I drove out to central PA to watch the Super Bowl with my father. Since my childhood, he and I spent many an hour in mutual frustration watching the Philadelphia Eagles do this or that. During the Super Bowl yesterday, he asked me what I’d been doing lately, and I mentioned an interview with Christopher Dickey and our talk about the poetry and fiction of his father, James Dickey.

Which got me to thinking about various themes of masculinity in Deliverance, (novel, not the movie), which made me wonder just what kind of manliness crisis is going on in America as depicted in several Super Bowl commercials, all of which can be seen at CBS Sports.com.

Right after the best ad of all — the “Casual Friday’s” ad — came a Dockers commercial in which a group of men are wandering in a field singing the Poxy Boggards song, “I wear no pants! I wear no pants!” with the concluding voice-over declaring, “Calling all men — it’s time to wear the pants.”

The obvious suggestion is that someone else is wearing the pants, or, worse, has taken the men’s pants and put them on (is it something to do with so many men out of work, while their wives still have jobs; or the 6:4 women-to-men ratio in college attendance?). Perhaps the implication of the commercial is that if you wear Dockers, you will always have pants because no one else wants them.

Then there was an ad for the Dodge Charger titled “Man’s Last Stand.” The commercial depicts exhausted-looking, exasperated men staring into the camera, not speaking, while voice-over narration describes their bedraggled  lives, summed up thusly: “I eat and do what she tells me to do and eat, and I work all day at a job that kills me and I come home and watch the stupid shows she wants to watch and keep my mouth shut and because I do all that this is the car I drive.” Vvvvrrrrooooooommm.

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