William S Burroughs is the dark satirical avatar for America that the Marquis de Sade was for France and, as with the marquise, the line between fiction and reality are blurred if there at all. They *lived* the literary indictment of their respective degenerate societies

Bolaño fulfills a similar role for Mexico and South America, and to a lesser extent Jodorowsky did as well, particularly with Holy Mountain (interesting that they are both Chilean transplants to Mexico).

If there is one peculiar similarity between the works of these men - specifically 120 Days of Sodom, Naked Lunch, and 2666 - it would be Aristocratic pedophilia. This is not a coincidence, nor is it simply reducible to the proclivities of the authors themselves.

Holy Mountain shares a similar theme but handles it in a different, somewhat (darkly) humorous way. Recall the character Axon, a titan-like figure who castrates virile young men and builds a shrine with their penises.

This imagery all serves the same archetypical purpose and is metaphorically true as well as literally true, both for the authors and for the societies they satirize (Bolaño not, as far as I know, included, but 2666 isn’t as satirical as the others, if at all).

When civilizations begin to rot from the inside out , the inexorable metabolic processes begin to cannibalize the host culture. The founders become wretched or exhausted, the bloodlines polluted or extinguished

They devolve into debauchery and decadence, and where their forebearers were productive and adventurous, they are depraved and gluttonous of flesh. The youth of their victims is both a symbolic and energetic vampirism of the decrepit elders...

Consuming the vitality and life-force of the youth of a nation for themselves, contra-posed with an earlier, more inspired time when the vitality of the youth was mobilized and unleashed upon the formless stone from whence a nation is carved.

Note that Sodom coincides with the fall of the Ancien Regime and 2666 with the end of the PRI and Naked Lunch and Holy Mountian more with a period of ascendancy and and incontestable power. In those pieces the sprawling debauchery coincides with Trimalchios dinner party...

...from the Satyricon. Note another corresponding state of affairs, in that the Marquis was himself part of the old aristocracy and Burroughs part of the nouveau riche.

There is no redemption in these stories, and the victims are always, or often, killed, as a metaphorical indication that the regime has entered some suicidal phase wherein the old snuff out the vitality of their culture, and no way out is presented in any of these myths.

One must consider the parallels with the Epstein case, and is forced to see these parables as reflections of a literal truth, an examination of a pathology that all civilization risk mutating into, or perhaps an inevitability.

Bolaño was the most insightful and certainly the most prescient here, for note that a story that was given disproportionate press compared to Epstein was the Nexivm cult

Which is getting its own documentary as a smokescreen to cover up the much more degenerate case of Epstein and co. (nexivm did not involve underage girls). This is the same type of diversionary tactic the PRI and the cartels used to draw attention from themselves

In 2666, with the false case against Achimboldis grandson. They say reality has become its own satire, but here we see that satire has always been a way for artists to display reality *as it is*