Top Secret
(written in 2009)
He was shorter than Hitler and had no facial hair to speak of, but he could puff out his chest and fly into rages, and so they appointed him Leader. Elections had long since been abolished for reasons of national security, and a Leader and his cabinet members were routinely appointed by a self-perpetrating corporate board.
Before his appointment, everything including the lunch menu was classified Top Secret, but once in power he issued a decree that (because of its highly sensitive nature) only he was privy to, that it was Top Secret that everything was Top Secret. This triggered drastic repercussions.
Soon cabinet members as well as members of the corporate board were being whisked away in the dead of night by death squads from the Leader’s Top Secret private-sector army for refusing to show their files to investigating committees of a titular congress, declaring them Top Secret: in so doing, they violated the Leader’s Top Secret decree that it was Top Secret that everything was Top Secret.
The Leader, short and hairless though he was, was no fool. With a single decree he’d abolished government, broken the back of corporate power, and become supreme ruler without a shred of evidence available to prove that anything had changed.
He ruled until he died at the age of 89, at which time the country erupted in chaos.
