Upon further review, Clint's ad holds up
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The expression "political football" refers to something kicked around for political effect. But, nowadays, everything is kicked around for political effect. In truth, politics has become football, as the Super Bowl ended up proving.
Consider that politics and football are both contact sports. Both involve lots of money. Both encourage blind allegiance to a team. Both are objects of fanatical support (fanatic is just the long form of fan).
In both, unsportsmanlike conduct prevails and plenty of flags are thrown. The only difference is that in politics the flags are thrown by people in rumpled suits (the press) and are ignored. In football they are thrown by officials in striped uniforms and must be obeyed. In both, the flag throwers are routinely despised.
Football players have muscles in places where ordinary people don't have places, whereas politicians have conceits where ordinary people are not conceited. Of course, ordinary people don't have their egos on steroids.
My theory is illustrated by the "It's Halftime in America" ad, featuring Clint Eastwood, shown during the Super Bowl on behalf of Chrysler. I confess I missed the ad at the time because I was interviewing a dog about the disappearance of a cat, but I saw it later while munching Doritos.
In the ad, Clint Eastwood emerges from the shadows, his low, smoke-cured voice preceding him. The two-minute spot is a tribute to the hard-working men and women of this nation, as symbolized by the resurgence of Detroit. A sometimes-divided America is coming back, and the world will hear the roar of our engines.
It was good stuff, the only problem being that it didn't feature dogs, sex, babies or beer, which I gather from most of the other Super Bowl ads are necessary to get America's attention before any engine-roaring can go on.
But this is a quibble. I like and admire Mr. Eastwood, and here I must make full disclosure. I met him a couple of times when I was editor of The Herald in Monterey, Calif., in the late '80s and early '90s. And on one famous occasion -- famous to me, he's surely forgotten -- he called me up to make a complaint.
That morning, The Herald featured a front-page story about the restaurant he then owned, the Hog's Breath Inn in Carmel, which had been cited by local health officials. If memory serves, restaurant workers were shelling peas outside the premises in the lot next door, this in strict contravention of hygienic pea-shelling practices.
First Published February 8, 2012 12:00 am
