From The Zero by Jess Walter, published 2006.

Walter’s post-9/11 novel. Brian Remy, our protagonist, is in conversation with someone who might be a hallucination.

“That’s not surprising.” the man smiled warmly and spoke in a soft, mellifluous voice, like a professor giving a lecture. “You’re always convincing yourselves that the world isn’t what it is, that no one really matters except your own. that’s why you make such poor victims. You can’t truly know suffering if you know nothing about rage. And you can’t feel genuine rage if you won’t acknowledge loss.

“That’s what happens when a nation becomes a public relations firm. You forget the truth. Everything is the Alamo. You claim victory in every loss, life in every death. Declare war when there is no war, and when you are at war, pretend you aren’t. The rest of the world wails and vows revenge and buries its dead and you turn on the television. Go to the cinema.”

“Entertainment is the singular thing you produce now. And it’s just another propaganda, the most insidious, greatest propaganda ever devised, and this is your only export now – your coffee and tobacco, your gunpowder and your wheat. And while people elsewhere die questioning the propaganda of tyrants and royals, you crave yours. You demand the propaganda of distraction and triviality, and it has become your religion, your national faith. In this faith you are grave and backward fundamentalists, not so different from the grave and backward fundamentalists you presume to battle. If they are barbarians knocking at the gates with stories of beautiful virgins in the afterlife, then aren’t you barbarians too, wrapping the world in cables full of happy-ever-after stories of fleshy blonds and animated fish and talking cars?”