Am I obliged to speak about the violence?
When harm is clear as blood in sunshine, what needs saying?
Who is listening?
*
What’s plain about the day, best I can see: the glutton for power wants to keep it. His followers want him to keep it. It in this case is the ability to compel.
More people than ever before want the glutton out of their lives, yet the glutton doesn’t believe this. His followers don’t believe this. He gathers a crowd to stop his dethronement. The crowd does what crowds do well: threaten. The crowd threatens the strangers stripping its champion his right to rule. (The glutton for power is a stranger to the crowd and the crowd is a stranger to him. This separation grants commands their weight and delusions their perfection.)
The crowd crawls up walls and pushes past doors. Cops who believe they love force welcome this. Politicians who plan to inherit power welcome this. The crowd brings bombs and binds. The crowd carries flags celebrating centuries of rape and torture. The crowd flashes to cameras their little codes of cowardice: snuck praise for the mechanized murder of millions of kids—since every person alive and dead is forever a kid—those children dead because their names and bones sounded and curved that and their way, not this and our way. The crowd shrouds itself with the farce of stars-and-stripes, pennants to property rights so broad as to include people. The crowd parades the name of the glutton, their champion. The crowd grabs and smashes and sits on the objects of their scorn, thinking this way they’ll kill the symbols. The crowd grins in its rehearsal for murder. Unsurprisingly this rehearsal is public.
The crowd has much white skin and all the psychotic confidence this skin confers. If the crowd’s color were otherwise the crowd would be dead, piled on marble and strewn over stairs. Yet the crowd is pale so the crowd kills. A guard murders a woman, a self-supposed warrior climbing into one of two rooms in which laws are methodically conjured. Elsewhere the crowd kills a cop. The crowd kills and dies while ginning up its mission: show by its presence that it—a bunch of proud “individuals”—owns our world. The glutton for power has shown how: talk as if you own all rooms and the stupid minds surrounding you.
Soldiers come, those clockwork children with outfits and guns. They force the other children out (a fruitless collision of fantasies). Those who conjure laws begin again their incantation. They talk and jockey, preparing their chambers for a man less enamored with the dream of never needing to suffer. In so doing, they close the book on the man who cannot shut the fuck up. (Much like children close books whose words they wish to forget, panicking with their eyes closed.)
The crowd’s push into those drab halls of power is sad, half-assed, and seconds away from large sums of blood.
That is the coup.
*
I needn’t paint a subtler picture. We see in that day two simple figures: scorn and power. Scorn and power. This same sea-saw we’re trapped on, which we must die to escape.
I am saying the last four thousand years of history are boring. (Of course our little chosen loves—our many wild sacrifices like stars in the sky—are left out of all official accounts.) An eye for an eye is boring; a world for an eye, our empire’s principle at war, is era after era’s numbing dogma.
We are as a forest-wandering little boy, a naive hunter, who puts his foot in the snare he just that morning fanged, letting it cripple him so that he may cry out, “I was tricked!”
What need I say about this violence? This violence is obvious. This violence is not love. Power is not love. Power is artificial, as profane as anything marketed. I know all this. Yet I fail in my life to upend the tables across which this business is done.
*
I ask to feel a response: who hears me?
My lovelessness is as bright and plain as hunger. I want to sow the seed of its inadequacy.
I pray to my Christ that those eaten by anger feel love and put down the sword. I pray silently—silently to secret myself into hope—to let myself live, which means let myself heal, since fascism is a long-whispering and patient suicide. I promise to take up no grudge. I promise to retreat rather than to hate.
May I look without judgement at those who want me invisible or dead. May I keep fear only for the consequence of betraying reality.
I open my heart to this fact: that love abrades in every instant the cackling mask of history. I open my heart to the face of another.
To whom am I listening?
