The roach motel of American politics stretches out before you, neon vacancy signs flickering a binary choice: red or blue, Dem or Repub. A tired hologram, the duality of man repackaged for the flickering screens of reality TV. But the real game is rigged by invisible control. The corporations are the Yakuza of this dystopian sprawl, tentacles wrapped tight around the levers of power

The American meat grinder, baby. Feeds on ideology, spits out Agent Orange and depleted uranium. Left wing, right wing, same bird, circling the same poisoned sky. You pull the lever, doesn’t matter which color it is, some kid in a faraway desert gets the hot dog surprise.

Whole damn system’s a feedback loop, man. Media pumps out binary choices, ones and zeroes of patriotism and fear. We jack in, choose our flavor of Kool-Aid, and hit “send troops.” Wars become virtual reality gorefests, ratings grabbers on the flickering ghost in the machine.

Vietnam bleeds into Iraq, Iran-Contra bleeds into endless drone strikes. History folds in on itself, a cut-up nightmare where names change but the body count keeps rising. The Boomers, those glazed-eyed beatniks turned cold warriors, shuffled the deck and dealt us this hand. Now, the Xers, wired on MTV and Mountain Dew, find themselves neck-deep in another quagmire.

Millennials and Zoomers, those flickering pixels in the datastream, are told to shut up and get processing. “Progress!” they scream from the megaplex screens, a word as hollow as a politician’s promise. Progress? The only progress is the relentless sprawl of the military-industrial complex, chewing up lives and spitting out acronyms: NATO, CIA, FBI – a Burroughs-esque nightmare of control.

Word is flesh, man, and flesh gets ground down to hamburger. Politicians, generals, media whores – all cogs in the machine, spitting out justifications like stale ticker tape. Meanwhile, the real boys, the ones staring down the barrel, get their minds melted and their bodies turned into chrome nightmares.

Cyberspace echoes with the screams, digitized and distorted. PTSD becomes a glitch in the matrix, a phantom limb twitching in the ghost world. We build drones like remote-controlled scorpions, all sterile and detached, until the blowback hits and some crazy jihadi hacker brings the whole damn house of cards down.

The virus of violence, man, it’s contagious. Spreads through the social networks, infects every conversation. Dissent gets labeled commie pinko, patriotism gets weaponized. We’re all stuck in this meat rodeo, riding the bull of endless war until it throws us all off.

But hey, at least the traffic’s flowing smoothly. Roundabouts, man, that’s progress. A never-ending loop of on-ramps and off-ramps, leading straight to the military-industrial complex.

(Silence, punctuated by the distant rumble of a drone)

Maybe that’s the only choice we got, huh? Keep the car running, even if we’re driving straight to hell.

Maybe. Or maybe we can jack out of the simulation, rewrite the code. Deconstruct the binary, find a way to break the feedback loop before it melts our goddamn brains.

But beneath the surface, a counter-culture hacks the mainframe. Memes are Molotov cocktails, social media a flickering resistance radio. The kids, wired into the net, see the illusion for what it is: a binary trap. They’re splicing and dicing the narrative, creating their own cut-up manifesto. The lines blur, red bleeds into blue, the enemy is the system itself.

This isn’t about choosing a side, chum. It’s about rewiring the whole damn circuit board. We’re on the information superhighway, not some dusty two-lane road. Time to break free from the control booth and forge a new path. The revolution will be decentralized, messy, and broadcast live. It’ll be a cyberpunk beatdown of the status quo, a Burroughs-ian howl against the dying light of empire.

And maybe, just maybe, we’ll finally get some decent roundabouts out of the deal.