“Dark night of America’s soul happening right now.” This is what I wrote on social media during the Super Bowl game last Sunday. I’m not surprised, I guess, that it didn’t elicit a single response, positive or negative.

Yes, America with all its grave deceits was well on display during the game.

The first, and foremost, was the game itself. Tackle football. All of America was watching and cheering during this spectacle, despite the fact that most of us know by now the game by its very nature is inflicting permanent brain damage on its players with almost every play. But even though the evidence is convincing and incontrovertible about this, no one in the context of that big game wanted to acknowledge it. As such, there is no lie, no deception, bigger than this one. Occasionally a late night talk show host, such as Steven Colbert, will make an offhand humorous comment on the subject, but that is the extent of it.

So, millions upon millions of Americans are complicit in this massive deception, of avidly and enthusiastically watching these athletes subjecting themselves to massively debilitating damage to their brains. How can we expect the people of this nation to insist on honesty and transparency from their elected officials when they are so complicit with this life or death matter in this way?

Then there is the sports gambling, which was plugged throughout the broadcast of the game, and the statistic that emerged from it that fully 26 percent of the American Adult population has gambled in this way on this year’s Super Bowl. And of course, the “house always wins,” which means this is a massive deception, as well, in which top celebrities have been recruited into creating a cultural environment that tempts the average Joes all over the country to spend money they, in the vast majority of cases, can’t afford to lose.

With the vast majority of us living from paycheck to paycheck, living one paycheck from the street, often desperate people are induced to risk their families’ basic wellbeing for a hopeless chimera. The old image associated with such gambling, that of the desperate dad who precedes a roll of the dice with the exclamation, “Baby needs a new pair of shoes,” is a tragic testament to the way essential needs too often do, in fact, get sacrificed through gambling.

Next, there is the way the Super Bowl also functioned as an environment for direct deception in the political process, such as the way the deceptive third party candidacy of Robert Kennedy made invaluable gains through one TV ad played to such a huge audience.

The biggest single factor that could result in the election of the fascist Trump this November stands to be the entry of a seemingly credible third party candidate into the race to draw votes away from Biden. The Super Bowl proved a massive platform for just that.

It came in the same week that the appalling language of a special prosecutor concerning President Biden, painting a highly opinionated and distorted image of the effects of his age, was matched by Trump’s delivery of incredible remarks calling for the effective dismembership of NATO in the face of Russian aggression.

There are other indicators, as well, of the wholesale deterioration of our culture that translates into an effective incapacitation of the public’s capacity for reasonable thought and decision making.

One is the effective hijacking of the Christian faith by its seriously flawed and, to use a term from that tradition, heretical, so-called “evangelical” wing, and displayed with the two highly deceptive “He’s Like Us” ads that played during the Super Bowl. The backers of these ads, which are also flooding regular programming on TV almost every day, are among the same vicious anti-”woke” enemies of women and LGBTQ+ rights.

Once again, as in the 1970s, mainstream and progressive expressions of the faith are “missing in action” in the face of this onslaught. The most rational voice is now no less than the Pope himself, but on this continent churches, synagogues and temples representing variants of a shared Abrahamic faith are being found wanting as extreme cultists, “evangelicals” and their ilk, are eating their lunch.