A bit of ancient mytho-political theater might be of relevance to what is now stirring in disintegrating Western constitutional states.

For instance, consider the Perso-Babylonian festival of the Sacaea which, according to Berossus, was celebrated annually at Babylon. Here a prisoner who had been condemned to death replaced the king, and for his brief term of royal office bore the name of Zoganes (perhaps sagan, 'substitute' or 'deputy'). He was dressed in the king's robes, seated on the king's throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink and enjoy himself and to lie with the king's concubines. During the five days of the festival, masters and servants changed places, the servants giving orders and the masters obeying them. At the end of the five days the victim was stripped of his royal robes and scourged, and then either hanged or impaled.

Promotion of pop culture figures or fools into supposed positions of grave responsibility seems like a flaccid expression of a profound need for sacred regicide, as in the above example. There is more than meets the eye in the bond between Chavez and Ahmadinejad.

All politicans in these times are in an unusually treacherous arena. The mob's latent hunger for blood is exacerbated by an increasingly raucous and unprincipled mass media. In rich nations especially, where in the immediate future so much is going to be lost by every social class, there will be increasing upwellings of primitive desperation. Every nation will harbor an emergent civil war. During the Bush administration 'progressive' elements were too droopy to consider assassination. Not so a considerable percentage of believers who take offense at Obama one way or another.