I CANNOT BREATH

WHERE WE ARE NOW

A discursive look at our current predicament 

The bleak relentlessly beating heart of this period, is a cocktail of populism, fascism and the corruption that is never far from flawed democracies and all by their nature are flawed. We swirl around this black hole, that devours journalists, doctors, scientists, judges, and those enemies of the people, the ‘experts.’ 

In the night people wake afraid, invisible, and everywhere the plague. Morning brings no relief only the stark clarity of daylight an extra five minutes in bed, listening to what the stale voice on the radio says. Then coffee, a laptop life in which we isolate. Still better than the crab commute, the fearful juggling of hot coffee umbrella and business bag, sweaty, cramped, and struggling to breath, chest tight with an animal anxiety.

Across the city the room is vacuumed and disinfected for the press conference at noon.

The insomniac stare of the politician at the lectern as he reads his carefully scripted lies looks irritably surprised that he has not been believed that nothing is automatically agreed. This is the anger of the betrayer toward the betrayed whose every word, whose every look accuses him. Sympathy, empathy, even human decency dies in this angry sterile atmosphere, it cannot breath. Only the script remains to be delivered, a black mass ritual over the coffins of the dead.

A cop slowly murders a black man in a casual banal manner, and I think, for a moment, of style, - is this not the fashion in which the SS killed? The deliberate casual cruelty of the sadist.

Climbing out of the bunker the grotesque parody president gasses the crowd so that unafraid and proud he can pose Bible in hand, Arturo Ui and Chaplin

combined. A walking vacuity, a bubble of flatulence anchored only by the weight of an absurd vanity and a conceit that is the preserve of the truly ignorant.

The minister at the dispatch box wipes his brow, having queued like a sales bargain hunter for over an hour, he is sick and soon may find it difficult to breath. A smug patrician madness has descended on the palace, half arrogance, half malice.

And we circle the hole moving ever faster, ever closer to the edge, though racing resumes at Newmarket to allow us to forget the dead.


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