A friend on Facebook declared: “if you want to know everything wrong in the world, all you have to do is watch the stupid bowl.” Written during the course of the great event, I missed the comment in real time, as I missed the game. But I suspect she is right. And for this reason, I generally stay away, though with some ambivalence.

As a good American boy, I enjoyed playing the game and watching, and the memories of pleasures past linger (including watching games, in the less distant past, with my son, who was without my provocation a fan). Yet, football is more and more clearly brutal, with its special cult of violence becoming increasingly problematic. And the Super Bowl is not just another game; it has specific repulsive dressing. The ads are a spectacle of consumerism and all I hate about capitalism. Even though I begrudgingly offer capitalism two cheers, seeing no practical alternative in our world, I see no reason to see virtue in necessity, and it is off putting to celebrate. Super Bowl Sunday is a media event from which I abstain.

Last night, I followed my Super Bowl tradition, and went to the movies. I finally pushed myself to go see Zero Dark Thirty, with less than ten other people in the audience. I very reluctantly went. Following the debates about the film, I didn’t want to support a work that apparently credited torture for the killing of Osama bin Laden. I expected to be repulsed, not by the gratuitous violence of the film  (in football’s spirit). It was the violence of the message that concerned me. Proponents of torture applauded this Hollywood production as the exception that proves the rule of Hollywood’s liberal bias. Opponents of the use of “enhanced interrogation” denounced the film. And esthetes of various sorts, including the film’s director, claimed that as a work of art, one based on our very recent past, Zero Dark Thirty is intentionally without a clear political message, depicting the facts, opening discussion. I decided to decide for myself, and what better day to do so than the day of the “stupid bowl.”

To my surprise, my first impression was that the film isn’t nearly as objectionable as I had expected. Zero Dark Thirty is a successful Hollywood flick, flawed by political and moral mixed messages. Using the language of Malgorzata Bakalarz, it was presented as an important film and a work of art, but seemed to be, rather, an entertaining unimportant movie, which despite itself poses serious and important problems.

The film is gripping. Torture, the tortured and, especially, the torturers are immediately revealed, all properly repulsive. Knowing the end of the story heightens rather than reduces the drama, as one feels and doesn’t only view the advanced military maneuver, the attack on Bin Laden’s hideout. The unlikely hero, a young, petite, obsessed, female intelligence officer, attractively dominates the screen, alongside of her CIA superiors and the super macho Navy Seals of the successful operation. All, strikingly, offered her the proper deference in the end. This, along with the killing of Osama, provided for the required Hollywood happy ending.

Yet, the moral and political problems of this entertainment are very real. It is pretty clear that both torture and more acceptable forms of interrogation were used by the CIA and military intelligence in the pursuit of bin Laden. It is a matter of debate which was more important. Although the film doesn’t take a stand on this issue, it is notable that the story moves from torture to the capture and killing of bin Laden. Non-violent forms of interrogation are hardly noticeable. I think because torture makes for good pictures, while the more conventional and acceptable questioning of subjects doesn’t film as well or as easily, the film seems to argue, even when it doesn’t explicitly, that torture was a necessary evil, this, despite the fact that the evil was portrayed.

Our attractive hero observed and condoned torture, and even actively tortured. The normalization of this, its presentation without criticism is disturbing. I fear that this will become a dominant story line. A problem with film as the popular democratic form of telling history is that it has a way of becoming definitive.

On second thought maybe the Super Bowl would have been more benign thing to do yesterday. And perhaps there is a connection between American reading of our recent past and the collective ritual that is Super Bowl Sunday. As H. Rap Brown, the radical black nationalist in the sixties, once said, “violence is as American as cherry pie.”

Over the past week, big changes have occurred in the little virtual world of Deliberately Considered. We have put up a changed format that has been on the drawing boards for months. You will note that while now the text of only the most recent post is to be found on the home page, the titles and images of many more posts can be viewed and easily accessed. We have been thinking about doing this for quite some time, but rushed this week to get it going in response to events just south of my New School office in lower Manhattan, in Zuccotti Park and its neighborhood. We are part of the neighborhood and seek to have neighborly discussions.

The new format provides easier access to more of the unfolding reports, analyses and debates on our site, and allows us to bring forward posts past that continue to address pressing problems, particularly in the editors picks.  And most important now, it will permit us to highlight more intensive investigations of pressing political issues, hoping to inform debate about those issues. Thus, now you will find the continuing posts on Occupy Wall Street.

Elzbieta Matynia and I find the occupation movement to be of great interest. For her, it is a case where her ideas of performative democracy apply. For me, the occupation is a clear case of the power of the politics of small things. We proposed and are now coordinating the Flying Seminar with our intellectual interests  and our previous work together on the Democracy Seminar in East and Central Europe and beyond in mind. As we have already reported, it is off to a quick and extraordinary start. Occupy Wall Street and Shiroto no Ran on Tuesday, Adam Michnik on Saturday. And Deliberately Considered now has a space for the announcement of upcoming sessions of the seminar, for reports on the seminar sessions, including videos of the events, and for what I hope will be sustained ongoing discussions about the issues discussed in the seminar.

And please note how the everyday posting will quite often inform the discussions in the Flying Seminar and, I hope, the discussions and debates in various groups in OWS. This week, in addition to the posts that have directly related to the occupation, Malgorzata Bakalarz reflected on the problem of curatorial practice as it attempts to address large public issues, in her case what she calls nine-elevenism. How we remember 9/11 is key to how a social movement in lower Manhattan is understood. The need to “re-remember” (as Toni Morrison put it in Beloved) the attack of September 11^th may be one of the reasons why OWS is so powerful. Malgo is dissatisfied with how an art exhibition dealt with the problem. I sometimes think that the greatest significance of OWS is that it is a much more successful exhibition. And Anette Baldauf thought about her film on the tragedy of Victor Gruen, a progressive architect and urban planner who designed the shopping mall. He hoped to “combine commercial and civic spaces and counter the a-geography of the suburbscape with a cultural and social center” and instead he “integrated living into shopping.” As she walked downtown through Soho, an art center turned urban shopping mall, on her way to visit the occupation, she imagined the city where this tragedy is overturned, where “people come before profit.”

Deliberately Considered is still a place for informed reflection on the events of the day. Now, I hope, we are moving in the direction where we can deepen the reflection and get closer to the events.