“Carnival” today often conjures-up the worst images of Mardi Gras celebrations: drunkenness, debauchery, sequin-laced costumes, gaudy masks in diamante, etc. Unmoored from the Gospel Carnival loses its Christian origin and becomes little more than a kind of sad “last hoorah” before the severities of Lent, a Barnum and Bailey inspired revolt against the upcoming sobriety. Carnival and Mardi Gras have become in their modern forms the epitome of what Guy Debord criticizes in The Society of the Spectacle…