Miles skipped the Monday meeting. That was a big deal. We don’t know why, since we may hae been dozing when things fell apart with the field goal kicking late in the second quarter, Eastern Standard Time.
Splash drove the white company mini-SUV to Urgent Care after the accident, which he insists was nothing. Still, he stayed in this morning—just a couple of minor things that needed to heal.

Rocket, naturally, slept in. To help, he said.

It was observed that everyone who finally settled into their seats after the endless pre-game hysteria already looked like people who had overstayed the party.
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Kickoff apparently was competent. Most of the Boomers were asleep well before halftime—the portion of the program that had been marketed as a cultural showdown: Puerto Rican Bad Bunny versus Kid Rock’s Turning Point America–sponsored reply.

(A note to NFL programmers: A 3:30 PM kickoff on the Left Coast may sound efficient in a conference room, but it lands at 7:30 PM on the East Coast—an audience that has often been drinking since lunch.)

We assumed halftime would be the real contest. We don’t actually know, because we were woken near midnight by custodial staff and instructed to go to bed.

Later, Fox News reported 134 million viewers. Twenty-five million, they said, defected to Kid Rock once they learned the Bunny was a leftist bum—or, more precisely, once they realized that whatever he was selling, it wasn’t for them. Why the NFL chose this programming mix remains unexplained.

But the decision felt familiar.

Another institution mistaking noise for relevance. Another attempt to force the country into a symbolic argument it no longer has the energy—or the patience—to fight.

What once passed as representation has curdled into provocation. What was sold as inclusion now registers as accusation. Diversity and equity became branding exercises, then litmus tests, and finally liabilities—abstract ideas imposed from luxury boxes on an audience that just wanted a game and maybe a nap.

By the time Bad Bunny took the stage, the whole thing felt less like culture and more like bureaucratic performance art: carefully vetted, aggressively explained, and oddly contemptuous of the people paying for it.

So Vic and Melissa took responsibility for what we decided to run as the Daily—rescued from the archive of many, many days ago. It’s part of a project the Chairman once floated to Miles: assembling those old letters from a time when institutions still believed their job was to reflect the country, not instruct it.

After that, they went to the galley for breakfast.

The Korea letter will have to wait until after the hash browns—but that, increasingly, is how things work now.

© 2026 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com