The Potemkin Village in New Orleans

Jeff Berwick, Contributor

With this year’s Super Bowl it looks like the Powers That Be realized they could stop pretending that the Super Bowl had become anything but a chance to unite their financially, ethically, and spiritually bankrupted subjects in worship of the militaristic imperial state and into acceptance of the state's push toward complete power over their lives. The whole show has become an embarrassing parallel of the circuses of the late Roman Empire. 

Where to begin? There was the fawning praise and worship of the military as the nation's "heroes", as if these people weren't the otherwise unemployable tools of foreign aggression and dominance. Even going so far as to have an ad that stated, "Without the military, there'd be no Super Bowl"! I nearly snorted my beer out my nose on that one. 

Then there was the shameless display of kids from Sandy Hook. I guess being put on such display before the nation at the Great Games was considered a suitable way to help heal the emotional wounds of the youngins who survived the tragedy. It looked suspiciously like callous propagandizing and tear-jerking to my jaded eyes, however. You'd think that a country that gobbled up The Hunger Games books and movies in the last year would find it at least a little revolting to see children offered up for viewing like that amidst all the state propaganda and just before a form of gladiatorial combat. 

The Sandy Hook choir was joined by Jennifer Hudson, of course. Her mother, brother and nephew were killed in a shooting in 2008. I was all but expecting them to lower the corpses of her family members from the rafters as the encore.