Why the Monday after the Super Bowl should be a national holiday
Millions of Americans are hungover today. Why don't we spare them the indignity of calling in "sick" and all just take a day to recover?
Well over 100 million people watched the Super Bowl on Sunday night, which means that, at the very least, tens of millions of people (tens of millions!) woke up Monday morning with an affliction that this writer would attempt to describe were he not suffering from it himself. Kingsley Amis expertly captured this self-induced malaise in his comic novel Lucky Jim:
Too many Americans know that feeling today. According to one study, about 6 percent of Super Bowl watchers call in "sick" the next morning, which would translate to nearly 7 million otherwise able-bodied workers. Everyone else has to suck it up and drag themselves to the office for the annual ritual of pain that must follow the annual pleasure of watching the Super Bowl. Even our bosses are sympathetic — indeed, it's the one day out of the year when you are almost forgiven for being useless. With all that in mind, many might justly wonder: What, exactly, is the point of having to work at all?
An intrepid group called 4for4.com Fantasy Football posed that very question to the White House, posting a petition calling for a national holiday on the Monday after the Super Bowl. The petition reads:
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The petition received more than 14,000 signatures. It may sound a tad extreme to make a national holiday out of football, but is it really such a stretch? The Super Bowl already has all the trappings of a patriotic super-spectacle: Miles of red-white-and-blue bunting, paeans to the troops, fighter jets screaming overhead, and the singing of not just "The Star-Spangled Banner," but "America the Beautiful" and "God Bless America." Making the following Monday a holiday would just be the cherry on top of an already indulgent affair.
Or here's an idea: Why doesn't the NFL air the Super Bowl on Saturday? Purists would object of course, and the NFL appears to have closed the door on the issue. But they should ask themselves, on this day in particular, whether any tradition is worth this.
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Ryu Spaeth is deputy editor at TheWeek.com. Follow him on Twitter.