America’s Super Bowl

Just when the Monday ST edition hits Winchell’s early morning coffee and chowder counters, the nation’s annual crunch and grunt ritual will have kicked off in Florida. An unofficial but widely observed holiday; the Super Bowl of the NFL has come to epitomize the religion, culture and ethics of Contemporary America.

Super Bowl observance has surpassed New Year’s Eve on the partying celebration index. Emotional outpouring pales the Fourth of July. Today, churches in the buckle of America’s Bible belt are going all out to get fans to Jesus. After last year’s Janet Jackson bare-breasted 15-second fame, the nation’s moral guardians are making sure that this year’s observance stays within the decency codes of the warm Christian hearth.

Once the national anthem is sung and the USAF flips its fly-by, the American soul formally gets into a combat-ready mode. Revved up by trailer parties and backyard barbecues, calories washed down with brew from the plains of waving amber grains, America goes into induced adrenaline high. In western Pacific America, the early bird breakfast is miso soup-ushered Kyoto beef steak, medium are, topped with runny eggs served sunny side up on garlic rice, with Chamorro sausage and sashimi on the side.

CNMI children in Public Schools stay at home today. Until the whistle blows at the end of the 60-minute gridiron playtime, it will be eyes-glued-on-the-tube day for most homo pigskintofuss fans. For an alternative, business guru tandem on this page pitched CAMIE (Character and Morality in Entertainment) awarded movies for preferred entertainment viewing. Posed as an alternate to OSCAR-awarded movies, the choice works also as alternate to the violence at the one-yard line. Members of the Amen crowd are grateful.

Now, where is this reflection going? I stepped out of the water off the north side of Managaha Island last Saturday when the 6.5 Richter scale quake wobbled my legs. Strong enough to trigger an internal tsunami warning system, I scanned the horizon for any signs, then looked for my wife in case an island inundation occurs and I had to strap both of us against a tree.

Seeing that none was forthcoming, my thoughts tele-zoomed into the mega sphere. I waxed philosophical about the meaning of human life, in general and the realities of my finite existence, in particular. My beach towel was spread close to the cordoned area to protect a migratory bird nesting spot. Just joined Lino Olopai and a new alliance to ratchet up island biosphere awareness and works on nature conservancy. In a multimedia flash of a lifetime, I went from the awesome sight of the Earthrise fragile blue Gaia, to examining a thickly encrusted crustacean that has evidently evolved into a gruesome creature in the frequently red-flagged waters of the lagoon.

I then recalled Bill Moyers’ recent remarks when honored by the Harvard Medical School, published as an article titled “There Is No Tomorrow” in last Sunday’s Twin Cities’ Star Tribune. He said: “One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.” Moyer, a Baptist Minister, is hardly your ranting liberal. Thus, it came as a surprise that the tone of this normally ineffable optimist bordered on despair.

America lives with ARMAGEDDON as its ideological and religious SUPER BOWL. This is the ideology of the end of history and the rapture theology of the end times. John Hirsch of the New York Times sees the Oval office being led by a cult whose context is the apocalyptic Christian belief that we are literally in the era of the last days. A third of our citizens, and probably most of our island church-going faithful share this belief.

America’s religion is dominated with war images. Our sentiments trace its roots to the levantine combat between the good Ahura Mazda and the bad Ahriman. From Josuah’s Conquest of Canaan to the Christian Schisms, from the European Crusades to the Iberian conquest of the New World, from moving the American natives into reserved fringes to subduing the far-eastern Filipino Malay as a consequence of manifest destiny, America moves on the impulse of combat and conquest. Family-oriented CAMIE’s movie award this year is the WW II-themed “Saints and Soldiers.” The tunes to Battle Hymn of the Republic and Onward Christian Soldier march on.

In a time of global economics, America’s ethics has now come to mean, squash the corporate competition. Ayn Rand notwithstanding, the solitary combat between a batter and a pitcher that is the essence of a previous age’s romance with baseball has been superceded by the coordinated moves of twelve field players acting as one. Team America rules. Congress and the Board rooms have joined forces to corner global natural resources and guard them with high-tech instruments of mass destruction. General Motors makes personnel carriers better than energy-efficient vehicles.

American culture abounds in images of violence and destruction. No less than USMC Lt. General James Mattis, Capital city guardian from nearby Quantico, declared recently that he actually enjoyed shooting Afghans as a patriotic act. This is not an aberration. The movie, “A Few Good Men,” dramatized an instance of religious and ideological fervor defining military conduct. Closer home, we have families letting their children shoot endangered bird species with their BB guns. Of course, without much thought, we still use the phrase “shooting two birds with one stone” in our discourse. And this year’s Lunar New Year ushers the Year of the Rooster. Cock fighting is not just a backyard sport; it is an apt metaphor for our elections. Just watch members of the CNMI Republican Party sharpen their spurs.

The conflict between Spartan security measures and Athenian democratic practices continues. My last glance at Managaha on the TASI ferry back led to these questions: Where does all life come from? Where does everything return to? Where needs my focus be? The Earth.

Many people are lost because they don’t know the importance of connection to the Earth. James Watts of the Reagan cabinet once observed that by the time the last California timber was cut, Jesus would have already returned. Our ideology and religion connect to money, to relationships, to success, to goals but it is disconnected from the Earth. When we are connected to the Earth, we feel warm and secure.

I woke up Sunday morning feeling warm. I failed to use sun block the day before. My skin is lobster red warm. Time to summon my combat-ready guardian angel. Primo, please pass the ice cold San Miguel, por favor.

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School and writes a regular column for the Saipan Tribune.