sotru

It's the state of the real unyan -- "sotru" -- as opposed to the SOTU cartoon the president draws every year, a week or so before, and it's called Super Bowl.

In the entrails and commercial emissions of the game, we can read the pulse and gauge the mental state of our beloved country, and the news isn't too encouraging. In one commercial, three guys -- Jim Kunstler calls them "plucky American male lumpen 'worker'" dudes -- realize they have survived the Mayan apocalypse of 2012, solely due to the rugged superiority of their Chevrolet Silverado™ pickup trucks.

Of course, the first thought that naturally occurs to anyone watching this very short (but not short enough) drama is to wonder where these plucky survivors are going to gas up in a landscape in which all technological capacity looks to have been utterly erased. It may not, however, have occurred in the minds of the creators of this terse message from a corporatocracy losing its hegemony while unconsciously prophesying its own doom.

Judged strictly as a show put on by gangs of professional gladiators-for-hire, who nominally represent one or another of the nation's largest metropolitan areas, it was skillfully rendered this year, with a cliffhanger ending and a fairly low but very close score. As a day to measure the psychological temperature of the American people through an advertising analysis, this year's super bowl was chilly. And finally, as one of those rare days I use as an excuse to eat ordinarily-forbidden foods like potato chips and hamburgers, I enjoyed pigging out, but not nearly as much as in the past.

The final score was New York 21, Boston 17, visitors 12, others 9, with Krebbs and Vronsky subbing for Horner and Johnson who were disabled by hostile proofreading.