The nation was so utterly disengaged from its own politics that in the course of this campaign America had become a secret unto itself… All of America had gone underground living out a subterranean psychic life of which the country’s politics knew nothing.
“The real and historical world, with its mass of tensions and contradictions, has always been in crisis. But the state of catastrophe is another thing. It does not mean apocalypse, or annihilation; it means the irruption of something anomalic, which functions according to rules and forms we do not and may never understand. The situation is not simply contradictory or irrational — it is paradoxical. Beyond the end, beyond all finality, we enter a paradoxical state — the state of too much reality, too much positivity, too much information. In this state of paradox, faced with extreme phenomena, we do not know exactly what is taking place.”
Jean Baudrillard | The Vital Illusion