"God Bless America and the Anthem? And the fly-by? Could you militarize this event just a tad more?"

"And what in the name of the FSM was the point of giving us both Sam Elliott and Michael Douglas for the pregame Heroic Voiceover Brigade? And, Michael Douglas, how exactly do we link JFK's inaugural, MLK's Dream speech, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, Ali's KO of Liston in Lewiston, and this football game? A journey? More like a trip, actually. The pregame show was what Leni Riefenstahl would have done had she emigrated here as a child and gone to work for Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price."

So wrote Charles P. Pierce about the Super Bowl intro, and I almost didn't post that because I had to check the Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price reference  — is it "Mad Men"? yeah, sorry, I still don't want to watch it — not to mention the FSM reference — eh. It flicked my bloggable toggle switch and then came very close to toggling back. But I'm quoting it, really because I agree that they overdid it. Leni would have been much more insidiously subtle. But that's a good thing, right? You can defend against the ridiculously overdone. We can feel patriotic and festive in a mixed up clutter of history and pop culture, and then it's on to the football game.

The Pierce quote is embedded in this James Wolcott blog post. Wolcott is crankier than Pierce:

I had the pre-game on mute and every time I glanced up I wondered if we had declared war on Iraq or a hologram of Ronald Reagan was going to materialize on stage, raising a ruddy hand in blessing as Peggy Noonan ascended into heaven. The Super Bowl is bombastic enough without being a fanfare for World War III or IV, but who's counting? Or is it that the country requires this much self-affirmation now to reassure itself that it's still proud and virile? Maybe Stanley Fish can figure this out for us.

No link on the Stanley Fish reference, which is not something I can untangle with a Google search. I know who Stanley Fish is. I'm even in the middle of reading his new book, "How to Write a Sentence." (Check it out: I just wrote a sentence!) I'll assume Wolcott means to say something like: All those words and images require interpretation and Fish is the interpretation-meister.

But let's try to answer Wolcott's question: Does the country require this much self-affirmation now to reassure itself that it's still proud and virile?

I anticipate, instead of real answers, your snarky reframings of the question, asking whether Wolcott needs to reassure himself that he's still proud and virile. Indeed, I got the impression that his paragraph paralleled Pierce's, that he was envious of Pierce's writing prowess and trying to outmatch it. Ending with that limp Fish, he failed, which probably explains the flailing about "the county" and its imagined self-esteem problem. It's so problematic, raising the flag.

Roxanna Green said Christina was patriotic and proud to have a September 11, 2001 birthday.

"It was very special to her. She would tell people she was born on a holiday. She would always try to the see the positive in it. She said it was a holiday because it gave hope and everyone came together."

Christina Green died in the Tuscon shootings yesterday.

AND:

Christina was an A student and was interested in politics, so her mother accepted the offer by her friend Susan Hileman to take Christina to the congresswoman’s town hall meeting. John Green told the Arizona Star-News that Christina was such a good speaker, “I could have easily seen her as a politician.”

But Christina also seems to have inherited her family’s baseball genes. She was on the Little League baseball team, its only girl, her mother said.

“She was an athlete, a good dancer, a good gymnast, a good swimmer,” her mother said. “She belonged to Kids Helping Kids charity and tried to help children less fortunate.”

Christina, a slender girl with brownish blonde hair, brown eyes and a gentle smile, also sang in the choir at St. Odilia Roman Catholic Church. At home she took care of pet geckos, but loved frolicking with the dogs and cats of neighbors and friends. In the big-dreams way of children, she told her mother she wanted to be a veterinarian and study at an eastern school like New York University.

The 33 Chilean miners, who know they will be trapped below ground for months, display their living conditions to the world...

... and sing the national anthem to express their appreciation that people have the courage to go to all the trouble of rescuing them.

Think of all the miners in the past who have been trapped and were not rescued. Imagine knowing even one human being was buried alive and not making the effort — whatever the expense — to get them out.

ADDED:

"This is our casino," the miner says at one point, showing a table where the miners, he says, had made some makeshift dominoes.

It is the best thing to do, under the circumstances. In the above-ground world casinos are deliberately constructed without windows.

"There's nothing between these ears."

Another detail from yesterday's Tea Party photographs:

"God bless America, my friend."

Said by a bicyclist to a pedestrian, outside my Madison, Wisconsin window just now. He added, "You going to work?" and the pedestrian, apparently someone he knew, said "yeah." That was the entirety of the conversation.

I thought you'd like to know what people are saying in Madison this morning.

American motorcycle.

In Augusta, Kentucky,

"American owned."

A store in Kentucky.

"You've got that patriotism in ya, that people just so respect."

Says Sarah Palin to the "American Chopper" guy. And check out her sofa: