Last night I dreamt I saw Tom Paine a-spinning in his grave. He'd just returned from two hellish weeks at the Republican and Democratic conventions. Turns out he'd gone as an observer for the Not-So-Recently-Deceased Commission.

"What in the name of Nathan Hale is all this endless blather?" he wanted to know. "Nobody would actually attend such a thing, would they? Much less watch it hour after hour on television?" I said I'd get back to him.

After much midnight lucubration, I have come to a startling conclusion: they'd co-opted the theatre of the absurd for their own nefarious purposes. Indeed, this was the triumph of the avant-garde at its most obtuse and stultifying. After years of being marginalized in tiny off-off-Broadway theaters, dusty lofts and coffeehouses, the lunatic fringe had finally found a national audience.

Believe it or not, I actually recall the modest genesis of those early soporific epics. At the Judson Church in Greenwich Village in the early sixties, relays of musicians (La Monte Young, John Cage, David Tudor, John Cale) would repeat an insipid little musical phrase by Eric Satie for 24-hours straight. Elsewhere, there were readings of the entire contents of the 1921 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica to Balinese gamelan music. Grid-mad formalists insisted on reducing language to its grammatical innards, composing entire books by rearranging the words of a single sentence in a different order until syntax itself begged for mercy. Repetition, in those heady days, was all the rage. It was Lou Reed's mantra, Jasper Johns's template, the very credo of transcendental art. Entertainment, it was generally agreed, was for the clueless bourgeoisie. Let the narcotic counterpoint of monotony flourish!

But who would have guessed that we would live to see these avant-garde ravings re-emerge on such a monumental scale? Five days playing to packed arenas in Philadelphia and Los Angeles! The entire proceedings televised on twenty stations, mulled over by interchangeable chat-show goons, paid lock-step hirelings of the left and right, mindless pundits, ex-marines, pregnant newscasters, and fatuous idiots of every stripe. All this! And avidly watched by millions of Americans who have never heard of Grotowski! This is far beyond anything ever imagined in the opiate dreams of Antonin Artaud. A pity that the French madman was not here to witness the ultimate incarnation of his theater of cruelty. Here was something beyond even the wildest ambitions of those technocrats of boredom, C-SPAN.

The conventions, in other words, were a species of Dada Guinness Book of World Records marathons. Events at which the participants have been in attendance for so long that they have forgotten the purpose of the proceedings, and consequently no longer know how to end them. They have dragged on so endlessly that maternity wards have had to be set up, while white-coated attendants escort those who have succumbed to dementia during the proceedings. Anyone even suggesting actual changes in the system is immediately arrested and taken into custody. Over 300 at last count.

So the techniques of the avant-garde have been fiendishly applied to the playing fields of American politics. But why? And by whom? Clearly the Republican and Democratic national conventions are designed to be a form of mass hypnosis wherein the American public is subliminally prepared for another four years of Nothing. Meanwhile, a shadow government of Mormon ex-FBI agents takes over the country, employing out-of-work actors to play senators shuffling zombie-like in and out of the rotunda.

Nothing, as we know, happens in American politics without the manipulation of special interest groups. For a moment I reverted to the accepted paranoia of several decades ago: the Trilateral Commission, a cabal of immensely wealthy businessmen and their creatures, politicians of the left and right, who met several times a year to plan how they could subvert the American public for their own despicable ends.

But the Trilateral Commission, in my opinion, lacks the imagination for a project as audacious as this. No, my guess is that such a project would be better directed by, say, the entertainment industry. Clotaire Rapaille, the French anthropologist of our manners and mores (and, note, a one- time Bush adviser) has said that American politics is never about issues. What it's really about is cheap entertainment. And, as far as cheap entertainment goes, we've never had it so good. Clinton surpassed any conceivable expectations in this regard --- and that's just the problem. During his period in office, this master of the form has transcended even the most florid Pennsylvania Avenue melodrama Hollywood could ever conceive.

Fellatio in the Oval Office! Suicide! Suspicion of Rape! Endemic Waffling! Travel Agency improprieties! FBI files! Crooked penises! Cigars! What coke-addled screenwriter could top this stuff? Under these conditions, how was Tinsel Town expected to compete?

Isn't it too much of a coincidence that we have two presidential candidates, both the privileged sons of politicians, bearing the same names as those fathers, and espousing almost identical platforms? And that these two clones have contrived spectacles of such brain-numbing tedium that the mind clamors for oxygen, seizes up, and finally falls into a state of delirium so profound that when the patient awakes he actually believes some sort of political process has taken place.

Here's my scenario, the way I told it to Tom Paine: Michael Ovitz and Michael Eisner got together in that satanic glass Sony pyramid in L.A. and cynically green-lighted some hapless screenwriter's soporific screenplay about a political convention. Then they ordered a couple of dozen rewrites, making such minor changes in the candidates' speeches that only a software program could distinguish between them. Then, in secret meetings with both candidates, they offered to "produce" the conventions. They took random versions of the original dopey script and handed it to the delegates. No acting experience necessary. In fact, the more wooden the better in their opinion. All spiced up with some slick Hollywood jive in which hypocrites and phonies denounce hypocrisy and phoniness in sanctimonious and disingenuous speeches. Perfect.

I felt bad about telling all this to the noble Tom Paine, but he just laughed and said, "Hell, they'll love this crap around here." He meant John Adams and Abe Lincoln and the lads. The Not-So-Recently-Deceased Commission wasn't exactly a fact-finding organization, he explained. It was more of a comedy club.

"We're always looking for new material," he told me, "and this summer gave us some of the best stuff we've heard in 200 years."