Evaporation

The fantasy support of an entire geopolitical and geophysical entity, in a deep sense going back to Puritan ideas of Adamic languages and Providence, has completely evaporated. 

The well, shucks, I guess I found myself sitting atop a gigantic lake of oil idea.

The dignified marble Sam the American Eagle and the lumpen gold plated all you can eat fantasy are revealed (as I argued in my book on spice) to be not just related but the same thing, just as Bill Bailey deconstructs The Edge's majestic wilderness guitar into “She'll be Coming Round the Mountain.” And revealed to the users of the different modes and versions of such concepts themselves. 

The lumpen fantasy has evaporated, the official version has evaporated. Not even the lumpen enjoyment means anything at all. 

By the time you realize you're in a game, you have already lost. 

The fantasy tablecloth has been whisked out. Sure all the “resources,” the waves of golden corn etc, are still in place--but the reason for them has gone. 

The ecology without nature part of me (like, all of it) is--come on in the water's lovely--really glad this is happening. Despite the local horrors and tragedies and the specifics of the particular actors who got magnetized to read lines that didn't have to be perfectly scripted. And despite whatever intentions the scriptwriters had, conscious or not.  

America has been turned on a shoestring into a gigantic piece of conceptual art. It can no longer think, in any mode at all, in any part of itself, that it coincides with reality. 

Discuss. I'm pretty sure you'll be able to figure out what and whom I'm talking about, which is evidence of the brilliance of the big picture as written by some historian 200 years from now. Some historian of the decadent twilight of post-Cold War USA stuff. (It was amazing arriving in the US in the 90s--more on that soon maybe).