I haven’t had time to offer any commentary on the Fox Sports “tradition” of reading the Declaration of Independence before the Super Bowl, but Charlie Pierce at Grantland has some hilarious things to say about it. (Thanks to Paul Matzko for calling this to my attention). Here it is:
I have accustomed myself to accepting the fact that the Super Bowl pregame is going to be the kind of militarized patriotic pageant that would have occurred had Leni Riefenstahl immigrated to Manhattan and gone to work with Don Draper. (By the way, did anyone check to make sure the Black Hawks that did the flyby weren’t circling David Wildstein’s house by halftime?) But imagine my surprise when Curt Menefee told me we were now going to have the “traditional” Super Bowl Sunday reading of the Declaration of Independence. When did that become a tradition? Did I miss a memo from the Founders Beyond?
Anyway, what a letdown it was to see that they weren’t going to read the whole thing. How does that fat bastard, George III, get off the hook? Why not have, say, Rooney Mara talking about “plundering our seas,” or Bob Costas intoning about “erecting a multitude of New Offices,” or, god knows, Dan Snyder warning us about attacks on the frontier by “merciless Indian savages”? I mean, if you’re going to do it, read the whole thing. And that’s not even to mention that, had he been alive when it was drafted, Adrian Peterson would not have been considered a person, let alone an American.
I was further disappointed that it wasn’t a theme. We could have had Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania at halftime, and a postgame reading of the Notes on the State of Virginia. Founderpalooza! Why wasn’t Jon Meacham in the booth?
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