10 Feb 2026

Veterans, various

Joe MacLeod watched the football game

Today: Joe MacLeod, Editor at INDIGNITY and author of the column MR. WRONG.

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Issue No. 499

Halftime in America
Joe MacLeod

Halftime in America

by Joe MacLeod

I love Super Bowl. I write a general-interest column called Mr. Wrong where I annually celebrate the Super Bowl, and it’s always easy to write the Super Bowl column because I am genuinely psyched for Super Bowl.

Some years I actually care about the teams that are playing, but this year it was the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks, and while I wanted the Seahawks to win because I am tired of the New England Patriots winning all the time and I am tired of Tom Brady, the famous multiple-Super Bowl-winning quarterback for the Patriots, even though he doesn’t play football anymore, because he is cashing in so hard right now on being Tom Brady, and I can’t get away from his dopey mug on all the television I watch, it’s just kind of annoying, I was largely uninterested in each team, but it was still Super Bowl, so I was going to go someplace and watch the big game.

A friend of mine is a member of a Veterans of Foreign Wars post, and sometimes he goes to the local VFW hall to watch the game. This year we made a plan to watch the game there. I’ve been to this hall before as a guest, and it has a bar and a large room for bingo and gatherings. I watched Super Bowl one year at this hall when Baltimore was in it, and the entire place was packed, the bar and the hall. It’s been unusually cold and the city of Baltimore is not particularly interested in this pairing of teams, but also there was an issue with the heat in the big room, so they weren’t having the regular big-event gathering, so there was a crowd in the bar side, but it wasn’t packed. We got seats at the far end of the bar away from the big-screens TVs, but it was perfectly fine looking down the bar at the TVs.

There was a free buffet of meatballs and crab dip and fried chicken and stuff, and the game was starting to look like kind of a bust, New England couldn’t score. I was starting to wonder about halftime because of Bad Bunny. I wondered if anybody was going to give a shit. Personally, it’s the Super Bowl, and I’m interested in the whole scene, the commercials, half time, are there any famous people in the crowd, stuff like that, the whole experience.

So now it’s halftime, and the big halftime festivities were on the screen. At the beginning we heard the Bad Bunny audio, and it stayed on, but then somebody cranked up a different audio source, the public address system for the hall, on top of the TV audio. It was a song called something like “It ain’t easy being country” where the guy was musically complaining about how hard it is to be “country,” and there was a line about “little boys ain’t little girls.” We were at the far end of the bar and right near a speaker, which was distorting badly from being cranked. We could still hear the TV volume, along with a few VFW members yelling about speaking English in America. Whoever had the second audio control pushed their audio way up and now the Kid Rock song “Bawitdaba” was overmodulating tremendously, and that’s when I realized it was the alternate halftime programming for people who hate the idea that somebody who sings in Spanish was the main Super Bowl act, and then someone introduced “my friend, Bob Ritchie,” which is Kid Rock’s government name. I forget what he sang, but it was mostly acoustic, so at least it was quieter, but generally it was a really unpleasant experience. I was sad about how much hate seemed to be in the room, but it wasn’t my room, and I was free to leave and never come back. I figured I’d ride out half time, but wow, never again. I saw Lady Gaga was in the show and I said out loud, “hey, look, a white person!” but nobody reacted. I also saw that it looked like some people were getting married, but I couldn’t hear anything. I went to the restroom, where they still have Jane Fonda “Hanoi Jane” targets inside the urinals, which made me think of my father, because he served in Vietnam, but we never really had a relationship where I had a chance to ask him questions about all that.

There was a Latino guy sitting near us, a VFW member, who came in at a certain point while some people were continuing to complain about Bad Bunny and Spanish and English. This gentleman sat quietly watching the game and had a couple of drinks. He didn’t really talk to anyone while he was at the bar, but I got his attention for a moment when the game started back up and one of the crowd was continuing to complain loudly about Bad Bunny while standing in front of one of the TVs blocking the view. When I was a teenager I worked at a shoe store with a Puerto Rican girl and she taught me all the good Spanish rude words, so I hollered down the bar “CALLETE! LET’S WATCH FOOTBALL,” which “CALLETE!” means “SHUT UP!” and the guy said "what?" and I repeated myself. Judging from his facial expression, he did not appear to completely understand me, but we watched football. At the end of the game, the Latino guy got up to leave and shook my friend’s hand and shook my hand on the way out.

The Commander of the post came in and sat with us at the bar for a while. We were discussing the unusually crappy weather and digging our cars out of snowbanks and she was telling us about her wife who has limited mobility on her right side, getting a new car and all the stuff they had to get done to add mobility equipment so she could drive it. Then she talked about recruitment and how young vets stop in to the post and then are turned off by the behavior of some of the members, and it’s a real obstacle to recruiting. I brought up the Hanoi Jane targets and she said the targets really keep things a lot neater in there. At the end of the night we were encouraged to go in the kitchen and take home some food, so I got a big box of fried chicken. I didn’t hear until later that at the end of the show Bad Bunny said “God bless America.”