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A Culture War Breaks Out Over Super Bowl Halftime

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

I want to thank Rudy Giuliani. As supremely unenlightened as I may be about pop culture, hearing the former New York mayor's cranky critique of Beyonce's Super Bowl halftime show makes me feel almost hip.

"I think it was outrageous," he said, venting full You-Kids-Get-Off-My-Lawn geezer rage on Fox News Monday. "The halftime show I thought was ridiculous anyway. I don't know what the heck it was. A bunch of people bouncing around and all strange things. It was terrible."

For the record, the "bunch of people bouncing around" consisted of pop superstar Beyonce backed by her female dance team who wore Black Panther-style black berets atop huge 1960s-style afros and at one point raised a "black power" fist salute in the air.

All of which Giuliani interpreted as a salute to the Black Lives Matter movement and a slap at police.

"This is football, not Hollywood," Giuliani grumbled, "and I thought it was really outrageous that she used it as a platform to attack police officers who are the people who protect her and protect us, and keep us alive."

Excuse me? If pro football is not entertainment, what the heck is it? And if police who behave badly and, by the way, make good police look bad are not going to be held accountable for it, who will?

 

Yet it didn't stop with Giuliani. Over on Fox Business, Stuart Varney asked: "Is there anything in America which can exclude race? I mean, why is race brought into the halftime show at a Super Bowl game, why?"

And Rush Limbaugh called Beyonce's performance "representative of the cultural decay and the political decay and the social rot that is befalling our country."

Well, I'm glad they got something out of the show.

Normally, I would not jump eagerly into the culture war over Super Bowl halftime shows, but Giuliani's complaint comes at a special time: an election year in which anger dominates discourse on both political sides more than it has at perhaps any time since, well, the Sixties.

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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