A NOTE FROM YOUR FUTURE DIVINELY ELECTED, SUPREME EMPEROR IN CHIEF

An Election Day Special

(Note: This is an excerpt from Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny, which I wrote in 2007. It is fucking ghastly how much of it came true. Courage, dears — American politics has been utterly terrifying for a long, long time.)

Ave!

I'm Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus— better known by my fans as Caligula. (I am called "Zeus," in the bedroom, but never mind.)

Like Rome in its third act before total collapse, twenty-first-century America seems to be in a self- destructive tailspin.

Look at yourselves.

If you're like most Americans, you are a depressed, isolated consumer. Lonely and restless, with no community efforts to dignify your time on Earth, you work too hard (if you're even employed) for meager wages toward unspecific goals you will never person- ally benefit from. Your small and hopeless life can only be dignified through the purchase of new techno- logical gadgets, "It" handbags, plasma TVs, plastic surgery and other large-ticket luxury items, on credit. You drink too much, you're addicted to porn and you're deeply, perhaps irretrievably, in debt (due to the magical fiscal thinking that you'll somehow be making exponentially more money in the future than you ever have before).

As a nation, you're burning through your natural resources and your borrowed money as if there were no tomorrow, because in some lemming-like way, you collectively fear there might not be one.

And there are people who have organized this thinking of yours, and people who have benefited greatly from your suffering.

(I confess: I'm one of them. Guilty!)

To medicate yourself away from any real awareness of your own powerlessness and/or the discomfort and anxiety it makes you feel, you engorge yourself on wild excesses of prescription drugs, fatty foods, simulated violence, and wet-brain-feverish entertainment.

In your weakness and confusion — stricken by the paralyzing fear of your own wretched impotence that both fuels your fear of terrorism and stokes your desire for a strong national paterfamilias at the head of the big table — you have allowed your executive branch of government to become perfectly, beautifully, legally imperial.

These recent corruptions are nothing new, really— au contraire. They are as old and impenetrable as a mummified nun.

My point is, America is thisssclose — right on the forty-yard line—of having a real, live, old-fashioned, dynastic totalitarian monarchy-cum-military dictatorship. And I intend to drop-kick America orgasmically through this goalpost.

I never really liked this country, but things are just 

starting to ferment enough to get interesting here. I'm feeling quite at home.

I can tell you from experience: This kind of “Armageddon cometh” behavior is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Your empire has peaked, the corruption recently tattooed in place will be very difficult to laser off— and, indeed, the next executive in charge will have no personal incentive whatsoever to erase these inherited perks and extrajudicial magic powers.

Take the doctrine of Unitary Executive Theory, for example-a fantastically obscurantist loophole- stretch so diabolically luscious it really should be renamed the Project for a New American Mussolini. This gem argues that the president possesses all the executive power and is therefore above all regulation, oversight or supervision . . . and that Congress and all other annoyances that seek to check and/or balance this new paradigm of brazen executive dictatorship can feel free, while they're down there, to shine the Holy Presidentio papal pimp-boots.

Then there's dozens of crazy-sexy-extralegal presidential directives-National Security Presidential Directives (NSPDs) and Homeland Security Presidential Directives (HSPDS) — created under insanely top-secret Cones of Silence and Veils of Mystery. Since these en- tirely lawlike bonus-extras relate to national security (because we are, after all, under a grave and constant threat of terrorist acts that will make 9/11 look like Shirley Temple doing ballet on the back of a miniature pony), about two thirds of these are so massively classified that you won't even have the foggiest idea what they are for at least twelve years, and maybe never... but you can, however, possibly be prosecuted under them.

Boy, times have really changed. When Charles I tried to pull the same stunt on his Parliament, the English wasted no time assembling an impromptu platform at the Banqueting House in Whitehall and gleefully sawing his head off. Who'd have thought that Americans would be such gutless, nippy-wipe fifi-bags about these things, com- pared to the British?

Don't tell me... I guess you're all expecting to receive this letter in the mail from your next president:

My Fellow Americans:

There are some indescribably wonderful legal implements left over from the last administration that give me a ridiculous amount of totally uncheckable executive superpowers that make me, personally, the most powerful human being on the planet. I just wanted you to know that even though you, the American people, have no sophisticated idea what these deep-dish legal documents actually say or mean, I am voluntarily taking all the sexy, power-granting parts out of them and rendering them null and void. I am so incredibly decent, I know I oughtn't trust myself with so much Godlike, abusable, consequence-free authority.

By the way, while I'm at it? I am going to give up sugar, butter, oral sodomy and Vicodin. Because it's the right thing to do.

Leading by example,

Your Loving President

Do not hold your breath next to your mailbox. There's only one hope for America to return to any kind of cleanliness and political purity: the total disgrace of a brutally insane and psychopathic dictatorship, which will finally rile enough sufficient outrage among the American populace to slice out the current body politic like a diseased gallbladder.

This job has my name on it ☺.

This is why I recently realized that I am the rightful Holy Emperor of the United States.

Here's my campaign platform:

You think it's been bad lately?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Oh, mirth. I just wet my bespoke toga.

