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.
“What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night.”
J. G. Ballard | The Atrocity Exhibition