In 2000, the US, a nation founded upon the principle of revolution against political (or rather economic) despotism, experienced a common enough event -- one that should otherwise not be so shocking except for the grotesque wishfulness that sustains the lie of American "republicanism" (why is it, after all, that in the US the terms "Republican" and "Democrat" are posed as adversarial?). That is, the openly played-out usurpation of the presidential office by an unelected individual, with the aid of a section of the judiciary with a clearly defined vested interest. The lack of any constitutional validity behind this coup did not prevent the "constitution" being held up as in fact conferring an unquestionable (unassailable) authorisation upon what amounted to a series of illegal and supremely significant acts. There did not ensue a popular uprising or revolution -- the kind more often identified with the "founding fathers" as a kind of romantic mythology rather than as a legalistic precedent. Like the Rosicrucian eye of a mysterious and arbitrarily wrathful deity, the spectre of the "constitution" stared down upon the acquiescent and dissenting public alike and made collaborators of them all. Today a species of tyrant rules in the world whose creed is death to tyrants, and for this he is applauded. And in applauding him, a corrupted republic applauds itself. Wherever two or more are gathered together in a gang to worship the power afforded to the culpable. Here codework and surveillance reveal themselves as virtually synonymous terms within a matrix of rigid denomination. (The optical metaphor is itself a coded signifier, transmitting the subject's message of disavowed guilt back to it in the form of an object of negative desire. It doesn't matter that the metaphor is blind, indifferent, inert -- a type of false god. It is only necessary that it act as the focal point of some sort of conscience or alibi. And it is for this reason too that code, the mask or persona of a concealed "truth," belies a superstition of the unseen which nevertheless sees and which makes such easy work of the foolish.)