"With the extenuation of the political sphere, the president comes increasingly to resemble that Puppet of Power who is the head of primitive societies. (Clastres)
"All previous presidents pay for and continue to pay for Kennedy's murder as if they were the ones who had suppressed it–which is true phantasmatically, if not in fact. They must efface this defect and this complicity with their simulated murder. Because, now it can only be simulated. Presidents Johnson and Ford were both the object of failed assassination attempts which, if they were not staged, were at least perpetrated by simulation. The Kennedys died because they incarnated something: the political, political substance, whereas new presidents are nothing but caricatures and fake film–curiously, Johnson, Nixon, Ford all have this simian mug, the monkeys of power."
–Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981
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