Illusions

I cover politics. If you want an over-hyped empty spectacle devoid of meaning -- the sort of syncopated ritual that H.L. Mencken would have denounced as fit for the booboisie -- try a national political convention. At least at a Super Bowl, adults wearing funny hats are under no illusion that their bizarre headgear has any connection with electing the next Leader of the Free World.
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Authenticity matters in life -- and, for better or worse, I am stuck being the guy who hates pro football. So proudly taking the path less traveled, I intend to spend Super Bowl Sunday at the movies finally seeing "Avatar."

That will show Richard Nixon.

- Walter Shapiro

The working class, true to its sports culture aesthetic, is a spectator to politics ... politics which are so entirely imagistic as to be holograms of a process, not a process. Social realism is a television commercial for America, a simulacran republic of eagles, church spires, brave young soldiers and heroic firefighters and "freedom of choice" within the hologram. America's citizens have been reduced to Balkanized consumer units by the corporate state's culture producing machinery.

We no longer have a country -- just the hollow shell of one, a global corporation masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States.

- Joe Bageant

Maybe I introduce Sam to The Matrix tonight...

ntodd