the pageantry of civility

i prefer my violence sanitised, theoretical or faraway, thanks

for safe passage to the elysian fields of convenience, you must flip a coin of denial to the ferryman.

he will take you across the styx—an ectoplasmic river of restless souls—towards the opportunity at a better life; a place away from the savage wilderness.

all you must do is pretend.

pretend that the life of men who spend their entire political life dragging the overton window of American discourse towards deeply racist rhetoric are civil and reasonable.

you have to pretend that the performance of civility conceals some higher, moral clarity despite all the destruction that has occurred under its star-spangled banner. all the coups were civil. all the invasions are civil. all the drones are civil.

you have to pretend the death of a man—who’s love for the second amendment embellished his neck with a deadly love-bite—is a tragedy, and not a genetic consequence of his own political advocacy.

you have to pretend that because he spoke quickly and with conviction, was acrobatic with his arguments and convinced thousands of people to follow him—that he was a public intellectual worth more than the indigenous community he refused to acknowledge.

this is when you reach your hand over the rim of ferryman’s boat. you let your fingers skim the water. you feel a tug and pull your arm back.

when you cross the river, you’re shocked to find your denial payment hasn’t shuttled you to the tranquility of elsyium fields.

instead, the fates stand before you with scales.

the man’s soul is weighed against 70,000—give or take.

it seems he pretended, too. he was great at it. he pretended that his vision was just, that his most words weren’t hatred, that he was purely rational, phe pretended the violence against those souls was justified, proportionate, rational.

now the fates hold his soul in a dish, counterweighted to theirs and all you have to do is pretend once more—and tweet out “political violence has no place here” to a country with a $997 billion military budget that’s spent its entire existence at war.

one of the fates sees you falter.

“are you weary?”

you are. but you believe the pageant is all that’s holding this land together. the truth is, it is crumbling under the weight of its own glaring contradiction, and the energetic pressure needed to keep the reconciliation from bursting at the seams. you hit post.

the fates let you through a door in the very fabric of reality—to the elysium fields.

you step through to find a meadow on fire.