"Ever My Own Beauty Mirrored"
(This Week in Blackness) – For 34 minutes this past Sunday, Americans sat and watched nothing happen … with ad breaks. During Superbowl XLVII, shortly after Beyoncé WERKED IT, over 100 million people watched as the power blinked out in the New Orleans Superdome. The Delay was actually rated separately from the Superbowl itself by the Nielsen Agencies, making the power outage, and only the power outage, the 4th most watched live broadcast in television history.
I was one of the estimated 107 million people who watched as CBS scrambled and the players stretched on the field. I immediately considered the significance of an outage in the same Superdome where New Orleans citizens sought shelter from the third most devastating hurricane in US history. (1). And there we were again, watching. This time, it was the biggest capitalist spectacle in America, and we can’t even keep the lights on. For all of the money spent on shiny fables to coax us into buying cars and beer and whatever the hell this is, our infrastructure continues to crumble.
This brings me to the parable of Narcissus, the story of a young man known throughout for his unbelievable hotness. He was so insanely pretty that he couldn’t bring himself to date anyone because he would have to lower his own standards to be with them. One day, the Greek goddess Nemesis saw how dickish Narcissus was and lured him to a reflective pool. There, Narcissus was so taken with his own reflection that he languished and ultimately starved himself to death.
So the next time you hear a conspiracy theory about the power outage, remember it wasn’t the illuminati or Anonymous or the 49ers themselves, it was Nemesis, pure and simple.
Dacia Mitchell | Managing Editor
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