Governor Phil Murphy’s revised budget address in SHI Stadium had all the dramatic resonance of Wink Martindale starring in The Hunger Games.

There’s something about the culture’s lack of an aesthetic center that COVID-19 has exploited in the worst possible way (see the Republican National Convention), rendering the pomp and circumstance of politicans’ staged events through an especially lurid lens.

Just when you think you can’t endure another zoom-style event, you get an inexplicable reenactment of the throne scene in The Phantom Menace.

In short, this revised budget address gave us yet another dreadful tour of surreality that would probably only delight the late Salvador Dali, as Steve Sweeney and Craig Coughlin perched on bar stools behind a governor who marched through the Roman encampment-like surroundings with a game show host’s sense of dislocation.

It’s not a criticism of those noble souls who attempted to “pull off” this event; only a statement about the weirdness of the hour.

“Woah, gonna take a quick time out; we’ve got a tent challenge here,” Murphy said at one point, presumably as one of the French fox hunt-syle teepees collapsed.