Big C_Cal;472424 said:
1. "The main reason I watch the Superbowl is for the commercials!"
Well, you're an idiot. I admit the game is a superbore, but commercials are supposed to be when you turn the set OFF.
2. A bunch of commercials with special effects designed to appeal to the 14 year old intellect.
3. Most of the commercials were for either movies or snack foods. This country used to MAKE STUFF.
Most of our economy is now built on amusing ourselves. This is what the fall of the Roman Empire must've looked like.
PS: Can't wait till football season!:p
The Roman Empire did not fall because of people amusing themselves (which was the case for almost 800 years) or because a decline of morality (unless you believe that the pagan gods were upset by the people's conversion to that Eastern Religion -- i.e. Christianity)
Try:
1. winner take all politics where almost all of the qualified candidates were excluded from positions of power unless you were related to the current emperor thereby leading to too frequent unofficial means of regime change -- i.e assassinations.
2. Autocratic rulers who cared more about destroying real and imagined internal enemies not the foreign enemies.
3. climate changes which led to major population migrations putting pressure on the Northern borders of the empire;
4. disease which decimated the entire empire and destroyed the tax base, trade and the military at a time when barbarians were at the gates;
5. eternal war at the Eastern borders (i.e. in present day Iraq and Iran which) with a sophisticated kingdom which led in part to mutual military and financial exhaustion.