The ugly Americans have spoken on the Super Bowl’s halftime show. What they said is wrong.

By James J Devine

Let us dispense with the fiction-based political football concerning Bad Bunny.

The annual paroxysms of outrage over the Super Bowl halftime show are not a defense of culture, but a tantrum thrown by those who believed the empire would only export, never import; who believed the projection of power came without reciprocity.

This is the hypocrisy at the heart of the American experiment: the desperate, nostalgic cling to a monoculture that was a demographic and historical impossibility from the moment the first expansionist foot stepped beyond the original states.

You speak of “American culture” as if it were a pristine heirloom, kept under glass. It was never that. It was always a battlefield, a negotiation, an absorption.

English is not the official language of the United States, but freedom of speech is our fundamental gospel.

It was Cherokee and Choctaw, Spanish and French, Mexican vaquero and West African rhythm, forcibly folded into the dominant Anglo-Protestant project through conquest, enslavement, and annexation.

The halftime show is merely that unfinished, cacophonous, glorious negotiation broadcast live. It might sound like the screaming and crying of citizens battered by police for trying to vote or a mule team kicking down a picket fence.

When a Puerto Rican artist headlines, that is not an alien insertion. It is the anthem of a territory you acquired and have never fully acknowledged as your own. It is the sound of the bill for 1898.

Remember the Maine? Probably not.

The MAGA patriot, apoplectic at the sight of Spanglish and reggaeton, is the direct inheritor of every nativist panic in American history. He’s educated by yellow journalism.

He is the Know-Nothing, the Ku Klux Klan kleagle, the opponent of Catholic schools, the incarcerator of Japanese Americans, the foe of “foreign” languages.

His tribe is united by fear. His tradition is exclusion. He wraps himself in a flag that his ideological forebears would have reserved for a far narrower constituency.

He believes empire is a one-way street—that you can seize land, labor, and resources without, eventually, hearing the music of the people you seized them from. This is a child’s understanding of power.

The ugly American chose the Empire. The ugly American chose global hegemony. The ugly American chose a demographic destiny woven from every corner of the globe you influenced and invaded.

After something like that, the stereotypical “ugly American” has no right to insist that the height of our commercial spectacle mirror the aesthetics of a 1950s soda fountain.

The halftime show is the most honest reflection of the American century: brash, commercialized, technologically masterful, and built upon a foundation of Black, Brown, and immigrant genius that the arbiters of “traditional culture” have spent centuries appropriating, sanitizing, or suppressing.

The Christian nationalist clutching his pearls at the spectacle is not a defender of faith, but of a theocratic ethno-state that has never existed here.

His project is not preservation, but erasure—a Taliban-esque desire to scrub the public square of any vibrancy, complexity, or joy that does not conform to his narrow dogma. He mistakes his anxiety over diminishing demographic primacy for a moral crusade.

Since its founding in 1776, the United States has been shaped by waves of immigrants, creating a unique “melting pot” culture. Americans have led the way or made major contributions in music genres like heavy metal, rhythm and blues, jazz, gospel, country, hip hop, and rock ‘n’ roll.

The Declaration of Independence functions as America’s foundational mission statement by establishing the core principles of equality, unalienable rights (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), and government by consent.

It defined the nation’s identity, justified the revolution against tyranny, and served as a guidepost for the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution. American culture recognizes that hundreds of millions of individuals do not define ‘happiness’ the same way.

Individualism is a paramount pillar of American culture, prioritizing self-reliance, personal autonomy, and individual rights over collective conformity. This deep-seated value influences nearly all aspects of life, fostering a culture of independence, competition, and the pursuit of personal fulfillment known as the American Dream.

The nation’s most popular sports are American football, baseball, and basketball.

The first American football game took place on November 6, 1869, between two college teams, Rutgers and Princeton. Each team had 25 players and played with a round ball that couldn’t be picked up or carried.

The first recorded baseball game in U.S. history happened on June 19, 1846, in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the “New York Nine” beat the Knickerbockers 23–1 in just four innings.

Just because it did not originate in New Jersey, basketball is still part of American culture.

Andrew F. Athias, 33, from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, was one of about 400 halftime show extras dressed in grass suits who joined Bad Bunny on stage during his historic Super Bowl LX performance. That New Jersey influence qualifies the whole shabang as American culture.

So let the show be loud. Let it be in Spanish. Let it hip-thrust and politicize. It is not the corruption of American culture; it is American culture. It is the inevitable, vibrant, and messy consequence of every decision, violent and voluntary, that built this contradictory nation.

It is ridiculous for the ugly neofascists to complain because American culture does not fit in with their narrow-minded perspective, especially since diversity is one of its defining traits.

The empire is playing its greatest hits, and the tracklist was always going to include the songs of the colonized. The halftime show isn’t the problem. The problem is an audience that still believes the myth of its own innocence, and is horrified to see its reflection in the glittering, pluralistic mirror.