The idea of bread and circuses. What does that mean always works in my mind. There is the idea that it was wrong to offer bread and circuses, to dupe a population by letting blood. Somehow also we just don’t really understood the blood lust and sit with the notion that it was also something bad asking people to forget the suffering of their lives by a spectacle that somehow buys their acquiescence. However the idea emerges, in the face of Sochi that there is something eventually good in the Roman model, no matter the ‘evil’, the bad which we acknowledge in Russia (anti – gay etc), we will take the pill of the games and forgive – provided nothing happens, provided the games are not interrupted. That there is no eruption of the real (gay demos with injury; bombings). Just give us the bread and circus (making money NOT giving it away as we thought bread meant – and Olympic athletes). We’ll forgive it because it makes money, fits in and maintains the system, entertains and burps us back out again into the night.