In recent years, Americans have known what to expect from our Neronian Super Bowl halftime shows.
Mediocre music is veneered over with gaudy, flashily lit, but ultimately empty and meaningless sets.
The usual array of supporting dancers twerk and simulate intercourse, in sync with the main singer periodically grabbing his/her genitals – apparently to highlight the explicit sexual allusions of the mostly nonsensical lyrics.
All this Roman orgiastic ritual is designed by the NFL each year somehow to appeal to American families of all ages as they gather together around the living room TV on their festive cultural holiday.
But the script has now grown predictable and boring. This year's mess jumped the shark and had a force-multiplying effect on one of the most tedious Super Bowl games in history.
The decision to have Bad Bunny as the main attraction to sing solely in Spanish – 14 percent of the U.S. population is fluent in Spanish, while 90 percent is proficient in English – was apparently designed to grow the NFL's global audience, particularly in the Western Hemisphere, or perhaps to shock America to get accustomed to its new official multilingual identity.
Yet of the anticipated 60 million Americans who likely watched this flat show, over 50 million of them neither could read nor comprehend Spanish. And they had previously been insulted by Bunny to hurry up and learn Spanish before the game – or else?
How odd that America provides translations of every conceivable language in its courts, hospitals, and schools for minorities of non-English speaking residents. And yet at its annual signature sporting event, the marquee and main-event non-English speaker cannot provide translations for the vast majority of the population.
Part of the hype of Bad Bunny's appearance was his supposedly edgy decision to perform entirely in Spanish! But was that really so avant-garde?
What would have been far more against-the-grain and bold for Bad Bunny would have been to find some way to reconnect with the millions of disenchanted families who simply wish a hiatus from the now-scripted and monotonous Super Bowl raunchy bacchanalias.
Most in the stadium had no idea what Bad Bunny was singing about, if we can call his rapid-fire talking and mumbling true music.
Fortunately for Bad Bunny, that language barrier proved about the only good thing of the entire Sunday disaster.
Most of Bad Bunny's lyrics were raunchy and demented, and likely out-Epsteined the imagination of the late Jeffrey Epstein. In his obscene "Safaera," Bunny describes the various joys of exploitative sodomy, fellatio, and anilingus, with the typical rap misogynistic trashing of his compliant female sexual partners as "hoes."
(Do woke intersectional feminists weigh in on the side of Bunny's DEI credentials and sexual fluidity, or do they bristle at Bunny's "objectification" of women, as he reduces them to mere mindless receptacles of violent and toxic masculinity?)
Were Bunny's purposes to shock America, then he should have sung his "Safaera" in English, ensuring that his listeners were forced to hear and react to his sick adolescent riffs on breasts, bottoms, phalluses and vaginas.
Bunny had been previously instructed not to repeat his prior performance-art trashing of ICE, and to keep his politicking subtle and coded.
Translated, that meant the NFL had greenlit his sick obscenities as long as they were relegated to a Spanish-speaking audience only. But he was not to alienate over half of the NFL's viewership, who not long ago had voted to stop illegal immigration and millions crashing the border.
He mostly complied, albeit with empty platitudes about hate and love, and reducing the American flag to the similar status of the other South and Central American states.
Ricky Martin chimed in with his own incoherent Spanish-language harangue about the American rape of paradise in Hawaii ("They want to take my river and my beach too/They want my neighborhood and grandma to leave").
A writer for the now-defunct sports section of the Washington Post had earlier and ludicrously boasted that the mostly forgotten Colin Kaepernick – the Dylan Mulvaney of the NFL – would be the most relevant figure at the 2026 Super Bowl.
Perhaps he was, if the writer meant "relevant" by the narcissistic Kaepernick's popularizing the racialist taking-the-knee during the National Anthem that likely reduced NFL viewership by 25 percent in 2016-2017.
In sum, same old, same old Super Bowl Satyricon.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of "The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won," from Basic Books. You can reach him by emailing authorvdh@gmail.com.