Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny
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Overview
In this inventive and biting satire, acclaimed novelist and cultural critic Cintra Wilson reimagines America's Manifest Destiny as helmed by Caligula, the only leader in world history capable of turning our floundering democracy into a fully functioning-and totally fun-tyranny, both here and abroad. With Caligula running the show, America will finally be able to achieve what the founding fathers really wanted, but never had the nerve to admit. Like, how to:
- Achieve the guilt-free looting of natural resources for the sake of immediate gratification;
- Declare war on abstract concepts (drugs, terror, the ocean) for the sake of imperial expansion;
- Utilize propaganda, psychological operations, and other prisoner-of-war techniques to create a sense of learned helplessness in the citizenry, gain their utterly terrified trust and obedience-and leave them begging for more;
- Rape, pillage, and loot-both here and abroad-with impunity
Wilson also traces the historical arc of Caligula's life and not-so-hard times, from his privileged childhood in Syria to his ascent to power to his eventual takedown by the hands of an angry populace, to point out the unsettling parallels between his own extravagant reign and the avariciousness of other administrations, which helped usher in a new golden age of unlimited executive power. Part political parable, part cautionary tale, Caligula for President is an ingenious and hilarious send-up of the current state of our Union by one of this generation's sharpest satirists.
"Imperial tyranny for everyone": a hilariously chilling vision of America's future, as inspired by the despotic, profligate, and callous reign of Caligula, the world's first compassionate conservative.
Cintra Wilson [is] the thinking woman's David Foster Wallace.
The Dorothy Parker of the Cyber Age.
Wilson cranks out the zingers.
Hilarious.
A blazing satirist.
- Title: Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny
- Author: C. W. Wilson
- Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
- Print Publication Date: 2010
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 256
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781608192465, 9781596915886, 1596915889, 1608192466
- Resource ID: LLS:9781608192465
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:25:37Z
Cintra Wilson is the author of the acclaimed novel Colors Insulting to Nature. She is also a pop culture pundit whose column for Salon.com and collection of essays, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease, have garnered her a cult following. An award-winning playwright and screenwriter, she has seen her work produced by Tim Robbins's Actor's Gang theater company in Los Angeles, Naked Angels in New York, and MTV, where her creation Winter Steele was a long-running segment of Liquid Television. She lives in New York City.