I'm not laughing at you! I think you're adorable. It can get SO-0-0-0-0-0-0 much worse.

I pledge to remove all obscurantism and mystery from the process of leadership. No pussyfooting around the ring, no debates, no superdelegates.

I vow to kidnap my opponents and extraordinary rendition all my most visible dissidents to undisclosed CIA black-site dungeons, to serve as examples. I vow to tilt all the banks into cowering submission with my own sovereign funding arm, and I will personally terrorize all members of the Senate who oppose me with snakes, blackmail, witchcraft, extortion and other threats until they are gibbering, weepy and compliant.

Your whole "empire" has been run by rank amateurs so far. Wrought with failures of will. But I vow to abuse my authority to the fullest extent of my lavishly psychotic imperial imagination.

Resistance to my hostile takeover of the democratic process is futile. (Actually, truth be known, the whole "democratic process" thing is kind of quaint and out-dated, like the Geneva Convention, or burying Vestal Virgins alive in the Evil Fields near the Colline Gate in times of national crisis.)

My leadership is a stark inevitability.

The Caligula brand is just the topless mermaid carved on the iceberg I am about to ram into the hull of your great country.

I am major academic research perverted to meet my own needs. I am the telecomopoly that spies on you, the major network television news station and its local affiliates and newspapers that present domestic propaganda as fact, and thirty-three premium cable channels that sedate you with gunplay and tits. I am the pharmaceutical giant that sells you both illness and cure, and your self-abusing mortgage and financial service that predatorily lends to itself and then faints into the waiting arms of sovereign-wealth funds. I knit my own guns, tanks, bombs and aircraft. I am private intelligence service corporations, scads of private equity, and a saucy little escort service-cum- sushi bar on K Street. My Praetorian Guard is jacked to the stud-beams on state-of-the-art implements of mass death. My offshore assets alone are enough to ensure my rule and that of my descendants for the next four thousand years. ( I'd love to elaborate, but then we'd have to discuss certain operations that would endanger national security. In other words: I'd tell you, but then I'd have to shoot you, ha ha ha.)

And I have jails, jails, jails, jails, jails. More than enough for you and your family, and your family's families, and their future children. Forever.

I'm the new kind of corporate brand.

I have recently enslaved both Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima. I raped Betty Crocker in front of the Pillsbury Doughboy and am now using his corpse as a waterproof throw pillow in my wet sauna. Of course, I am speaking metaphorically, but that is only because I am also about to become your religion.

In summary, I make the research that makes the news that makes the wars that make the entertainment that makes the public opinion that sells the wars that dictate the votes that make the laws that sell the weapons and the drugs all over the world. Olé.

Actually, Russia, China, Exxon, Wal-Mart and the House of Saud and I all dwarf-tossed over you, and I won. Yes, I cheated.

Bow down and tremble.

Like a real, grown-up imperial leader, I have nepotism, divinity and corporate synergy on my side. You've already been trained not to resist: Your womb-to-tomb consent has already been manufactured by Madison Avenue television psychiatrists, whose bold thought- leadership ensured that you have been imprinted with 

slavish loyalties to our brands since you were six months old.

You hadn't a chance, darlings: We had you at Barbie. But there is hope: It's called total submission.

You may have some doubts about me, due to the negative buzz that has been surrounding my name for the last eighteen hundred years or so.

You might be asking yourself: What can Gaius Caligula, a blood-drunk, epileptic, sister-molesting, transvestite Sun God and sharklike Machiavellian superbrand, do for me and my fellow Americans?

More to the point: Will Caligula detain me in prison indefinitely until I am finally given pellets of angel dust and led blindfolded into RFK Stadium to fight hyenas wearing nothing but a loincloth made of ham?

You don't need to worry about that right now.

Concentrate on this: My techniques, while criminally insane, cut through a massive amount of bureaucratic red tape.

Your country is devolving from its original pretense of democracy into something as wild and new and unspoiled as the golden frontiers from which this myth sprang. The United States of America is now on the verge of becoming the launchpad for a radical and unfettered new system: the Holy American- Pluto-Monopogarchy, an über-imperial, wild-style, free-market, XX-treme-o Theo-Capitalissimus Maximus... juiced on 'roids. A Thuggo-Ecclesiastical, Oligo-Pentagonarchy-al-Olio. With an attitude. It's indescribable. Anyway, to quote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: "It's my happening, and it's freaking me out!"

Just trust me: You will obey. You want to obey. You will love obeying. Microserfs with proper unquestioning loyalty and abject servitude will achieve total buy-in.

Imperial tyranny, as history will support and any taste-making trend-spotter will tell you, is the wave of our future. And I am just the Sociopath of Divine Birth to drive it all home.

Come, my American children, into my soothing embrace of malls and multiplexes. Let the loving but stern Father of your Fatherland extend you the credit to buy the valuable prizes you deserve.

You're worth it!

In short, relax. Everything is under control, exactly as it has been in one way or another since the dawn of recordable history. You really have no idea how under control everything is.

Theme song: Jack Black

Artwork: “Humpy Dumpy,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2023