Inventing Reality

His novels were wildly popular, they
seemed to scintillate with the kind of
bleak malice and a zeitgeist sense of loss
in emphasizing his contempt for politics
and politicians to a sizzling degree that
his readers connected with. His skill at
portraying political figures as crassly
mendacious hypocrites whose only
discernible interest was achieving their
goals of power, prestige and opportunity
to dip their grasping fingers into the public
treasury resonated with people because his
writing style, dripping with contempt still
managed to bring a wry humour to the
matter, with little hilarious peculiarities
revealed about these power figures that
characterized them as pathetic losers
despite which they fooled all the people
all the time. People related, they howled
with rage and laughter reading his work.
At public book signings a stage would
be set up for the great man to read
passages of his latest, his voice curled
with the acid of his unconcealed anger
at the characters he drew with such notable
ease in the pages of his novels; nasty
little charlatans all. And then the strangest
thing, the very people who shared this
writer's venom for the people of power
the pretenders occupying influence and
squandering of their tax dollars witnessed
the appearance of this novelist's avatar
stepping out of the pages of his book
wildly acclaiming him as the new leader 
of the free world, voting into office the 
very embodiment of all the attributes of 
avarice, corruption and arrogance they 
deplored in the novel, and cheered on the
newly elected president. Who's laughing?