West Wing becomes Veep. Obamessiah turns into the psychopathic janitor-in-chief. A figure like Mitt Romney – open fraud, an ambulatory non sequitur whose nonsensical emptiness is his main redeeming quality – becomes theoretically electable as Head of State and Government. The words “citizens united” come to mean “citizenship annihilated,” we wait for the economy to vote for or against itself to no known purpose, and at every crisis the mask slips away further, revealing nothing at all in the foreground, beyond it a coven of vampires (“them”) amidst a mass of zombies (“us”). To continue functioning at all, the system will have to finish discarding itself, likely to the applause of those few who even notice.
