An Open Letter to American Industry RE: Super Bowl Monday

Dear Self-Appointed Schedule Makers of the World,

Yes, Chairperson Beerman H. Brewer and Secretary Car F. N. Dealerson, I’m talking to you. Directly and without apology. So you can stop crouching down there behind your piles of money, because you’re in plain sight now and every single one of us can see you.

While you were out casting a freshly spray-tanned legion of actors and models to populate the most technotronically elaborate nightclub to ever grace a commercial soundstage, and while you crowded around cubicles crunching complicated formulas to unlock the perfect five-word jingle that would be the key to convincing any Joe blow his immortality lies at the bottom of a light beer bottle, we were busy packing the boxes that we’d load onto the trucks and then drive to the stores to be sold to Joe Blow.

And while you toiled another long day in your think tank, dreaming up brand new ways to update brand new devices seventeen times over so that you can crank out trillions of brand new ads with brand new celebrities claiming how these brand new gadgets will help us pay our bills and educate our children and manage every aspect of our public lives in brand news ways–well, we were busy paying the bills and educating the children and managing every aspect of our public lives. In the flesh.

See, Mr J.S. Snakfud, Esq. and Ms. Sadie Poppins, Ltd., what you fail to recognize is quite simple: the same Joe Blow you try–every year come the first week of February–to send awash on a raging river of hops and barley, and whose pockets and his belt clip and his messenger bag you try to overflow with the same gadgets he’ll drop off at the recycling center in about six months, and whose arteries you bog down under puffy bags of pure cholesterol in its crispiest and most deadly form…did you think about that guy? You know, the jingle guy? Joe Blow?

Yeah, he’s the same one who clocks in at the warehouse every morning. Five minutes early. He’s the guy who stands on the assembly line for eight hours and the lady who drives the truck to the distributor every afternoon. He’s all of us. The sports fans. The ones who wake up on Super Bowl Sunday and stake a claim to the couch at sunrise. The ones who endure seventeen, grueling weeks of actions for a chance to sit through two more hours of football scattered between four extra hours of commercial madness.

We are fine folks, us sports fans. We do not ask for much. We are willing to accept the hats of consumer, employee, and sports fan as one in the same and we’ll even relish in the opportunities you provide us: to plunge face-first into bubbling vats of nacho cheese; to bathe in the amber light of literal, Super Bowl royalty, the King of Beers; to jam massive, foam fingers in the eyes of opposing fans  and buy “Super Bowl Champion” t-shirts thirty seconds after the official game clock hits zeroes. You give us these things and we expect them. We want them. We empty our wallets to get them. And, of course, you are there to catch all the loose change. Oh, how you know us so well.

That’s why I must ask: why do you continue to terrorize us? At what point did you decide it was best to resort to punishments most of my sporting brethren would agree sits only a notch above medieval torture? How could you rain down the full might of your capitalistic arsenal on us on a Sunday and expect us to show up for work on Monday? In fact, let’s call it “Super Bowl Monday” from now on. The day after the big game. A day that is cosmically intended for picking loose corn chips out of the couch cushions and off the front of your shirt. A day meant for licking one’s wounds. For national rest. Any sports fan will tell you that. It’s obvious.

What it’s not meant for, this Super Bowl Monday of ours, is lying face down in a pile of paperwork while attempting to sleep off a bean-dip hangover between cold calls. But that’s what you’re gonna get, because you brought this scourge upon us.

So how about it? I know it might not seem like world-changing activism or anything, but consider: with every dumpster in the world currently on fire at the same time, couldn’t you start by first providing a single extinguisher for us to push back the flames? At least for one day? We know you have the power. Couldn’t you at least give us our Super Bowl Monday?

Signed,

Frank Morelli, on behalf of sports fans (and employees) everywhere