It is Carnival time, everyone, time to turn the rules upside-down and roast some of our sacred heifers on the pyre. One by one they are being lined up for our delectation, our bread and circus, our consolation for a world of images that increasingly doesn't match the one we are trudging through, a Real that peeps more and more through the screen.

Now A-Rod, previously Christian, before that Michael, Blago, etc. etc. More to come. Can there be a sadder and more insulting compensation for eight years of being relentlessly shat upon and fucked?

But wait, you might say. These people did shit wrong, and there is no conspiracy. They are getting what they deserve. This has no bearing on economic policy or our presence in Afganistan, or anything that really matters.

But I would argue that there is a reason these opportunities for collective punishment, for pathetic "apologies" and hara-kiri on late-night television, are so prominent in our social world of appearances. There is, in fact, a thread, a conspiracy of sorts. The conspiracy is for US to join in; it is the meager sum we are offered to keep us going. Those people who it always seemed had no business getting so much praise, so much success, so much money are now going up on crosses. They will mortify themselves for our pleasure. They will get cut back down to our debased and unrecognized level, and lower than that. Fuck 'em.

These limp celebrity burnt-offerings are skin-masks pulled over the real proprietors of power and disaster, the ones who have slipped away with nary a downcast eye or apology, the ones who have fucking destroyed the world and left us to live in it.