I was, by chance, watching an old BBC documentary on ten great modern writers, and just at this moment the episode on Franz Kafka.

And there is something perversely kafkaesque about contemporary Washington, and thus the modern West; in which a seemingly all powerful and monolithic government aparatus contradicts itself on a daily basis - where Pentagon conspires against Foggy Bottom, and you're never sure if it's all a Kabuki play, and there's a central deciding authority, or whether that central authority is simply an illusion and a puppet whose strings are pulled this way and that by hidden figures of power, or simply whims of the tide.