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 have to do is pretend.

pretend that those who spend their entire political careers dragging the overton window of american discourse towards divisive rhetoric are reasonable, moderate men.

you have to pretend the chaos you see all around you has no discernible origin. no chauffeurs helped usher it in.

you have to pretend your performance of civility—a livelong endeavour—in response to political violence conceals some sophisticated, moral clarity despite all the political violence that’s occurred beneath the star-spangled banner.

all the civil us-backed coups. all the civilising foreign invasions. all the civil assassinations.

you have to pretend violent ideologies spawn from an ether, that words are, simultaneously, powerfully transformative and incapable of inciting great violence, despite the fact that each and every one of us is transformed by words every single day.

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 advocacies.

you have to pretend that, because he spoke quickly and with conviction, was acrobatic with his arguments and “debated the right way”, he was a public intellectual worth more than the souls he made restless or the indigenous people he refused to acknowledge. you have to pretend to mourn, even when clips of his long, public career are functionally unusable for a visual eulogy because the fibre of his arguments were noticeably more heinous than his delivery of them.

you have to pretend you don’t understand why so many people are happy he’s gone—as if gleeful reaction to death is some uniquely evil feeling attributed to uniquely evil people and not some common emotion people experience so often that it has its own word. you have to pretend that, because he did things “the right way”, anybody who expresses their schadenfreude deserves swift punishment.

you have to pretend that “the right way” is cosmically neutral.

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

when the ferryman’s boat docks, you’re surprised to find your payment of denial has only gotten you across the river.

there is more you must do for the tranquility of elsyian fields.

the fates stand before you with scales.

the man’s soul is weighed against 100,000—give or take.

his entire life was pantomime of incitement. his words were engineered to leave the world worse way than when he found it. he called a black man everyone saw choke to death a “scumbag”. he once said, “i hate the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage.”

from his own daughter to the starving of palestinians—he spoke of fellow human with something worse than overt contempt—a detached, theatrical lens, flexible in presentation but profoundly inflexible in ideology and punctuated by bad-faith theoreticals that always seemed to conceal what he really believed. his legacy is one of stochastic terrorism, folding divisive rhetoric in half enough times to conceal its true ambition. it seems he was a pretender, too. there were only ever flashes of genuine inhabitance in his performances, propagandising mischaracterised as debate, where he could pretend his words weren’t the merchandise of a sycophant accruing spiteful interest.

now the fates hold his soul in a dish—counterweighted to starved palestinians, the ever-climbing casualties of american gun violence, trans suicides, george floyd and other victims of police brutality and an immeasurable amount more.

all you have to do is pretend once again. make a statement that “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 in the pageant. you believe the revelry of it is all that’s holding this civilisation together. the truth is—it is crumbling under the weight of its own glaring contradictions. the energetic pressure needed to hold together the psychic stage, where one side of the violence demands condemnation and the other side rejuvenates its skin in conquered blood, generates enough raw power to level nagasaki and hiroshima twice over.

you make the statement.

the fates cut a door from the very fabric of reality with a pair of scissors.

elysium.

you step through.

and find a meadow on fire.

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