I had to leave the living room frequently over the last couple of weeks (it was beginning to look like a tart remark free-fire zone and snarkfest, mine all mine), and the weeks leading up to the last couple of weeks, and I’m gun-shy about turning on any broadcast media even now, lest I hear that taahh da-da-da-da  da-da-da-da  dum-dum-dum-dum and the stream of drivel that would follow, haloed with messages from Tim Horton’s and Molson’s, VISA, RBC, GM, McDonald’s and all the back patting and bonhomie that seems to accompany the least success in a major sporting competition. And now we’re into the post-mortem, picking over a corpse that wasn’t all that interesting in the first place.

There is also something of a sense of anticipatory dread stemming from the knowledge that the hype stream has already started for the World Cup this summer, the programs for which will barely have a chance to hit the recycling bin before we’ll hear the clarion of the trumpets signalling the barrage related to the next round of summer games.

The Russians admitted to $50 billion in expenditures for this round (check here for a point of view: who knows how real this is) . How much was spent by all those national teams in the lead-up to the actual competition, one might wonder, along with what a real reckoning of the disbursements for the Sochi installations. It would be interesting to compile a progressive equivalence list: what good could we have done with that money, material and effort were our empathic instincts less repressed?

Oh, and while we were so busy thumping our chests over our world domination in curling and hockey, the Ukraine passed from the hands of one set of oligarchs to a new/old set, Syria continues to be a warlord’s wonderland, Thailand is caught in a see-saw of interests similar to what transpired in Ukraine and the forces of evil are at work stirring things up in Venezuela. Our own deal leader went to misrepresent us in Mexico, then to sign away what last vestiges of democracy might still exist at a TPP meeting in Singapore, and his return will see the passage of an undebated Fair Elections Act that has about as much Fair as the Bush II. administration’s Clean Air Act had Clean in it. Our language is headed in the same direction as our ability to control our economic and political destiny.

Stay tuned. Or perhaps, even better, stay tuned out.