Reality television before World War Three.

Excerpt from The Rise and Fall of the United States (Putnam, 2037), William Shirer IV. From the chapter entitled, "The Anschluss Begins."

THE INFLUENCE OF REALITY TELEVISION

In the years before the campaign of outright territorial expansion began, entertainment had begun to play an increasingly important role in American society. The evolution of American television entertainment advanced most particularly on two fronts. The first was an increasing emphasis on a celebration of law enforcement and the military in the primetime drama genre.

As discussed in a previous chapter, this trend reached its peak in 2008, when 89 of the 93 original drama and situation comedy shows on the four networks had law enforcement themes, with ABC's CSI: Binghamton and CBS' Coast Guard Dogcatcher leading the ratings. It is perhaps fortunate that the nuclear holocaust wiped out all video record of the leading children's show from that year, a puppet vehicle called FEMA Presents Armed and Prepared?although some survivors still recall it vividly.

The second trend in American television during this time was the continual blurring of fantasy and reality, and a muddying of the lines between news and dramatic programming. The trend began innocently enough when the networks, in a cost-cutting move, produced dramas that featured ordinary people engaged in idiotic and demeaning contests of strength on faraway islands, with the participants voting one another out of the game. It progressed with shows like Extreme Makeover (2003), in which self-hating neurotics volunteered to be mutilated by plastic surgeons for the entertainment of the public.

In a parallel development, politics during this time began increasingly to resemble reality programming, in particular the elimination-survival shows. The 2003 election of the action star Arnold Schwarzenegger to the governorship of California was of particular importance as a pioneering precursor to full-blown reality political programming.

No single television show, however, was to have more influence on the terrible events to come than Extreme Fascist Makeover, launched in 2007. The appearance of this inspired piece of programming is one of the more unlikely subplots of the American tragedy. It was conceived by a onetime political dissident named Matt Taibbi, whose late conversion to the imperial cause has caused him to be judged very harshly by history; indeed, his very name would become a synonym for "traitor" in languages all across the planet. In his memoir, Why Not? Diary of a Collaborator, published shortly before his execution, he describes the origins of the idea:

I tuned into the news on CNN just after watching an old rerun of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and found myself troubled by the drab appearance of President Bush and his lieutenants as they walked through the ruins of Damascus? It occurred to me at that moment that America was a strapping fascist hunk, straining to get out but trapped in the frumpy wardrobe of a Jeffersonian democracy. And I thought to myself: "There's a tv show in this."

Through family connections, Taibbi managed to get a proposal into the hands of David Collins, an executive producer for Scout Productions, which had produced the gay-makeover show Queer Eye. Negotiations ensued, and finally Taibbi and Scout convinced the John Birch cable channel to produce a pilot with former congressman and Fox anchorman Joe Scarborough engaged as on-air talent. The first program, a "fascist makeover" of President Bush and the Oval Office, was to have far-reaching policy implications for years to come.

In the program, five fascists of various types?one Le Penite, one German Nazi, one Italian blackshirt, one Spanish Falangist and an offensive coordinator for the Nebraska Cornhuskers?"made over" the Oval Office and Bush in the areas of "fashion, grooming, food and wine, interior design and culture." In his memoir, Taibbi describes the transformation:

We took Bush away to be fitted for epaulettes? When he came back, he found that we'd painted the White House jet black and covered it with scary vines? The fence-posts around the presidential residence were adorned with human heads, which he quickly recognized, to his delight, as belonging to Democratic Congressmen. The walls on the inside were covered with his presidential portraits, while on the front lawn there was a raging bonfire fueled by portraits of his predecessors. On his desk, we'd left an executive order for the cancellation of elections? We asked him what he thought. He laughed. "This is amazing," he said. "Laura is going to love this." Then this little abashed smile came on his face, and he wiped one of his eyes. That was the money shot. The show was pretty much off and running from there.

The show was an immediate hit, and subsequent episodes featured makeovers of the U.S. Constitution, Reed College, Cuba and the Sundance Film Festival, among others. In one of the highest-rated and most rebroadcast programs in the history of American television, Extreme Fascist Makeover spent a half-hour tackling the New York Times?and ultimately, in what must seen as a humorous gesture, left it exactly as it had been.

Historians who blame the subsequent "makeover" invasions of Europe and Southeast Asia on the show are at least partly correct, though the true blame for these later wars should probably rest elsewhere. Certainly the merging of programming and policy was a drawn-out, gradual process that began long before the show's appearance, and was considerably advanced even by then, though most Americans were probably not aware of it.

It is an undeniable fact that for more than a decade before the big wars, the chief trend in all television programming was a kind of growing uniformity of the broadcast esthetic?in which all events, no matter how disparate in character, were produced in an identically saleable style loosely identified as good television. Wars were thus covered in the same splashy style as football games (complete with colorful commentary), while elections were indistinguishable from ad campaigns, and televised trials were given the same glitzy graphics and segues as police shows. As the postwar historian Fritz Werner wrote:

Throughout the later prewar period, what was successful politics was seldom not also successful television? And with the lines continually blurring between fantasy and reality on the air, and with the medium's rapacious quest for marketable new taboos to shatter, it was probably inevitable that successful television would eventually itself become successful politics. Extreme Fascist Makeover was nothing if not good television.

The fate of Taibbi is one of the more curious footnotes of the nuclear wars. Captured and castrated by Dutch guerrillas in the Californian campaign, he was for many years displayed in a cage in an Amsterdam zoo, which mistakenly identified him as late-era Bush administration propaganda chief Jonathan Franzen. When the body of the real Franzen was discovered in the arms of another male corpse in a bomb shelter on the island of Reunion, Taibbi was forced, under torture, to reveal his true identity. Victorious humanity was astounded at its good fortune in unearthing this notorious war criminal, and a sensational international show trial ensued, culminating in his public electrocution.

As he awaited sentencing, Taibbi managed to pen his memoir. Today it stands as an ultimate testament to blind careerism. Even as he faced death, he managed to write more than 200 pages detailing his failed efforts to sign actress Eliza Dushku to the show, and in the end he confessed only to having "furthered stereotypes." But history knows differently.