``...Suppose that this administration did con us into war. And suppose that it is not held accountable for its deceptions, so Mr. Bush can fight what Mr. Hastings calls a "khaki election" next year. In that case, our political system has become utterly, and perhaps irrevocably, corrupted.'' Krugman
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Suppose that this administration did pretend to con the US public, and the US public pretended to be conned. Suppose that no amount of media unmasking of this farce is deemed sufficient by the public to convince them to drop their pretense of naivete. And suppose that time passes, while more and more frauds accumulate until there is nothing but fraud, pretense, and the entire polity is irreducibility transformed into a monstrous farce so riddled with deceit and pretense that it becomes utterly opaque. At some mystical point the sheer density of pretense and its unquestioned suspension of dis-belief becomes so habitual that the opaque quality of the frauds overwhelms whatever thin vale of critical reality might remain. At that point the totality of the fraud takes on a complete self-sufficiency of its own and can no longer be threatened by any concrete circumstance or material concern what so ever.
Correct me if I am wrong here, but I think we passed that point, some time back. When, I couldn't actually say. It is tempting to identify that transition with 9/11. But choosing that date would only validate the fraudulent premise that the US was a benevolent empire seeking to help an ungrateful and nasty world---some part of which evidently reacted to our benevolence with terrorist attacks.
So how far back do we go? How deep is the rat hole?
I suspect the reason that the US public seems to be so impossibly naive, is that if they reject the latest frauds, they threaten the entire system of pretend. So then what? The simulacrum begins to liquefy and melt away, leaving nothing but a very disturbing armature. And who wants to live with that?
Let's go shopping and forget it.
Chuck Grimes