After a long day in the parks we got back to our rooms last night and settled in for sub sandwiches and television.  I had forgotten that the Super Bowl was airing last night, but my older brother did not, and he had the game on in our room.  While I rested and unpacked, the game entered halftime, featuring the infamous Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, began to unfold.

By the end of the show—or by the point I stopped watching to get dinner in the other rooms—I was convinced that we needed to grant Puerto Rico its independence (while probably maintaining some naval bases there or the like).  It was the least American halftime show I’ve ever seen.

The show itself was a technical and artistic marvel.  Bad Bunny (and his team of dedicated technicians, cameramen, gaffers, and the like) essentially recreated a Puerto Rican sugar cane field, along with all the sights and sounds (and, from the looks of it, even smells—a guy was grilling sausages in one scene!) of a Puerto Rican town.  There was a neighborhood store and a barbershop.  There were linemen working on the electrical poles.  There was even a sleazy jeweler hawking his wares.  It was a really cool microcosm of Puerto Rican life.  I found myself asking, “how did they set that up so quickly?”

But I was asking another question:  “what does this have to do with America?”  Puerto Rico is an American territory, and the people there are full American citizens.  The culture, however, is fundamentally foreign—it’s clearly a Latin/Caribbean culture.

The show was also filthy—for all its technical and artistic merit (again, recreating a sugar cane field and a small town on a football field is incredible and worthy of praise from a technical standpoint), the dancing was hypersexualized.  The Super Bowl is supposed to be a family-friendly, fundamentally American event, but there were Puerto Rican babes and hombres grinding up on each other in very sexually explicit ways.

I’m old enough to remember the infamous Janet Jackson “nip slip” “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl in the early 2000s (I didn’t see it, but I heard about it—you couldn’t escape it).  The halftime show after that went into a real Boomer rock direction—Paul McCartney, etc.—and avoided controversy for years.  It got bland.  But the Bad Bunny halftime show is an extreme overcorrection.  I don’t think there were any “nip slips,” but there didn’t have to be.

The cultural disconnect was also palpable.  The entire performance was in Spanish.  Everything about it was a celebration of Puerto Rico.  That’s fine for a FIFA soccer match, but, remember, this show was for halftime at the Super Bowl—one of the most American events of the year.  Instead of being grateful for American citizenship and all the opportunities that brings—including his music career having any sort of reach outside of Latin America—Bad Bunny rejected that completely.

If Puerto Ricans want their own culture, that’s great!  And sharing that with the world in the appropriate settings is wonderful.  We all benefit from learning about other cultures.  But doing so at the Super Bowl was inappropriate and—to borrow language from the Woke Left—an “appropriation” of American culture.

The whole thing smacked of hatred for the United States and its unique culture and contributions.  If that’s the thanks America gets, perhaps Puerto Rico should enjoy going their own way and pursuing their own course, free from American investment and aid.