“After that, Obama just blew it, then?”

“Hardly,” Simon said. “Wasn’t given much of a chance. Oh, he pulled the best and brightest together; set about to restore credibility in the world community; worked his new Congressional majority; leveled with the American people. All the furniture was in place pretty quickly, but the criticism began almost before he took the oath.”

“Criticism? From whom?”

“Unlike post-Clinton, after the bailouts finance and industry could absorb only so many pink-slipped neo-cons, especially with the feds overseeing them. Public service was out and academia never paid well for them outside of development, so the best remaining option for them was media. A half dozen multinational corporations owned every means of public expression. Alliances with liked-minded owners and managers were already strong, after all, so it was a short step to the largest disinformation campaign ever undertaken. Everything President Obama did or attempted to do was subtly distorted and filtered through lenses of race, or inexperience, or ineptitude. Simultaneously, Governor Palin –“

“She ran against Obama with McCain, right?”

“Last, desperate gasp of white male patriarchy.” Antoinette snorted. “Two dozen years after Geraldine Ferraro was nominated they threw up an inexperienced, ill-prepared Alaska woman against an intelligent Black man. Most cynical stunt in American political history, in my opinion.”

“No argument,” Noam said. As I was saying, Governor Palin was resuscitated, re-groomed, and installed as a celebrity. Through her first term and re-election in Alaska, her every move was magnified; by inference and innuendo she was everything he wasn’t. They didn’t make the same mistakes. She was cocooned, rehearsed, and schooled. Times remained tough enough that the Democrats lost some seats at the next mid-term election, and another two-year campaign was on.”

“There were glimmers of hope before the endgame,” Antoinette said. “Obama opened multilateral diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East early. Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Clinton pieced together a political solution in Iraq, with back-channel help from Syria and Iran’s Shi’ite clerics. Revived the Arab-Israeli ‘roadmap,’ for real. They were well on the way toward pacifying the Afghan frontier, to divide the Taliban and force Pakistan to disgorge bin Laden, at last, when the sniping from the right began in earnest. Palin and Grover Norquist, self-styled ‘tax patriot,’ won another close, contested election and things went downhill quickly, once the old neo-con orthodoxy was back in place.”

“You saw what happened,” said Noam. “The Palin administration reversed course, snuggled up to the Sunni oligarchs again, and resumed a hard line with Iran. In early 2014, we bombed selected targets there; they retaliated by launching several Fajr-3 MIRV missiles at Israel. One of the warheads hit their ‘secret’ nuclear weapons reactor at Dimona. Israel launched against targets all over the region. Millions perished and most of the oil fields were contaminated.”

David sighed. “Where was the rest of the world, at that point?”

“The Chinese took the initiative. They went to the U.N. first but our Security Council veto put an end to that. They quietly pulled the others together – Russia and the European Union, primarily – and agreed it was time to take the dynamite and matches away from the toddler. The economy remaining weak, the combined threats of drastic currency manipulation and foreclosure on trade and investment debt were overpowering. Essentially, Beijing played the landlord card – call it a ‘leveraged buy-out.’”

“And the administration reacted – how?”

Noam laughed. “They were happy to escape with their hides. In exchange for eventual sanctuary offshore, they agreed to a ‘show’ re-election in 2016 and full cooperation in the conversion and management schedule, between and after.”

“And no one found out?”

“As I said, the media merchants were full partners.”

“What about – the people?”

Simon raised his arms. “Who was left to tell them that anybody paid attention to? Newspapers were already on life support, so they were merged into the electronic polyglot. Fact-based journalism died and the transition from ‘infotainment’ to total entertainment was complete. There wasn’t a dime’s bit of difference among broadcast news, culture, sporting events, and those video games you used to write. Elections became hyper-extended ‘reality’ shows, brought to you by billions spent on for-profit media advertising, crowding out any sort of political discourse in between.”

David thrust his fingers into his curly hair. “I – I just can’t accept that freedom would die so – quietly.”

“To be free is to be able to choose, but what are the choices and who defines them?” Antoinette said. She jabbed an index finger into her palm, for emphasis. “If you’re constantly urged to reinforce your own assumptions, rather than challenge them by acquiring new information, and to act on impulse, are you really making free choices?”

Simon frowned. “The 21st Century American’s grasp of good citizenship was to acquire goods and debt to enrich others. ‘Consumer Confidence.’ And – in addition to their possessions obsessions – the last two generations of ‘free’ Americans had stronger allegiances to pop stars and corporate sports franchises than any concept of self-governance. They were too distracted to tell they were being lied to, while they still could.”