Kryptosam

What I've been feeling is not outrage fatigue but post-outrage fatigue. Jerry's just posted about domestic spying. The Abramoff scandal may take down more than half of the GOP congressional leadership, the British opposition party may act like an opposition party and challenge Blair's complicity in pre-war lying, and Bushco has stolen Democratic plans for troop withdrawal from Iraq and claimed it as their own while simultaneously bashing Democrats as unpatriotic cowards.

Yawn. I'm feeling like I'm no longer a Slothrop worth studying by the scientists at the White Visitation.And what I fear is that when the crucial moment to decode the secret message comes I'll not be excited enough at the outrages to produce the agent that reveals the kryptosam. One side effect of total exposure to total stimulation is the devaluation of that stimulation. What's that, the vice president drinks virgin blood of tortured albino bunnies? I'll hear worse next week. Just don't ask me for a hardon.

I'm sure that this isn't a Bushco strategy, brilliantly planned and executed, but it IS, if not a strategy, a foreseen and time-tested symptom of consumerism-ism, part and parcel of our indoctrination and subordination as pay-for-play citizenship. As our tolerance builds, more stimulation is needed just to keep us docile and even more stimulation needed to keep us jonesing.

Which is why the idiocies and dishonesties and immoralities of Bushco, seemingly crucial in their own mendacious ways, serve purposes greater than the political fortunes of the United States or even, in his own mind, the legacy of dWarf. There's something happening, or about to happen, in the realm beyond paltry nationalistic interests. Power is more transnational, post-national, than ever before, but the goal of power, in whatever configuration those currently holding it use, is to render its subjects impotent. If we're impotent, we won't be able to read the kryptosam.