Oh, the artistry! The creativity! Foulmouthed cretins doing pantomime striptease and telling the world to 'f.... off' during a primetime, family-friendly football game.  Now that's entertainment!   

True to form, a solemn-looking Brian McCarthy, spokesman for the NFL, dutifully took to the podium on Super Monday (sic) to issue the customary NFL apology: "The obscene gesture in the performance was completely inappropriate, very disappointing and we apologize to our fans."

Disappointing? Just how stupid do the head honchos at the NFL think we are?  M.I.A. and Madonna didn't make obscene gestures—they are obscene gestures! In fact, Madonna has been the veritable embodiment of the obscene gesture ever since she hatched back in the early 1980s—mocking the Mother of God with the name she chose, publicly rejecting her Catholic Faith, and morphing into the gender-bending "boy toy" who would set pop music’s perversity standards for decades to come.

Exactly what did the NFL imagine would happen when they decided to hire degenerates like that to take to the stage in front of 110 million viewers, strip down and start gyrating about like harlots? Just how many times does the NFL get to orchestrate these massive assaults on the family values of most of their fans and then feign outrage after the fact? Who are they kidding?   

Remember Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" eight years ago?  Didn't the NFL apologize for that little "mishap" too? How many passes do they get?  And how seriously should any of us take their idiotic apologies when they themselves are the ones bringing in musicians who've made careers out of sending up one gigantic obscene gesture after another—and, in Madonna's case, for three decades and counting?

And now the NFL is shocked—just shocked!—by the obscenity of it all!  Puh-leeze! 

But, really, at the end of the day, it’s not Madonna, or this M.I.A. creature, or even the NFL itself that is the main problem. It’s us--the predictable, knuckle-dragging Christian lemmings, mouths open fishlike but silent, refusing to raise even a whimper of protest as the NFL assaults everything we supposedly hold sacred.  No wonder we're losing our identity as Christians, as well as our schools, churches, orphanages and hospitals! No wonder Muslims are kicking our lower spinal extremity in every way that matters!  We don't give a damn about much of anything anymore...except maybe football!

Now, don't get me wrong: I like football as much as the next guy. I even played wide receiver in college. I used to be a big fan of the Minnesota Vikings, and well remember watching Fran Tarkington, Chuck Foreman and Allan Page play for the great Bud Grant back in the day.  I loved the "black and blue division"!  I can still see the dramatic bursts of frozen breath billowing from behind helmet and facemask as the giants of the gridiron took to the field in subzero temps, whether here at Met Stadium or at Soldier Field or on the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Most of those guys were probably working for about $100 a game, and, while they were certainly no saints, at least the game they played was still just that—a game. 

That was then.

NFL football has since morphed into something of a brutish, semi-sexual social ritual that is becoming more important to Americans than just about anything else in their lives, including religion, perhaps especially religion! And as if to prove the point, the NFL thinks nothing of flanking its end zones with gaggles of veritable strippers on any given Sunday, while Guns 'n Roses welcomes Christian America to the jungle to see their warrior heroes battle one another on the way to the Valhalla of football immortality.  At halftime, blasphemers and harlots are trotted out to entertain the children while we stuff ourselves with beer and hotdogs, reveling in bread and circuses that give those of pagan Rome a run for their denarius.   We've got the lions and the bears and the gladiators too-- the only thing missing, in fact, are the Christians.

It took some of us a while to break free of the NFL hypnosis. Eventually, however, one simply grows up and asks: What does it really matter who wins or loses this stupid football game? Why should I care which set of millionaire semi-literates makes it to the Super Bowl?

Indeed, why does anyone care about this enough to put their Christian sensibilities on hold and endure every manner of cultural assault in the name of football? Children, of course, have to be taught to care about it.  Left on their own, they’d be playing football Sunday after Sunday rather than watching some ex-felon do it.  And now the NFL is ‘flipping us all off" on their own high holy day--Super Bowl Sunday--and pretending to apologize for the effrontery they produced, planned and financed.  Really, when is enough enough?

I was with my son on a racquetball court last Sunday night during the big tilt between the Pats and the New York "football" Giants. Normally bustling on Sunday nights, the gym was silent as a tomb. Nobody was there. In fact on the drive over, my son had commented on the rivers banks of glowing blue lights that flanked us as we drove along—TV’s flickering inside nearly every home we passed. The GAME was on and the whole world was watching. It was eerie. 

We played racquetball. We played hard and for nearly two hours. It was one of the best times my son and I have had on the court all year.  Funny, but we didn't miss a thing.

"Looks like Tom Brady's going to do it again," the man at the front desk quipped as we were leaving that night.

Outside in the car, my son—13 and homeschooled all his life—said: "Who's Tom Brady, Dad?"

"Exactly, Walter. Exactly!"