Allow yer old pal Jerky to set the scene.
It is evening on Wednesday, the fifth of September, in the year 2001; a year that’s fallen so far short of the promise imagined for it, decades will likely have to pass before historians can accurately chart the gulf between the century of optimistic prophecy, and its eventual, spectacular letdown.
Washington, DC. In a White House reception hall, the unelected Boy King sips 7-Up and chomps on a bison steak, while his inexplicably disturbing wife - wrapped in an orange/pink atrocity that wouldn’t seem out of place in Timothy Leary's nightmares - pops a candy hummingbird into her mouth and smiles that vacant, vaguely pharmaceutical smile that has become her trademark.
At the windows and balconies, the Boy King’s guests gather for an extra special treat. Mexico’s President Fox and his slinky new squeeze stand close together and sway, almost imperceptibly. World's Greatest DadTM Brit Hume - the only ‘journalist’ invited to this gala event - thinks of the previous tenants and scowls sourly into his tumbler of single malt scotch, scrying scandals yet undreamt in its amber depths. Dirty Harry, himself, walks among them, looking paradoxically geriatric and buck-virile as he mingles with the lesser lights, who can hardly contain themselves. Trent Lott adjusts his toupee. Alan Greenspan keeps compulsively checking himself for a pulse, never finding one. What a stellar congregation!
Outside and overhead, the show begins. As the chosen hundred watch, there is a flash, and another - delayed thunder cracks the cool night sky. It is a spectacular pyrotechnic display - a quarter million dollars worth of fireworks! - helping the unelected Boy King and his guests celebrate his first state dinner in true post-fin-de-sciecle style.
Meanwhile, for miles around, the uninvited wonder what the hell is going on. Where is that noise coming from? And why the hell are the windows rattling? 911 is immediately jammed with calls reporting gunshots, unexplained explosions, terrorist attacks, UFOs, a fire at the White House, etc. Children, asleep for hours on this school-night, stand on their beds and peer out their windows at the symphony of fire. They wonder why nobody bothered to tell them about this. Some wonder what kind of people set off fireworks at eleven o’clock at night, in the middle of the week, without warning anybody.
Back at the White House, the kind of people who would set off fireworks at eleven o’clock at night in the middle of the week without warning anybody lick icing from their fingertips, have their drinks freshened by the help, and chuckle at each other's lame jokes while casually watching the sky. They barely pay attention, even though all this heat, light and noise has been expended for their eyes only; this temporary monument to the irrelevence of nobodies.
And why shouldn't they revel in their role as Masters of the Universe? At a time when we have so much cause to take to the streets and oil the guillotines, what do we do? We sit on our asses and stuff our fat faces and starving brains with brand-name nothingness unencumbered by nutritional, intellectual or social value of any kind. For too many reasons to list here, they've won already. The game is over. We are citizens, no longer. Now, we are subjects, and they don't mind rubbing our noses in it.
Somewhere in the swirling and beautiful eleventh dimension, where the ideal is flesh and the flesh, ideal, America clutches at a short, sharp pain in her chest, and wonders: “What the fuck was THAT?!"
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