The Superbowl Has Become A Genuine American Holiday, Right Up There With Thanksxmas. By Jeff Smith IT WAS JUST after New Year's Day in 1959 and I was just shy of entering my teens when I came to understand the concept of cognitive dissonance. Back in class at Mansfeld Junior High after Christmas vacation, we were comparing new jackets and sneakers--the practical plunder of the gift-giving season--and bragging about all the cool toys we got, when Mike Weinstein, whose new jacket and tennies were as nice as anyone's, remarked that he was suffering an unusually severe case of post-Christmas letdown. Like my peers I was adolescent/pubescent back then, caught in that purgatorial middle-age between boy and man. I no longer spoke my mind with the unguarded innocence of a child, and I had not yet discovered the meal-ticket of my adulthood: People will pay you money to say things that embarrass almost everyone else. So I did not say, "You're Jewish, Weinstein--you can't have post-Christmas letdown." But the thought did cross my mind. And it troubled me, for in those times many Jewish families still did not erect fir trees in their living rooms and celebrate Christmas like all the rest of us Americans, Muslims and Rosicrucians included. I was not the only American in adolescent limbo during 1959. Our entire nation was passing through the time in its life cycle when the dominant religious observance was morphing into a universal cultural phenomenon of crazed consumerism. A decade earlier the notion of a 12-year-old Jewish kid experiencing post-Christmas letdown never would have been imagined. A decade later it was accepted without question. But in 1959 something was wrong with this picture: cognitive dissonance. The parts don't go together. One sense is telling you something another sense cannot accept. And so it is today that all across the continent, Americans like me are hurting. In them old cotton fields back home they call it the blues; in the glass-walled corner offices of Manhattan high-rises they call it depression; but by these or any other name it smells like the bad breath of nachos and Budweiser. The nation is mired in the muck of post-Superbowl letdown. Superbowl Sunday is the most hyped happening on the American calendar. More even than Christmas. And I do not make a statement of this magnitude carelessly or cavalierly: I've been sitting here for 30 seconds at my keyboard thinking real hard about it. And in fact one event of greater hoorah did occur to me: the recent presidential election. But presidential elections are quadrennial affairs, whereas Superbowls happened annually. No way is there four times the hype devoted to electing the leader of the free world, than in imagining and then analyzing all the possible permutations of match-ups, coaching strategies, meteorological factors, family backgrounds and other minutiae that might affect final score of the last football game of the professional season. Except for the Pro Bowl. The point is that the Superbowl has supplanted Christmas as the number one non-denominational holiday in America. Hell, as a commercial icon it even supersedes the legendary Day After Thanksgiving. More money gets spent--in fives, 10s and 20s--on the fourth Friday in November, what retailers like to remind us is the biggest shopping day of the year, but way bigger wads of cash in the six-figure denominations is spent during the Superbowl, just to sell beer and soft drinks and high-tech tennis shoes. It's come to the point where a statistically significant portion of the Superbowl audience watches the show chiefly, if not exclusively, to see the commercials. That is remarkable. That is powerful. That is sick. But hey: Which gave you a bigger kick from Superbowl XXVIII? The shanked punt that put the winners in field position to score that unneeded insurance touchdown, with more than six minutes left in the fourth quarter? Nope. The Pepsi commercial where the kid sucks himself into the bottle. Of course. In fact, not more than three percent of you even realized that the preceding late-game scenario was manufactured entirely in my own fevered little brain. I don't even remember who played in Superbowl XXVIII and neither do you. Because, for Christ's sake, it's only a football game. It means nothing. Oh yeah? So why do women ask other women what their plans are for Superbowl Sunday? Are they all gym teachers with short fingernails, sensible shoes and leathery skin? Uh-uh. But chances are they'll be having folks over for a party. Superbowl is as big a social situation as New Year's Eve. And how come your mom wants to know who you think is going to win the game, even though she can't remember which animals the participants are named after? Because she had a buck in a pool at the bingo hall, and stood to win a new car if the outcome was 26 to 19 in favor of those guys with the things on their helmets. And she thought that if you won all your bets she could have stopped worrying about whether you'd ever find a decent job. Why did I find myself wondering--and worrying--if my little girl Liza would be spending Superbowl Sunday with loved ones? Because she doesn't have a prescription for Prozac. And you know what they say about the holidays and the suicide rate.

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