Costaguana

I am really enjoying the United States these days.  It has come more and more to resemble the sort of tawdry, ramshackle, sweaty, tumbledown, corrupt Greeneland that it was always destined to be--or that it always was but managed to hide behind a mountain of dollar-menu burger patties and tip-hazard SUVs.  Well, it sort of sucks to live in a decrepit police state, but at least it finally feels a little more like a real country: demonstrators, work stoppages, tent cities, felonious oligarchs helicoptering to-and-fro, private security firms, a hapless and yet still terrifying apparatus of state repression.  A fat cop on the edge of cardiac arrest swinging a knightstick fruitlessly at a dirty kid.  Forever.