If you think the Super Bowl is about football, you’d make a lousy anthropologist. This is America’s premier cultural event, a festival of music, patriotism, costumes, hero worship, consumption and masculinity - a national celebration of our values - all of which is fascinating to cultural critics, as Kuyperians across this campus strive to be. Revealing cultural moments were plentiful last Super Sunday.

5:55 p.m.: Any notion that what is about to take place is merely a football game disappears as a somber narrator intones in the opening, “It is a celebration of precision, the will to win, of brilliant leadership and of ultimate redemption. It is a celebration of the legend that is victory. And most of all, it is an American celebration.”

6:11: With a giant American flag and the word “America” spelled out over the field with red, white, and blue banners, the loudspeaker announces the tenth anniversary of Desert Storm and introduces “a true American hero,” General Norman Schwarzkopf. In a moment that is quintessentially American, Schwarzkopf marches onto the field as the Backstreet Boys sing the national anthem.

6:33: As the game gets going, there are two notable absences - offense by either team, and macho talk from the announcers, such as “give it 110 percent” and “just go out there and execute.”

It helps that the color man is Phil Simms, a former quarterback who spends more time analyzing the strategy of the game than the manhood of the players. In addition to many useful insights, though, he informs us that the Giants need to “call plays that give you a better chance to succeed.”

6:35: Soon after kickoff, the real event gets underway - the commercials. Advertisers spend over two million dollars for 29 seconds of ad time during the game. Some of the best-spent money is E-Trade’s dot-com ghost town commercial, in which the monkey from the company’s ads last year rides through a deserted landscape of defunct Internet startups – sending the message that after a year of the dot-bombs, E-Trade is here to stay. This is a fascinating example of commercials as cultural artifacts – the ad is an aesthetic visual record of recent American history.

7:14: CBS wastes no opportunity to plug its new version of “Survivor,” which will run after the game, combining one reality TV spectacle of physical competition with another.

One of the voluminous promos for the series shows contestants saying “It will be a battle of bitches” and “I don’t like any of these people.”

The popularity of “Survivor” has a lot to do with this glorification of self-reliance and animal-like competitive instinct.

With people from all rungs of the corporate ladder looking on, “Survivor” is a theatrical projection of our rat race psyche. Come to think of it, maybe the Super Bowl is too.

7:17: Perhaps inspired by the “Survivor” ad, announcer Simms uncorks some macho talk, trumpeting the toughness of Ravens’ running back Jamal Lewis. “He doesn’t like to run away from hits. He looks for that punishment, likes to deliver the blow to the defender and that’s why he’s such a good runner inside.”

8:01: Studio host Jim Nantz tells us the first Super Bowl featured marching bands at halftime, and, in a severe understatement, comments, “Halftime at the Super Bowl as come a long way.”

The idea of the Super Bowl as a national pageant hits home as “MTV presents” the halftime show. It opens with NSync - a group appropriately named given that the music appears to be lip-synched - before a jolting transition to the elderly Aerosmith.

8:11: The true postmodern moment comes when Britney Spears takes the lead vocals in Aerosmith’s classic “Walk This Way,” a song written when she was still in diapers. The phrase “still in diapers” does something to describe Spears’ appearance years later, as her clothing is applied sparingly.

8:51: On yet another CBS promo, Ted Danson, star of a sit-com called “Becker,” rants, “The problem with the Super Bowl is it’s just an excuse for the networks to flog their own shows. It’s blatant self-promotion!” His lines are interspersed with a frame reading: “Watch ‘Becker’ on CBS.”

The spot serves only to emphasize the tackiness of a network whose programs are so underexposed that self-promotion is more valuable than advertising dollars.

9:43: In the closing seconds, muted cheers greet the loudspeaker announce-ment of Ray Lewis as the game’s MVP. Play-by-play man Greg Gumbel, who until now has avoided Lewis’ non-football newsmaking, says simply, “What a year that caps for the middle linebacker.”

Although Lewis was convicted of obstruction of justice, not murder, in two stabbing deaths one year ago, his media lynching will prevent him from capping this American ritual with yet another patriotic tradition - going to Disney World and appearing on a Wheaties box as a Super Bowl hero.