  Despite the nice geometrical properties of higher dimensional Chern-Simons
(CS) supergravity theories these actions suffer from one major drawback,
namely, their connection with the real world. After some quick remarks on
three-dimensional gravity, we consider five-dimensional CS supergravity and
study to what extend this theory reproduces the standard low energy description
of gravitons and gauge fields. We point out that if one deforms the CS action
by changing the value of the cosmological constant by a small amount (thus
breaking the CS symmetry), propagation around AdS becomes non-trivial,
asymptotically (AdS) Schwarzschild solutions exist, and the gauge field
acquires its standard quadratic propagator.
