Supposedly, the New York Times appeals to Really Intelligent People who look down upon the crass things that entertain the little people about whom the wonderful Really Intelligent People care deeply. It really would be for the best, the Really Intelligent People believe, if Wal-Mart is smashed so the little people learn that they need to make better shopping choices — like those choices made by the Really Intelligent People.

What’s an editorial page to do in the coming age of depression? Why, endorse the circus side of that old Roman adage of “bread and circuses.” Timothy Egan writes that the battered Americans need the “diversion” that March Madness, a.k.a., the NCAA Division I basketball championships, provides for our weary souls:

At a time when more than 4 million Americans have lost their jobs and a wobbly nuclear Pakistan is acting like a drunk with the car keys, why should anyone care whether the Zags beat the Zips on Thursday? Or, for that matter, why should the fate of Robert Morris and Stephen F. Austin — colleges? or WASP fashion labels? — concern a country at the depth of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression?

The answer: in troubled times, more than ever, our nation turns its lonely eyes to the best national diversion we have – the annual men’s college basketball tournament. All cultures have something like this: the Irish and their hurling, the Italians and soccer, the Aztecs and ritual sacrifice.

Indeed, given the populist mood of the public that Obama and his friends at the NY Times have been stirring up against those Evil Capitalists, I would not be surprised to see something akin to the Roman spectacles complete with public executions and people who are not in favor with the state or the mobs being torn apart by wild beasts.