Bad Bunny and falling iguanas this weekend

Halftime choices are a U.S. citizen or guy who rhymes 'statutory' and 'mandatory'

Here comes the classic old-fashioned, red-blooded, apple-pie chomping, pinnacle of American culture: laugh-tracked videos of frozen iguanas falling out of Florida trees.

Right - it’s that season again. If those iguanas weren’t Republicans, they’d move to California, where it was 70 degrees Wednesday, forcing my own large lizard to take many leisurely, non-frozen naps.

Also happening this weekend is the Super Bowl, where men literally try to kill each other while viewers sit on their asses, forcing nachos and beer down their windpipes until they’re drunk and passed out on someone’s furniture with molten cheese smeared around their mouths.

That was a run-on sentence, which seems appropriate for a run-on day of gluttony, screaming, bloated nationalism, more gluttony, and a nap.

But this year is apparently different, as an interloper named after a naughty mammal is bringing his dangerous ways to infiltrate American culture and lead our children astray.

His threatening and ominous name? Bad Bunny, a name he took from a childhood photo in which he was dressed up as a bunny.

A terrorist bunny, no doubt.

Before getting into the very real threat of a foreign (he’s a U.S. citizen) performer playing the halftime show for the first time (there’s been 13), I’ll remind you it’s supposed to be about football. It used to be (get off my lawn) but Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston and TV execs, music execs and money-grubbing, attention hogs at the NFL ruined everything.

By the way, Houston lip-synched. But she sold it, which is what the Super Bowl is now all about.

So now, in this age of taking sides, hiding behind screens and the all-caps button, football has become political again with outrage in the ICE age over a bilingual brown man from Puerto Rico performing at halftime.

Right wingers are staging their own silly halftime show on another channel, featuring such upstanding Americans as Kid Rock, who sings songs in which the protagonist seems to like underage girls and even rhymes “statutory” with “mandatory.”

Yeah … that computes. I guess Ted Nugent wasn’t available to sing about teenage poontang.

Hey - his words, not mine. I’m a father and used to be in bands. I’d eat my own face before I’d let my daughters near musicians.

A decade or so ago, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee in remembrance of how this country has treated African-Americans (slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, police brutality, but hey … just forget about it and let’s move on!) and somehow, instead of empathizing and understanding how a Black man might feel such feelings and exercise his First Amendment right, people took offense. Because we’re terrified of other humans going against the grain, are defensive of our own feelings and in some cases our race, and need to define ourselves by what we criticize.

Kaepernick’s protests ended his career, because so many Americans thought it was disrespectful and unnecessary and pro football owners are cowards.

By the way, just hours before this writing, the President of the United States posted a video on social media portraying the nation’s first Black president and his wife as apes, using a tired old racist image in dehumanizing and insulting them to appeal to his fan base. Which says a lot about his fan base.

Maybe we’re not quite past that racism thing.

So here comes the next tsunami of unnecessary outrage. I’m not familiar with Bad Bunny’s music (because I’m too busy listening to Mr. Mister)

which matters not a bit because I usually make a sandwich and look for liberal iguanas in our trees during halftime.

The halftime show is a publicity boon to performers, who generally need to be a big deal to score the gig. But it’s rarely inspiring and usually just an excuse for people to play social media music critic the next day.

The racists immediately jumped on Bad Bunny because he’s from Puerto Rico and they didn’t go to school long enough to get to the part where Puerto Rico is U.S. territory and its people are citizens.

What’s so terrifying about Bad Bunny? He’s extremely popular and wins Grammys. He also advocates for the rights of Latin people and criticizes Donald Trump. He kept a recent tour away from the continental U.S. because he feared ICE would show up and start trouble with his brown-skinned fans. He’s literally showing love for his fans by losing money in not giving ICE an opportunity to round up more people. Which makes him a good guy in my book.

Trumpers are also terrified Mr. Bunny will sing in Spanish, so they’re opting for Kid Rock, who makes sure to sing in English when he sings about how fun statutory rape is, so all the people who used to be afraid of pedophilia sex rings in Hollywood can understand the lyrics.

You try figuring it out. My head hurts.

I’ll be signing books - probably in English - at Barnes and Noble in Walnut Creek from 2 to 4 p.m. on Feb. 28. The store is at 1192 Locust Street.

My daughters have a dad to feed, so please consider paying $8 a month to read these columns. Find more senseless babble in Tony’s book “Lying Drunk,” available from Barnes & Noble at https://bit.ly/46xoaJJ or Amazon at https://a.co/d/cYNCUPp).