The Last Victim of the Culture War: Culture Itself

Reflections on the Super Bowl Halftime Show Discourse

It seems that the final victim of the culture war is culture itself.

The “debates” about Bad Bunny’s halftime show are so ridiculous that we ought to be embarrassed.

We are talking about a pop singer’s performance at the Super Bowl like it was the Council of Trent.

News flash – it wasn’t.

It was a reggaeton concert at the Super Bowl.

We have become so accustomed to politicizing everything that we cannot do simple things like watch a concert anymore.

We have turned culture into a warzone by making music and art political playing cards.

There were two Super Bowl halftime shows because the two sides of the culture war can no longer hear the same music.

Literally.

(Kid Rock performed a separate halftime show for Turning Point USA)

But beneath the silliness of this whole thing lies a deeply unsettling truth: the culture war has made us uncultured.

A cultured individual knows how to enjoy and appreciate art.

A politicized individual can only appreciate art that serves his political purpose.

Being unable to appreciate music because of the politics surrounding it is not the cultural flex that many seem to think it is.

It shows a smallness of character, an inability to understand the depth and breadth of human experience.

But the opposite is also true.

Fawning over a performance simply because of the identity of the artist is no more cultured than rejecting the artist because of their identity.

The people who mock the right for rejecting Bad Bunny are the same people who reject Israeli artists and boycott their work.

They are two sides of the same coin. Both have traded culture for politics; both lack respect for art and culture.

The politicization of art reflects a deeper spiritual crisis. Our worlds are shrinking into our political identities.

Soon, there will be nothing left but politics.

No art, no literature, no music – just the bitter fruit of our political obsessions.

But there is another way.

Instead of identity, we can focus on actions.

Identity politics has dominated American life for decades, and it has done nothing good for anybody.

Because it’s a faulty proposition.

At the end of the day, your identity doesn’t matter – it’s what you do with your identity that counts.

Individuals make things happen in the world, not identities.

Our identity-obsession has deprived us of the ability to think clearly and critically about things. It has made our world small and bitter.

But the world is big and beautiful. It’s filled with all kinds of individuals doing all kinds of wonderful things, people who are defined by what they do, not who they are.

It is time to move past the culture war, to move away from identity politics, to move towards a worldview that prioritizes individual actions over collective identities.

We live in a world of individuals, not identities.

We have lost sight of that in recent decades, but it is never too late to return.

The culture war has taken over our lives; let’s take them back.

Let’s grow out of our petty and childish identity politics and develop a more mature sense of what it means to be an individual.

Life is better when you live it for yourself.

We were all born with certain identities we can’t change.

But we can change how we act. We can change how we live and behave in this world.

Let’s judge people based on the quality of their actions and not the identities they hold.

Let’s evaluate concerts by the quality of the performance and not the politics surrounding it.

That’s the world I want to live in, and I hope you’ll join me.

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai.