How to Be a Better Dictator: Bread and Circuses

[osprey_archer]

To the illustrious President Snow

Comments

[roseneko]

I think this may be my favorite installment yet. Especially the line where the trap springs - "They'll become complicit." Shivers. So true.

(I assume this installment takes place before the Society for Improved Dictatorship washes their hands of President Snow. :)

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, if I ever clean this up and post it on AO3, I'm definitely going to have to do something to straighten up the timeline. Right now it's alternating between real-time reactions to the books and more general thoughts about how President Snow could tighten up his control in a world where he hadn't already destroyed his own presidency.

All dictators should aim for complicity! That way, echoes of their evil will remain even if they themselves get deposed.

[asakiyume]

It’s hard to focus on even the most spectacular bloodbath at the circus when your stomach is so empty that it’s trying to eat your spleen.

... I just like the image of the stomach eating the spleen.

And roseneko is right about the "they'll become complicit," though I was shivering at "they'll get engaged," because engagement is such a hideous business buzzword these days.

[osprey_archer]

I feel a certain affection for twisting buzzwords into the most sinister possible use. I've been poking away at a letter in this where "mental health awareness" turns into a euphemism for turning in your neighbors with rebellious tendencies, because clearly rebellious tendencies are suicidal which is totally a symptom of poor mental health, am I right?

[asakiyume]

You are so absolutely right. "It's for your own good." And, as you know Bob, it actually happened like this in the Soviet Union.

[osprey_archer]

Yep! And in the antebellum south, some bright spark invented a name for the "mental illness" of slaves who wanted to run away: drapetomania. The cure: whipping and hard labor

[littlerhymes]

OF COURSE they have an expansion pack. Of course!!!!

[osprey_archer]

Almost certainly they have multiple expansion packs, mentions of which they sprinkle through their other articles to entice to dictator in. The Dictator's Reading List! Mental Health for Dictators! Sex and the Single Dictator!