Betting, brothels and Super Bowls

America's annual Rorschach test comes to Vegas

In 2020, two months before a global pandemic was declared over Covid, I wrote an article titled “From Super Bowls to Oscars to Politics, a Week Long Celebration of US Imperium,” about Super Bowl week as a celebratory, propagandistic orgy of faux patriotic self-indulgence. The article was published in English in the US, and in Spanish in México and South America.

Here is an excerpt.

The 2020 Super Bowl in a nation that spends $1.25 trillion annually on its military, and in which 30 second TV ads cost $5 to $6 million, was awash in military pageantry to match the calibrated martial violence of the game itself. The entire star-spangled fandango, with F-35 and F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets flying overhead, is fueled by an unquestioning embrace of consumerism packaged in the idiom of pop culture and celebrity fetishism.

In the 2024 Super Bowl, the NFC champion San Francisco 49ers are competing against the AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs. Forbes projects the largest television audience in Super Bowl history.

The game is being played at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada, a city and state that are the de facto US capitals of legalized gambling and prostitution, thus completing the transformation of the nation’s premier sporting event into a lurid national Rorschach test.

As a gesture of thanks for the enormous upside in customers in the two week run up to the Super Bowl, sex workers at the famed Chicken Ranch brothel 60 miles outside of Vegas are offering a "no-holds-barred orgiastic blowout" to members of the winning NFL team.

Screenshot of Chicken Ranch website.