Dusty Spectacles; or, These Things Too
Ash Wednesday, 2025
“All nations surrounded me; in the name of the LORD I cut them off!”—Psalm 118:10.
It is not that the old school contrarian commentators require remarkable foresight to call the experiment in exceptionalism on its cruel game ahead of time—it is after hours, and they look back to tell us what will be. The hearers are now sufficiently unhistorical to forget how many times before the repetition with difference has occurred. Just read the stately strategists of any time and place, swapping out the names and dates. You are a citizen—let us count together the centuries that’s been the politically correct jargon for subject—of the last custodians of universal empire that reigns through commerce when it can and violence when it must. But direct and unmediated war is unpleasant to domesticated audiences—not to speak of the foreign informants who grace the common stage in guise of scapegoats, puppets, or fusty cultured despisers of ourselves—so it has to be outsourced to others who venture mortal sacrifice in our stead—for “freedom” and its riders, which is how one rebrands the vested interests of the shareholders. The public—let’s flatter ourselves that we are even such a thing—are not the shareholders but the employees and the customers. Even those who are mere errand boys-cum-passive consumers of advertising are made to feel that they are stakeholders in the manufacture of consent. So the managers circulate memos to the company about what one is to think, revising them as expedient—and this keeps the public squabbling obstreperously over whether the old policy or the new policy for managing the post-industrial apparatus is superior. One group of managers says we must not even think to call it by its name anymore while the other has fewer qualms. The basic premise is never mooted for discussion; if it were, the words would find no fitting matter in which to incarnate, because the humus is so rich it is poor.
How does this realization always manage to linger at the periphery of thought and speech: two decades ago, four decades ago, six decades ago? We can, of course, never divest because that would jeopardize our way of life. We are fatted on it, even in lean mean contracted times. We keep our place in the sun only by throwing others into the meat grinder, just as the foremen instruct; we contain our cringe reflex when the unworthy in high command or upper management cajole or coerce the ranks below into kissing the rod, muttering as hollowly earnest a reheated “Thank you, sir—please, sir, I want some more!” as anyone could dredge up. We are all jostling at the trough to be the deservingest of the deserving poor, and that means singing for one’s supper. Beats breaking one’s back for it—yes, surely! We liquidated industrial discipline inward as rules of order that we encounter as flotsam amid rapider currents than in the age of steel. Metal gives way to plastic—yet that heightened mutability renders us, oddly, all the more immobile precisely in our precarity, estranged from our life’s projection as a redoubled duplicate refraction ever more persuasively emulating it on our behalf. Once, twice we dreamed of humanizing the machine but now we tend to dream of digitizing ourselves, like the masters of accumulation reduced to mere technicians tinkering with Mammon. Do you think alienation stops at the boardroom door? The temptation to emulate their image of success and insulate ourselves from these travails is a chimera, so we can detach ourselves unpoisoned by resentment.
You who late awaken to the predatory character of a wicked sort of polity whose corporate logo tends to be a beast of prey, soaring or striding the globe under some three-coloured banner—what took you so long? Will you keep unbroken vigil now or drift off to sleep again at the changing of the guard? In such a system of world disorder qua order, citizenship as a virtue to maintain is dead copy and the subject is tested like a kept rat, racing round the wheel or the labyrinth to a perpetually titrated anesthetic cocktail—social media, 24-hour news, reheated tins of studio magic, grind of work and allure of romance, or less figurative opioids—until a garish vulgar clown emerges, acclaimed by the mob as the spectacle’s emcee, makes visible the rot of it all and claims the fix is on. The demagogue’s presence disquiets you who, like the speaker, retain fond pretensions to gentility—this custom-selected avatar of the system that requires no control room conspiracy to keep it from crashing. Let us mock him, lest we be seen as pueri æterni who recoil from the frightful clown. He is there for it, the life of the after hours party that feeds on our scorn vampirically. But again, the leader principle has not been resurrected because that is not how any of this has worked for some years now. The empty suit you would grab by the lapels and demand not restoration but creature comforts from is a cipher; flesh and blood was never our adversary. Rebellious powers of dispersion form a congeries of stuff sprawled without organic unity in which every “choice” one could make is folded back into a bricolage, reinforcing despair of ever finding an Archimedean point from which to lift this fallen world. The linguistically conjured nostalgic illusion of moral or even amoral personal mastery of fate, of authentic involvement in resisting the “villains” or embracing the “heroes,” serves to keep us invested in the game. It masks the plain fact that we are spectators given the odd participatory role to play by the emcee or the Greek chorus, letting the one captivate our passions or the many signify our mimetic rivalry: to cheer, to jeer, to stampede, to laugh, to cry—and we go home but drained in place of the catharsis we used to find.
We find the spectacle too leaden and contrived now, even and especially when that lead is made molten lava to try to keep our short attention spans—like an addict who’s reached his peak and cannot get the old high back without risking an overdose. A sordid show is the way empires go—seldom with dignity or grace or distinction. But who am I to presume so? Like you, I beg not for justice or mercy or truth but the return of self-assurance in the mission of the land of hope and glory, mother of the free. I just want to forestall final reckoning until I am safely dead, having kicked the can down the road for posterity to cut its hands on should it have the residual civic-mindedness to clean up after our leavings. I question only the vulgarity, you see, not the vain futility or the carnage of what human hands have wrought. All the poetry and the prayer I would write has been better penned by yesterday’s young—of a garden reduced by human perversity into a desert wasteland that we no longer expect our god to make bloom again. We can fortify our digestion by breaking our fast from worldliness not on circus fare but on reserve rations from wayfarers, laid like love tokens at roadside shrines under ash: ages pass, like thrones—and even the heavens above and the earth beneath the feet. Cling to nothing save that beauty which slips between the fingers, because she will live forever not by rooting around in barren wastes but by alighting where dust cannot. O pilgrim—friend—our hearth is the universal altar of oblation toward which all life inclines to meet the origin and end in which it longs to be hid—a lover unlost, silent but not absent.
