I can’t shake the feeling that we’re being set up. Set up for something bad. I mean, I know they’re trying to keep us in a state of high tension and anxiety, but I think it’s about to move even beyond that.

First off is that thing where they were talking about post-poning the elections if there’s a terrorist threat. Then they of course trotted out a terrorist threat which was linked to the election. Now there’s this big barrage of different non-specific threats for New York City. And of course the Republican National Convention is soon to occur in NYC. And supposedly they are gonna have the RNC on prime-time major networks. So everyone’s eyes are going to be on whatever happens there. All the mechanisms of media will already be arrayed.

A variety of things could go down. (1) It could be like the DNC in Boston, where people protest, but they basically don’t get any coverage. And nothing really exciting at all happens, and everybody forgets about it. But that’s not really the Republican’s style. (2) Since it’s NYC & the Republicans this time, its likely that protests will be much more visible and vocal, and we may see a bit of coverage, and we’ll probably see a fair amount of arrests. Personally, if I were an unelected President who was ruling through fear and subterfuge though, I would make this go even a step beyond that. (3) I would, as aspiring Dictator-for-Life, actually hope for rioting, violence and civil unrest against me and my party of intergalactic zombies. But if those pesky protestors decided they thought peaceable solutions were better, then, I might even go so far as to have some of my undercover operatives go out, and pretend to be protestors, but actually have them incite and begin the violence. That way, I could make an enormously valuable point about fear, and control by doing something drastic like invoking martial law in the city. (4) The other thing of course, is that we could just let a couple “real” (and by real I mean brown-skinned) terrorists slip through and so something nasty. But that would just be repeating ourselves. I think that we, as evil ruling regime have much more to gain by being able to prove that terrorists can also come in the shape of white college kids, and hippies, and anyone who is anti-government or else anti-bullshit. Then we can drive a huge paranoid schizophrenic wedge right down the center of America. A classic divide and conquer maneuver. Plus, we could test out a bunch of our super fun PATRIOT Act laws, and fill up our super fun illegal concentration camps, like Guantanamo Bay, and others which I’ve heard rumours of existing.

Hopefully I’m really dead wrong in this line of imagining. I mean, I really and truly hope that I am. But according to the writer and also the movie-goer in me, that would be the sort of plot-twist that I would expect to have happen at this time in the story. But this administration is always one step ahead - or to the side - of what I’m expecting. Usually, I feel like I underestimate their dementia, and their ability to escape being tarnished by anything they do wrong. It’s really an exquisitely scary guessing game, but also kind of exciting, at the same time. They’re at least keeping me on my toes.