Punditville on the Potomac

Dear George,

My, how the Beltway has changed. What was once the august capital of a democratic republic is now a Never-Never Land where little boys refuse to grow up and are given free rein to indulge their fantasies of altruistic depravity.

By rights, we should rename Washington D.C. Punditville, because that it is where your minions float their balloons of fetid gas which our pundits keep afloat with the hot air of their pundification. The balloons are gaily colored, resplendent with flashing neon lights and dancing screens upon which dour-faced anchors shill the threat of the day while reassuring passengers that the ship of state is sound even as it lists sharply to starboard.

It is there that the melodramatic fables are spun that reduced the complexities of the world to a Hollywood “B” western in which the hero’s hat never falls off, no matter how violent the fist fight.

But Punditville is more than just a town. Buddhists speak of Indra’s net, which one commentator describes as:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number…If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring (emphasis mine).

Punditville is like that, but instead of jewels, in each eye of the net is hung a polished turd culled from the daily output of bullshit that flows from its back alleys and cloakrooms, and in each turd can be seen the reflection of all the other turds in this encapsulated universe of make believe.

To believe in nothing is the ultimate utopian act. Life becomes a blank slate upon which can be written the madness of the now in which letters shift and slide, forming and reforming themselves as dreams dies and bubbles pop, giving rise to new dreams and new bubbles as insubstantial as the ones that preceded them, and words become the building blocks of a fortress behind which we curl into our fetal balls of isolation, safe and secure in our fear and anxiety.

God, I love it!

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones