J.M. Coetzee treats the shamelessness of the state in the U.S. and Australia in his 2007 novel Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Señor C, the novel's protagonist, imagines a politically charged performance that gives new meaning to the term 'Theatre of Cruelty':

Someone should put together a ballet under the title Guantanamo, Guantanamo! A corps of prisoners, their ankles shackled together, thick felt mittens on their hands, muffs over their ears, black hoods over their heads, do the dances of the persecuted and desperate. Around them, guards in olive-green uniforms prance with demonic energy and glee, cattle prods and billy-clubs at the ready. They touch the prisoners with the prods and the prisoners leap; they wrestle prisoners to the ground and shove the clubs up their anuses and the prisoners go into spasms. In a corner, a man on stilts in a Donald Rumsfeld mask alternately writes at his lectern and dances ecstatic little jigs.

One day it will be done, though not by me. It may even be a hit in London and Berlin and New York. It will have absolutely no effect on the people it targets, who could not care less what ballet audiences think of them.

I confess to being excited by the prospect of such a ballet as I read the first paragraph. When I reached the end of the second, I knew how right Señor C was and how delusional the admonition to 'Speak truth to power' really is: when power is exercised shamelessly, it has no need for truth.

[...]

What happens when the state and the most powerful corporate interests forgo any illusion? I think we're about to find out. The truth is that there is no necessary narrative outcome. People may get depressed, shrug in apathy, or start a revolution. One thing I will predict with confidence is that the shamelessness will endure. It is our response that is in question. [link]