Dreams Really Can Come True

The Passion of the Pop-Tart and the spirit of 2024

Photo courtesy @PopTartsBowl

On December 28, the Kansas State Wildcats faced the North Carolina State Wolfpack in the inaugural Pop-Tarts Bowl, played at Camping World Stadium in Orlando, Florida. It was preceded that day by two other contests, the Wasabi Fenway Bowl (Boston) and the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl (Bronx, NY).

The Pop-Tarts Bowl is a new addition to a postseason landscape of dozens of matches between American college football teams, all of which are named after corporate sponsors. The outlandish idiocy of the naming conventions has become essential to their appeal, their self-advertisement. To the college football fan, the sense of amusement at something being terrible, and the inevitability of it, is, if you will, baked in.

The participating teams in these contests have their own cartoonish foam-costume representatives—in this case, Willie the Wildcat and a heteronormative lupine couple known as Mr. and Mrs. Wuf—but the games have them as well. The Pop-Tarts Bowl had, of course, an animate human-scale Pop-Tart, which it advance-promoted as “the world’s first edible mascot.” Its fate at the end of the game, an all-American rite of semi-religious torture porn, became a wild, viral success, garnering praise for the marketing geniuses who conceived it and its viral penetration into countless outlets, including this one.

The mascot’s reveal took place before kickoff, when the oversized strawberry pastry emerged with bulging eyes and a rank red mouth from a giant toaster to an ungainly medley of Taylor Swift’s “. . . Ready for It?” and “Wildest Dreams.” The unveiling was accompanied by smoke and giant sparklers rather than real fireworks, since we feel compelled to surround ourselves with images of disaster, let’s assume for apotropaic reasons. At the same time, we can’t be trusted not to actually burn everything down at any given moment.

Subsequently the tart was paraded around the stadium atop the toaster like a corrida bull.

The game played out, KS State defeating NC State by the score of 28 to 19. It was but a preamble to the postgame celebration, which launched into the realm of ritual and haruspication.

Clutching a tiny sign that resembled the one Wile E. Coyote produces from nowhere in the fleeting moment when he hovers midair having just run off a cliff in pursuit of that which he will never catch—the sign often says simply HELP—the Pop-Tart mascot stood atop the giant toaster at scaffold height and presented a message to the assembled and those watching at home: DREAMS REALLY DO COME TRUE.

It was a riddle. Was the Pop-Tart blandly endorsing, in the spirit of sports as Americans practice it, our psychotic faith in “work ethic,” the belief that if you grind your bones into dust you can achieve anything you can imagine? Or was this signboard a diagetic statement, a consent contract affirming that a Pop-Tart’s dream is to be burned alive and consumed?

“Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer played while all this was going on, which is a song about going out for the night and trying to get fucked, though you might not have ever realized it. This boomer chestnut, performed by a Black woman and emerging from the originally queer milieu of disco, has been so vitiated by white straight culture that it might as well have been written by Paul Anka. In the words of my associate Paige K. B. via private communication, “There’s no rampantly horny gesture that can’t be sublimated into family-friendly entertainment.”

As the Pop-Tart descended into the belly of the machine, waving, it tossed the sign away. Then it disappeared. Moments later it emerged prone on a slab from a slot at ground level—browned, crispy, and ready to devour. In the stadium, the PA announcer, who was offering occasional commentary on the proceedings, called out, redundantly and diabolically: “RIP in peace. Can’t wait to eat you.” Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my jam, shall have eternal life?

Though its expression had been frozen to begin with, the rictus the tart wore was now unnerving. It, he, she, they was the childsafe mass-market icon of the American drive toward self-immolation and our delusions of noble sacrifice. DREAMS REALLY DO COME TRUE, if your dream is to be ingested by a group of young men ages 18–22 charged with representing our universities in mock combat that leaves its participants, particularly its most skilled and avid ones, with lasting injuries, reduced lifespan, and frequent brain damage. The sport was permanently adjuncted to the American military complex in the years after 9/11 while exponentially increasing its status as the most popular spectator pastime in the country, nowadays mostly because you can gamble on it.

I’m a big fan of the game. I watch it every Sunday in the hours after church.

At this point, Kansas State’s most valuable player (an interesting phrasing in its own right; not “best” but possessing the most value, a formulation with dubious overtones given football’s traditional racial dynamics) and the team’s head coach plunged their hands into the Pop-Tart above the eyes—just as dead now as they were when it purported to be alive. They ripped off the first chunks of icing and goo and nibbled at them, then began tossing some to the rest of the squad, which crowded around and began peeling off pieces like enormous psoriasis flakes. The kids had a great time, clearly, but I could not find a single quote saying what they thought of the taste.

Subtext is outmoded. Things are as they appear. There was nothing ironical about the Pop-Tart festival; everything about it was perfectly clear to those on the field, in the stands, and at home watching on TV. We all experienced the same level of glee and revulsion and we all loved it. The pastry transcended its proximate function—millions of dollars in free advertising that were immediately, admiringly tabulated—and became more than a symbol of this particular contest or football in general, or of American attitudes toward food or sex or religion or violence or even the USA’s own eschaton.

In the Ordeal of the Pop-Tart lies the occult spirit of our age. Thus I give you Strawberry, portent and anima of pending year twenty twenty-four AD.