What is happening can be called lots of things:
efficient or insane,
genius or dumb,
doublespeak or based,
projection or calculation… accusation or confession.
Merit or biology, superiority.
Indoctrination, education, retribution.
Fragility or security,
unconstitutional or patriotic,
privilege or authority,
prideful or respectful,
Nazi or heart.
Civilly or criminally or politically guilty.
Gitmo or the 51st state,
MAGA or DOGE or Dark Enlightenment Accelerationism or Project 2025.
Fight or flight.
Uncharted territory or history, repeating itself in fractal, transpersonal patterns, micro and macro, the bully –
(abuser or abused?)
– once evaded and contained within memory, now loose again, shape shifted since the last
but your nerves recoil inward like that only in the presence of this unmistakable ick,
Here again, now again somehow,
not defeated by the world as had hoped but rewarded with glory! Grown to everpresent influence right up to His desk next to Him, a double, complete with a parthenogenic, sacrificial son who blindly repeats his Father for approval.
What men these boys become!
They inherit no authentic language from their fathers, and so are desperate for other ways to impress:
they must be enraged to show the world what men they are,
they must arrive in all the gold and gadgets to show the world what men they are,
as the intro music ineluctably revs through forced open lips into forced open ears and out again, one by one by one in a nationwide procession of simulacra: what successful, hard-working, intelligent, talented, big men they are, the power to remake worlds in their image.
Wordless dictators reveal that language was only ever a clumsy disguise of power, passing among us.
Fake mustache
fake tans
fake genius
and fake fathers
who pretend they can lead us out of the mess they profited from at our enduring expense.
It will go by many names, and while we worry about technicalities and work to pull back the flooding cover to reveal truth – lie by ridiculous lie – we must remain conscious that underneath the hood, the underlying thread of it all is that it so obviously, so horrifically, wrong. That’s all you really need to remember, despite the seeming normality, the confusion:
listen to the ick, telling you this is all so very, very wrong.
And I do not fear these men so much as I fear the people I see everyday who cannot sense this wrongness, that have grown numb or indifferent to this ick, out of necessity or an inability to navigate its confrontation. I know all too well this ick washed over these men as boys and they joined the wave, it’s so easy: fighting is suicide against this mass, and flight is a life of paranoia, not worth living. But to just freeze and just let it take, conversion from oppressed to oppressor, boys to men, as it passes through his story, her story, their stories, ours and mine. No effort at all, for the glory of the world, as promised. Just ignore that ick. I understand this all too well
but how I, too, have changed since our last meeting! And I will not ignore it.
Collective sense was supposed to be our weapon against dictators, tyrants, and kings – a divine wisdom that all are equal and that no man shall be above the law. OUR weapon. The consent of the governed. Consenti: to sense together.
Usurpers.
