Protest through joy

The Super Bowl halftime turns into a study of how to oppose power without a clenched fist. Green Day opened, and watching a band that old felt like watching your grandparents sing ▸ 40:57, but the main act is Bad Bunny, and the diary arrives with low expectations that the production dismantles: a set so fluid, so full of scene changes in a tiny space, that it reads as pure craft ▸ 42:10. What makes it the entry is that the craft is a delivery vehicle for protest.

The politics are woven, not shouted. He performs almost entirely in Spanish, names North, Central, and South America in turn, and the only English of the night is “God bless America,” deployed to confront rather than salute ▸ 48:01. Ricky Martin joins for the Hawaii song, which carries its own accusation: as retold on camera, the theory that the island’s fires two years back burned only the natives’ homes, not a single hotel, to clear land for tourism and displace the residents ▸ 47:00. The thesis Juan draws is clean: “con amor, con fiesta podemos hacer oposición al gobierno” ▸ 48:53.

con amor y fiesta se puede protestar →

The proof of impact is the target’s own reaction. Trump had announced he wouldn’t watch a Bad Bunny halftime, then posted minutes after it ended, meaning he watched, calling it absolutely terrible, one of the worst ever, “a slap in the face of our country” that doesn’t represent American excellence ▸ 44:42. The joke writes itself: the show he called the worst became, reportedly, the most-watched halftime in history at some 130 million viewers ▸ 45:33. A protest that makes the powerful furious enough to review it in real time has already been received…