During a special televised edition of Washington Week, a cadre of elite commentators solemnly announced that the American populace has suffered a profound detachment from reality, evidenced primarily by the working class's entirely accurate perception that no one on television possesses the slightest interest in their survival.
The broadcast, an endeavor produced in partnership with The Atlantic and aired across the PBS network with the kind of funereal gravity one usually reserves for the final cantos of Dante's Paradiso—or, for those with more esoteric palates, the grueling fatalism of Anthony Copley's 1592 plague-pamphlet A Fig for Fortune—served as a stark reminder of the widening chasm between the commentariat and the subjects of their commentary. Staff writer Tim Alberta, adopting the weary posture of a tragic chorus, argued that the nation is mired in an "epistemological crisis," a condition wherein the American public no longer shares a lived reality with the journalistic class; an aesthetic and moral failure roughly equivalent in its devastating cultural implications to the narrative incoherence of the 2009 MTV reality series Jersey Shore, though one hardly expects the contemporary television viewer to grasp the structural similarities.
Alberta posited that the citizenry has somehow developed the unseemly habit of observing their own material conditions; he noted with palpable dismay that voters have "reached the conclusion that no one is looking out for them, that no one has their best interest in mind, that no one can be trusted." This diagnosis, delivered without a trace of irony from a brightly lit studio in the nation's capital, successfully framed the working class's entirely accurate assessment of the American political-media apparatus as a tragic cognitive defect; a mass delusion that can only be cured through a renewed subscription to prestige literary magazines.
It is a horrifying epistemological collapse when the populace rudely pierces the veil of our civic rhetoric and correctly identifies that we view them primarily as tragic abstractions to be mourned between foundation sponsorships.
The panel's post-mortem on the American experiment's upcoming 250th anniversary proceeded with a distinctly melancholic cadence; the speakers appearing genuinely baffled that their subjects, much like the forsaken agrarian peasantry of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels, have noticed the boot upon their necks and refused to politely categorize it as a structural necktie. The assembled intellectuals ultimately concluded that the crisis of truth is an insidious malady; one that threatens the very foundations of democracy by allowing ordinary people to accurately perceive that the individuals explaining the world to them on Friday evenings are, in fact, entirely insulated from the consequences of the policies they so elegantly describe.