APOLOGIZE, AND PROMISE TO GIVE IT AWAY.  Atlas Shrugged, from which I extracted the subject line, is fiction.  It's fiction inspired, however, by nonsense like this.

If you are still passionately following football or, worse, allowing your kid to play, you may just be an old-fashioned imperialist running dog. Not that all football fans are bloodthirsty hounds feeding off the crippled hindquarters of the dying animal of empire. Some are in a vain search for a crucible of manhood that no longer exists. Others are in pursuit of a ticket out of a dead-end life.

Whatever your reason, this is the Super Bowl to watch, even if you are among those who have made an effort to disregard the game since high school jocks shouldered you in the halls.

This is the Big One. Maybe the Last Big One. Never before have so many loose strands of an unraveling empire come together in a single event accessible to those who mourn or cheer America.

Let’s start with the conceit that this game is the only super thing we have left. Super power, super economy, super you-name-it… gone. You can beat the Bushes for that, but we’re all out of super -- except for the Super Bowl. That celebration of an all-American $9 billion industry (estimated because the National Football League has never opened its books), not to mention millions more in subsidiary and dependent businesses, offers us a national holiday that has arguably superseded Thanksgiving (thanks for what?) and Christmas (electronic excess and obsolescence).

How dare you nosh on hot wings and tortilla chips, while Egyptians are protesting, Somalis voting on secession, Australians battling floods and brush fires, and Italians envying their prime minister indulging himself with a showgirl?

If any of this sounds depressingly like real life, how could you not watch what might be the last Super Bowl, the endgame of empire, the two-minute warning before America finally beats itself?

And how dare you enjoy commercials that make light of Chinese oppression of Tibetans, or the hunting of the whales?