On Monday my First Draft colleague JamieO wrote about the right’s reaction to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show. I really thought that by Tuesday all of the winguts would have moved on to some new outrage, but instead, the righties are still really angry, and unfortunately our elected officials in DC decided they needed to get involved, too.
First Andy Ogles announced he was putting his House committee on the job:
I laughed when I read that. All that emotion! All those feelings! Crotch grabbing!
And then this guy:
But wait—another MAGA congress critter wants in, Mark Alford of, you guessed it, Texas:
Alford: "On Bad Bunny – we're still investigating. There's info out about the lyrics. I don't speak fluent Spanish, but if it's true what was said on natl TV, we have a lot of Qs for entities that broadcast it & we'll be talking w/ the FCC. This could be worse than the Janet wardrobe malfunction"
The crux of the matter is in that quote: they don’t speak Spanish, so they have no idea what happened on Sunday. And because a brown-skinned person was singing it, they were free to imagine the very worst things possible. Well, the worst things possible to their little imaginations, which was mostly lyrics about sex. And not just sex, but enthusiastic sex between consenting adults, something that might be unknown to a fair number of them.
I’ve written before about how these extremists don’t seem to have happy lives. They mocked the love between Tim Walz and his son. They won the election and hold the legislature and Supreme Court and they are still so angry all time. Those scenes of people living in community through good times and bad made them mad because that’s not what their lives look like. Mad because they couldn’t find anything real to complain about so they went on weird tangents like screaming about “gay pornography” but not actually being able to find any.
And there were way too many Americans who were OK with or even liked the half-time show even though it was in Spanish so they decided there had to have been something objectionable in the Spanish words themselves—a hidden message of laughing at the rest of us or making us look like fools for enjoying the show. So we end up with Alford’s FCC investigation.
And you already know where this is going. All of the outrage about “dirty” lyrics being sung on live TV are based on fake translations of the words Bad Bunny actually sang and our MAGA elected leaders are some of the stupidest people alive. Of course the show had to meet FCC guidelines, regardless of what language it was in. But too many people connected with the joy in the performance and now The Island of Misfit Toys has decided that someone must pay.
I’ll leave you with some more non-English music.