To Chicago! There’s your revolution, there’s your doomed Ancien Régime! You can see it from the highway — faraway bonfires, columns of smoke, lean-to skyscrapers of corrugated aluminum, the weaving phantom lights, neon advertisements pitched here and there like burning heretics. All of this, what is this? Why, it’s the Chicago Imaginary Zone! Don’t look too close. Just another run of the mill, infernal, post-apocalyptic regime, left to its own devices, like the whole nation; all territory, all reality had devolved into a collection of fragments, dream-shards, frantic make-believe states hellbent on conjuring ever more unimaginable circuses of damnation. This Chicago is ruled over by a King, a so-called king dressed in robes of gold-edged newspapers; the King denounces and routinely guillotines his advisers for the capital crime of “lacking ideological imagination.” For the King declares, in speeches, poems, and aphorisms, collected in his Little Green Book: “Everything you can imagine is true, is indeed already happening. We lucky few of this last eternal city, we’ve grasped and throttled and flayed the truth of history. Francis Fukuyama was a madman! There is no end, only transformation, eternal transformation, all of which is engendered solely by the activity of one’s mind — my mind, your mind, each makes its own true world! Some men, men who lack imagination, with no talent for believing in themselves or playing pretend, will argue that this is simply false, your world is a simulacrum of the actual object, but these men are thunderously delusional, and will be cast out of the city, transformed through execution into bearers of the faith they’ve so callously thrown away! Apostates! We, the true people of this fine city, we know better! Let no man go hungry! For is he not free and always satiated, if he simply imagines his belly full of bread? If he simply wills the chains around him to unwind? The truth is, there is no chain! There is no hunger! My glorious fellow citizens, you have only to believe it, and it is so! If there is nothing in your pockets, but you believe yourself to be a millionaire, why, what conceivable difference is there in the end between you and the man with the bottomless bank account? We the people of Chicago are madly rich, in spirit, in imagination, and subsequently, cash, prosperity, decency, and power!” The King of Chicago will often invite local aldermen, small business leaders, and media personalities to his “funereal banquets,” intended to impress upon the guests the mighty scope of the King’s imagination and his absolute control over life and death: the banquet room is painted black, and all the food and drink is black, and the King and his little demonic serving boys have their skin painted black, all to better terrorize the dinner guests; this is intended as a reminder of the guests’ own mortality, as well as the King’s complete power over it. The King elaborates: Funeral colors are especially striking at meal time! Though, must be said, the King stole this idea wholesale from Emperor Domitian of Rome. “Can you imagine, can you possibly imagine, for what reason I might find it necessary, to defend the political theater of all Chicago’s great citizens, to put you yourself to death? This terrible funereal scene, don’t you see? It is merely an illustration of the breadth of my ability, to conceptualize any situation in which, to defend all of us, I might require your head to be detached from your body.”
Beyond the King’s rambling lakeshore villa there were rumbles of dissent brewing among the slums and shantytowns like flowering vines around the roots of the city. Dirty, smudged-ink pamphlets, or graffiti scrawls: declarations that the King himself is a figment of our collective imagination — and all we must do, the graffiti insisted, is wake up! Wake up, end this absurd dream! Take back rightfully what’s ours from this madman who insists chickens can talk and music is made of perfume and human skin! He’s not correct, he’s not a genius, he merely sits on the throne —- largely through accident! A king because of luck, and what is luck? Luck! Luck’s nothing but the apathetic malice of fate itself! Why imagine your belly full, my friends, when you can simply kill the king and take his bread? That’s the truth of history, echoing in our ears our whole lives! Why dream of a better life when all we have to do is kill those sons of bitches who already have everything they need, and take what they’ve already stolen?
In the coming weeks the King will be executed, a victim of the cheerfully bloodthirsty atmosphere he himself created. In his place will be a military junta run by the King’s most traitorous policemen. But it won’t belong until they devolve from revolutionaries into yet more decadent, wine-plump madmen, free just as the King was to destroy the city and rebuild it into the colosseum of their own Caligulan fantasies. Then, then someday they too will be thrown against the wall, victims of the ever-churning ideological imagination… It’s quite an interesting place, the Chicago Imaginary Zone. Though I’d only recommend it for seasoned terrorists. All others are subject to immediate schizophrenia.