Super Bowl: Shock of civilisations

This year’s Super Bowl has a symbolic dimension. The two teams which will be playing for supreme prize incarnate two contrasting visions of the US:

• Pittsburgh is a traditional industrial city, built on steel. It is a tough blue-collar town where people drink beer and play rough
• Seattle is a quintessential new age place. This is where Microsoft has its headquarters and Paul Allen, the owner of Seahawks, is a Microsoft co-founder (and second largest shareholder after Bill Gates). The new economy is so dominant that the old mainstay of Seattle, Boeing, packed up and moved its headquarters to a more congenial environment of Chicago. And people in Seatlle drink cappuccinos and lattes: Starbucks is another well-know brand, which was created there.

For people like me, this shock creates a dilemma. I always liked Steelers, precisely because of their brand consistency: they are what they are supposed to be: physical, with dominant defense and occasional daring. They are also consistent and loyal: the same family still owns the franchise and in their history there were only two coaches.

But how can a new economy zealot root for Pittsburgh? After a second thought, it is not too difficult: I am not a great fan of Microsoft (I still have not figures out where the billions of R&D the company supposedly spends every year is going). And right now, Microsoft appears more and more like a dinosaur from a prehistorical (read pre-Internet) era of the New Economy.

So, while the economic logic and the strength of numbers may be in favour of Seattle, I am sticking with Pittsburgh.