The Illusion of Leadership

Dear George,

Make believe is America’s unique dynamic. It spawns prosperity and empire, because all power is grounded in fantasy; we always think our balls are bigger than they are, until somebody cuts them off.

Our greatest strength is the fantasy born of a delusory belief in entitlement. We are born; therefore we are entitled to love, happiness and power, any one of which will transport us to an eternal euphoria in which life will be a Technicolor symphony, played out to the sonorous moan of the strings and the triumphant blare of the brass.

The wise leader encourages the dream. He encourages the masses to believe in the eternal dawn, in the sun streaming through a break in the clouds, in the primacy of beauty, truth, justice and the operative ideology of the day. He sings of the happy ending that is eternally just around the corner.

All oppression is born of attempts to make the dream real. It makes no difference whether it is the oppression from within, born of narrowing one’s vision to an obsessive quest for “happiness”, or the oppression imposed from above by those who would force society to “live” the dream.

To dream is to court disillusionment, which is the core of our prosperity. The shards of a shattered naiveté become the embers of a glowing discontent that sends the ego bouncing and careening from station to station on a mad pilgrimage that embraces the illusive, which glows briefly before turning to dust. And at each station, they buy and buy and buy!

When you were in office, you were our role model. The fantasies you spun before the camera legitimized illusion. Your failure to embrace reality shored up the American spirit. Your personified all that is American in your role as the cowboy who never was in a West that never was.

God, how I miss you!

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones