Bey and Jay sitting petty for anthem
JUST when you thought it was safe to go back to the football game, there it was: “Kaep 2: Electric Boogaloo.” Did we really have to go through the whole celebrities-dissing-the-flag drill again?
Unnoticed by most of us, Beyoncé and Jay-Z (and daughter Blue Ivy) remained seated for the national anthem before the Super Bowl in Miami. Were they trying to send a message of contempt to the police? Were they expressing support for Colin Kaepernick? Were all three of them suffering from a simultaneous case of sore knees? Did they just feel too important to show a little respect for the flag? When you’re among the most famous celebrities in America, people’s eyes tend to be on you at all times, so don’t be surprised if your conspicuous behavior succeeds in attracting notice.
Sure, Bey and Jay have every right, as Americans, to stay seated for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and for that matter they had every right to flip the middle finger to Old Glory or even sploosh a whoopee cushion when Demi Lovato was warbling, “O’er the land of the freeeeee.”
But it would have been better for Madame and Master Carter, and more important, it would have been better for all of us, if they had simply gone along with this brief little ritual that binds us together as Americans. This is, after all, the country where one grateful fellow once rapped, “I’m out that Bed-Stuy . . . Now I live on Billboard and I brought my boys with me.” What other country makes it as easy as this one does to go from the bottom to the top? Have gratitude, friends!
Whether intended that way or not, Jay-Z and Beyoncé performed the most unwelcome resurrection of a cultural zombie since “Murphy Brown” climbed out of its grave of smugness at CBS two years ago. I challenge you to name anything good that came out of Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 flag protest. Did it spur a “national conversation on police brutality”? Please. Kaepernick is the guy who comes to the Metallica concert and says, “It’s too quiet in here.” (“WHAT?” “IT’S TOO QUIET IN HERE.”)
I think we were good on the whole question of “Is there enough talk about police shootings?” True, we weren’t talking about police shootings
during football games, but isn’t that kind of the whole purpose of entertainment? NFL games gave everybody a chance to take a break from hating the police and return to the natural order of things — hating the Patriots.
Kaep’s pointless protest, which spread like wildfire until it died like wildfire, just made everyone even more grouchy, combative and bitter than we already were, and that’s saying something given that all this happened during the Hillary Clinton-Donald Trump presidential campaign.
“It was Rousseau who made the hatred of one’s own culture the stance of the cultivated person,” historian Frank M. Turner once noted. Roudawg had nothing on Jay-Z, who cast shade on not only his own culture his but embarrassed his own business partners of the NFL on football’s biggest night.
Mr. Carter was signed up by the NFL, you may recall, as cultural Tylenol to ward off the headache caused by its feud with Captain Anti-America. Jay-Z and the NFL announced last fall they would partner on “education and economic advancement; police and community relations; and criminal justice reform.” All of this is press-releases-peak for post-Kaepernick image reform.
Now that Jay, Bey and the Che of the Bay are all on the same side again, we all have to weigh whether our love of Queen Bey outweighs our dislike of Comrade Colin, whether we’re Crazy in Love or crazy out of patience. And Jay, meanwhile, is officially up to 100 problems. It’s an election year again. We were going to be grouchy enough already. We were going to yell at one another enough already. “IT’S TOO QUIET IN HERE”? No.