February 12, 2026, 11:04 AM
CoolRich59
https://amgreatness.com/2026/0...uper-bowl-satyricon/
Our Super Bowl Satyricon
Super Bowl halftime has devolved into a stale Roman bacchanal—gaudy, raunchy, and empty—leaving millions bored, alienated, and wondering who the spectacle is even for anymore.
By Victor Davis Hanson
February 12, 2026
In recent years, Americans have known what to expect from our Neronian Super Bowl halftime shows: mediocre music veneered over with gaudy, flashily lit, but ultimately empty and meaningless sets.
As seen again this year, the usual array of supporting dancers twerk and simulate intercourse, in sync with the main singer, mindlessly grabbing his/her genitals—apparently to highlight the explicit sexual allusions of mostly nonsensical lyrics.
For some strange reason, this Roman orgiastic ritual is supposedly designed by the NFL each year to appeal to American families of all ages as they gather together around the living room TV on their festive cultural holiday.
But the script has now grown predictable and trite. This year’s mess jumped the shark and had a force-multiplying boring effect on one of the most tedious Super Bowl games in history.
The decision to have Bad Bunny as the main attraction to sing solely in Spanish—only 14 percent of the U.S. population is fluent in Spanish, while 90 percent is proficient in English—was apparently designed to grow the NFL’s global audience, particularly in the Western Hemisphere, or perhaps to shock America to get accustomed to its new official multilingual identity.
Yet of the anticipated 60 million Americans who likely watched this flat show, more than 50 million of them could neither read nor comprehend Spanish. And they had previously been insulted by Bunny to hurry up and learn Spanish before the game—or else?
How odd that America provides translations of every conceivable language in its courts, hospitals, and schools for minorities of non-English-speaking residents. And yet at its annual signature sporting event, the marquee and main-event non-English speaker would not even provide translations for the vast majority of the viewing population.
Part of the hype of Bunny’s appearance was his supposedly edgy decision to perform entirely in Spanish. But was that really so avant-garde?
What would have been far more against-the-grain and bold for Bad Bunny would have been to find some way to reconnect with the millions of disenchanted families who simply wish a hiatus from the monotonously gross and politicized Super Bowl bacchanalias.
Most in the stadium had no idea what Bad Bunny was singing about, if we can call his nonstop talking and mumbling true music.
Fortunately for Bunny, that language barrier turned out to be about the only good thing about the entire Sunday disaster.
Most of Bunny’s lyrics were raunchy and demented, and likely out-Epsteined the imagination of the late Jeffrey Epstein.
In his vile, obscene “Safaera,” to avoid being censored, Bunny omitted a few of the song’s lyrics about his celebration of exploitative sodomy, fellatio, and anilingus—with misogynistic trashing of his compliant female sexual partners as “hoes.”
(Do woke intersectional feminists weigh in on the side of Bunny’s DEI credentials and sexual fluidity, or do they bristle at Bunny’s “objectification” of women, as he reduces them to mere mindless receptacles of violent and toxic masculinity?).
If Bunny’s purpose was to shock America, then he should have sung his full lyrics of “Safaera” in English, ensuring that his first-time listeners were forced to hear and react to his sick adolescent riffs on breasts, bottoms, phalluses, and vaginas.
Bunny had been previously instructed not to repeat his prior performance-art trashing of ICE and to keep his politicking subtle and coded.
Translated, that meant the NFL had greenlighted some of his obscene references as long as they were relegated to a Spanish-speaking audience only and toned down a bit. But he was not overtly to alienate over half of the NFL’s viewership, who not long ago had voted to stop illegal immigration and millions crashing the border.
Bunny mostly complied, albeit with empty platitudes about hate and love, and reducing the American flag to a status similar to that of the other South and Central American states.
Ricky Martin chimed in with his own incoherent Spanish-language harangue about the American rape of paradise in Hawaii (“They want to take my river and my beach too/They want my neighborhood and grandma to leave”). If Martin’s point was the arrival of too many newcomers, then he might have first reflected on the 10-million uninvited illegal aliens who, during the Biden tenure, stormed America’s southern border.
A writer for the now-defunct sports section of the Washington Post had earlier and ludicrously boasted that the mostly forgotten Colin Kaepernick—the Dylan Mulvaney of the NFL—would be the most relevant figure at the 2026 Super Bowl.
Perhaps he was—if the writer meant by “relevant” the narcissistic Kaepernick’s past popularizing of taking-the-knee during the National Anthem. That antic likely reduced NFL viewership by 25 percent in 2016-2017, and turned Sunday afternoons into racial psychodramas with two race-coded National Anthems.
In sum, last Sunday was the same old, same old Super Bowl Satyricon.