The US not an eternal Rome but as the media would have it - a Purgatory in an eternal present tense.

Incarceration-crazy USA once assumed  allegorical and oracular proportions. A quarter of  a century ago, everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Umberto Eco scanned it as a sort of crystal ball in which the future could be seen; it could have been likened as  Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, but now post Trunp
the media play it out as a Ship of Fools, not as the eternal city of Rome but as  Purgatory, in an eternal present tense.