Getting Away With It

There’s a streamlined aspect to authoritarianism that’s very appealing to the modern American citizen,” said the director of the University of Chicago’s Sociology department Ellen Ornelas, who went on to explain that time-consuming citizen obligations like jury duty would be made obsolete by totalitarian statehood, which summarily convicts offenders without a trial of their peers. “It’s a comparatively freeing model of civic engagement that requires nothing more than unquestioning obedience to a strong, charismatic leader with an ironclad vision for the future, and today’s U.S. population thinks it’s a style of government they could get behind.

Pretend, if you must, that we live in a representative democracy, but the reality is that the planet is controlled by the makers of money and the makers of taste, and The Onion is both.

The Onion has had its fair share of political enemies in the past, but rest assured few have survived to tell the tale.

A comprehensive and groundbreaking new report released Monday by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project has found that only four users of Facebook derive pleasure of any kind from the popular social networking website.

According to the report, the remainder of the 950 million people registered with Facebook, despite using the site on a regular basis, take no joy in doing so, and in fact feel a profound sense of hopelessness and despair immediately upon logging in.

“I talked to my wife for four hours last night,” said Denver resident Charles Bain. “I got home from work, she started talking. I turned on the TV: Nothing! Nowhere to go, nothing to do but relate to her and the children!”

“AIIIIIEEEEE!!” Bain added, diving headfirst through a plate-glass window to his death.