The NFL season opening game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New England Patriots stands out in my memory for one reason: the deification of Tom Brady.
     The Patriots beat the Steelers, not a surprise.  The Steelers head coach complained of Patriot radio broadcasts in the Steelers coaches' headsets during the first half.  This complaint of audio interference in the Patriots home stadium is not new.  The Patriots have cheated in the past, it's common knowledge, or, if you're a Patriot fan, it's how the great ones deal, fuck everybody else.
     As with Deflategate, it's been wondered why such a team, strong and talented in so many ways, needs to "bend the rules."  They can't seem to resist gaining every possible advantage over opponents, and they've gotten away with so much, they know that punishment is hard to enforce against such a special organization characterized by unscrupulous winning strategies and a quarterback who looks like Achilles.
     Shifting the Greek reference to a German one, a striking advertisement aired during the game's second half.  I can't remember the corporation advertised.  Whatever it was, the ad's imagery swallowed the basic commercial intent.  We see Tom Brady working out, then another Tom Brady, and another, and another.  Multiple Tom Bradys in a square of athletic man-meat in motion.  Pulling back and back, we see more squares of Bradys working out, until the view becomes an ordered CGI mass of Tom Bradys in militaristic formations.  I've never seen anything like this, except in Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 Triumph des Willens, a propaganda film commissioned by the Nazi Party, documenting that year's Nuremberg Rally.  In Riefenstahl's film, massed formations of human beings gather before the platform where Nazi Party officials, Hitler foremost among them, make their speeches.
     Multiplying a Patriot, the night before Patriot Day (September 11), and putting him into military parade square formations, shows a new stage in twenty-first century America: put the cheater with the chiseled face in the ad showing him duplicated into a familiar mass-think ideology.  Patriots forever--get ready to march to new battlegrounds.

                                                                               Vic Neptune