ITITY
Cultural Affairs Correspondent
Along the meandering midway of our abandoned
amusement park nation, we see ourselves in mass media fun-house mirrors where talk
radio hucksters spin cotton-candy conspiracies and cable news clowns reflect
imbecilic confections of fear and suspicion.
On the ramshackle county-fair carousel a
restless crowd of backward-baseball-cap rubes, meth-addled moms, and their
several-generations-removed-from-the-ability-to-reason offspring, still reach
for the brass-ring fantasy that gets further away with each creaking turn.
The sideshow pundits pitch their inbred
opinions, the frat boy ex-president paints portraits of puppies, and the
fortune teller sees a dark future of foreclosure where grifters in business
suits patiently circle like buzzards in the grey sky above.
A chainsaw sculptor turns a piece of dead
tree into a trailer-park totem, while down at the derelict arcade of bankrupt dreams
the proud tattooed-and-pierced percent desperately try what’s left of their
luck at a rigged game of chance they’ve already lost.
America, the exceptionally banal,
heck-of-a-job country you’d like to have a beer with, a raucous carnival of
corruption that refuses to fold its tent, where the lines are all long, the
rides are all rusty, and if you try to cut in, you’ll likely get shot.
