Left Behind: The Bad Melodrama of American Anachronism

by Bodwyn Wook

[Mr Wook would wish, he says, to apologise in advance for certain discursive experiments, in the following; but, since all persons of perception agree that the worst sin of the "clear" and "direct" & "easily understood" writing in what passes for the English of to-day, together with its ever-reducing vocabulary, is to dump us all in the end in to iconic & abbreviated epithet, the gentleman is sure that no one concerned with the future prospects of all actual elites in the world will mind -- ed]

More than twenty years after the pulling down of the wall in Berlin, and the end of both the Cold War and late-modernity then, these today are the anachronistic, the petty and pampered, political faces of a done-for American past that still haunts the World.  They are the old Roman blind masks of death and the after-the-fact crisis now on us, the final crisis, of the old American late-modern order.  History like a snail in a garden as always leaves its traces.  Now, in the digital clatter of a load of mortgaged electronic junk out of Asia, the players writhe and gaze vacantly out their eye holes on the eve of yet an other “government shutdown”.  They can not and they will not compose their differences over the spending of “money” that in fact does not exist.  They are soaked and slimed in the infantile political hatreds of a childish and useless generation.  Now, like stylish and twittering, subadult, factions in a bad expensive suburban highschool, they peer and squint in the night and fog of the public spot light, in the in sides of our Tee Vee sets, to vilify each other and each other’s criminal parties.  They do so with every impression of sincerity and give no sign what ever of knowing that the American game of “governance” does not matter any more.  None of this can matter any more.  For the players them selves in fact do not matter.  They are sightless dummies in a bankrupt department store window with out clothes — and so their ticks and megrims can not matter any more.  Not now.  And, from now for ward, never again.  But with no more real sense of the actual time in the World than a cracked and askew sundial leaning under a cloud, or a digital watch with an exhausted battery, they cling on none the less.  Their motives and vague purposes are painfully naked for all to see, and a shame to the whole battered and misused population.  They hang on for dear life to their old disputes long since discredited by the un-deliberately misled and yet endlessly, tirelessly, and always stupidly, lied-to (and yet still, as yet even so, still-undead!) “American people”.  The root of the stupid dishonesty in it all lies in the way, and how just to go on day by day in that manner of all men more or less alive with out any actual religion, they lie to them selves about their service and dedication.  This devout capacity for self-deceit makes them deceitful, but they are there for fools (perhaps it is a kind of Sufi teaching plot?) and therefore them selves not actual villains.  Only careerish half wits hot after prominence in order there by to know to them selves that they “really” live.  It is their results that are Evil, and this is no merit of theirs and, so, any thing at all satanic in it is not particularly to their credit.  Their political self-service is all vanity, and is no thing but stale haggling over the dismemberment of a corpse.  It has no thing on Earth any more what so ever to do with us.  For they rave and hiss like vampires in an old literature, drowning in the ocean and who grasp and feud at a waterlogged coffin stuffed with garlic.  They have no more purpose than to keep alive some how the old quarrel.  It is all they know.  For all they know of any way of life beyond their own, it is all there is.  That not stylish out dated party fight — we all can vaguely remember this much about it, any way, since they all blindly, and only just to get elected, promised us all “free” money — was about which party would get to drink the public blood of an exhausted budget and gorge on a virtually meaningless “dollar”.  Like vampires in that old literature of a sleepless doomed careerism, and frenzied empty days and all the pointless stealthy nights invested in it, these are the false faces twisted and tanned that show us yet again the traces of History’s (as well as of God’s) left-behind ones.  It is a kind of ambulatory archaeology of un-dead things that have the shapes and make the noises of men with warm blood.  It has about it all that semblance of  “World” significance so dear globally to worldly none entity.  There is in it all an under current livid and rococco, of the paedophiliac viagresque and the grotesque.  They are political men with no dignity of self-control, and with no other “power” at all in the Earth except in sulks and incooperation, and they are a bad dull sort of closing joke on the end of the constitutional age in History.  Mainly they over-identify them selves with the passing moodinesses and other hypostases of their distinctly over active and not witting  inner womanliness.  It is their profound ignorance of any thing what so ever about their own selves beyond what appears in the mirror and passing store windows through gritty limousine plate glass, and in the in sides of our Tee Vee sets, that makes them hysterical.  They are so many Jane Fondas and Ann Coulters in suits.  More than any other thing they are the sad indictment above all of whom ever were so luckless as to have been assigned by the Institute to try to be their teachers.  They have been brought down, as always, by the convergence of foolish egotism and no knowledge of History. 

That is why (with the connivance of the Wise), by now, it is already a full generation since the American nation-state of 1865-1989 came to its end in the whole World as a central, an effective and, above all, a true historical force.

[Bodwyn Wook

[all rights reserved

[8 April 2011]

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