The Super Bowl was last weekend. I watched the game and cringed at the halftime show, as I suspect did many others of my generation who grew up when the halftime show at the Super Bowl was a marching band-and nothing else. This year’s halftime show was a cross between Disney on Ice and a Kiss concert. The word that comes to mind is gross.

Say what you will, but the Super Bowl has quite simply become a MONUMENTAL monument to American bad taste. If the Super Bowl were personified it would be Jerry Seinfeld’s father, overweight, vulgar, loud, brazen and in-your-face. Hagar slacks and white belt to boot.

And it just seems to get bigger – and worse – every year. In fact, the game nowadays seems secondary to the garish, pyro-spectacular halftime show that we have to sit through while we wait for the 3rd Quarter to start. I often wonder how the older football fans – people of my father’s generation, who grew up on a steady diet of Glenn Miller and Count Basie – must react to the invasion of rock and roll into American professional football ? And how insufferable it must be to actually be there ! ( at least if you are watching on TV you can get up and go get something from the fridge). Moreover, this year we not only had to endure a bad halftime show but a scandalously rendered national anthem as well. No one talked about the game on Monday, but instead the headlines were about Christine Aguilera’s “performance” during the National Anthem. Even if she had not botched the lyrics, her rendition was enough to make one reach for the remote. For such is the Super Bowl nowadays.

And they want American Democracy in Egypt ?