed in a tracksuit designed for him by Zara, Bad Bunny sealed the half-time by listing the names of all the nations of North and South America and closed with a «God Bless America».
The half-time show in Spanish revealed the NFL’s interest in expanding the audience beyond the US borders even if the reaction of Trump and the conservatives demonstrated that many of the public do not want to share the event with the rest of the world. For many Americans, not just in the Magic world, the Super Bowl is a popular national event where the patriotism of flags and chants has survived in today’s age of division. “I think only law-abiding citizens who love this country should come to the Super Bowl,” said the head of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, in the same interview in which she announced in October that ICE agents would patrol the stadium. The NFL denied it, but the population of Santa Clara, half of whom were not born in the USA, were clearly worried.