Observance: Totalitarian regimes use words to mean their opposite

December 15, 2024

I have intended to use this space to make Observances, mostly in prose, about the intersections between my own personal, lived experience, close to home, and the politics of the moment as I see it. But with some really great sources that echo what I would have to say politically (and say it much better) – I’m thinking of Rebecca Solnit, Heather Cox Richardson’s vital Letters From an American, Timothy Snyder, Masha Gessen (read Surviving Autocracy) and many others – and with such a glut of misinformation, and disinformation – I’m on the verge of giving up. But rather than give up prose for silence, today I will turn back, again, to poetry.

In What Orwell Didn’t Anticipate, The Atlantic’s Megan Garber lifts off from Orwell’s famous essay, Politics and the English Language, writing that “this essay, today, can read less as a rousing defense of the English language than as a prescient concession of defeat. ‘Use clear language’ cannot be our guide when clarity itself can be so elusive. Our words have not been honed into oblivion – on the contrary, new ones spring to life with giddy regularity – but they fail, all too often, in the same ways [Orwell’s] Newspeak does: They limit political possibilities, rather than expand them. They cede to cynicism. They saturate us in uncertainty. The words might mean what they say. They might not. They might describe shared truths; they might manipulate them….”

Masha Gessen tells us in Surviving Autocracy, “Trump’s autocratic attempts begin with a war on words. As with the other things he has done, in his attack on language, Trump has resembled, or perhaps emulated, twentieth century totalitarian leaders and twenty-first century autocratic leaders, like Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Totalitarian regimes use words to mean their opposite.”

Even beyond the manipulation of language, whereby the totalitarians force us to debate whether 2+2=4, or equals 5, or equals nothing at all, is the betrayal of consensus reality represented by the collective AI hallucination – the technical feat that roundly denies any firm ground for public debate or private contemplation by drowning us in unhuman content mimicked from large language models. In this sense, Artificial Intelligence broadly serves the totalitarian agenda – to erode any sense of shared reality, to undermine the collective aspirations that are central to any democratic project, and to deny human agency.

There is a tremendous need for what eco-theologian Thomas Berry called “a new story”, rooted in cosmology and serving the transmission of earth-based values. But when the clear prose and determined action needed to serve this new story are drowned out by the noise of totalizing artificial hallucinations, poetry may be the place where we can fight fire with fire. I’m thinking today of the early twentieth-century Russian poets at the moment when the post-truth language of the Soviets was creating a totalized consensus reality and destroying the shared language of the past. Then, the emergent futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexie Kruchyonykh launched an audacious experiment with the Russian language drawing upon its roots to originate zaum, a language defying translation. With some small nod towards those guys, and a large nod towards the formative 1970’s poetry movement that was called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, where the avant-garde met the New Left, I maintained my sanity during the recent pre-election months of the Harris-Trump campaign by writing what became a long serial poem: The Plunge of Fascism Comforts Me.

The Plunge of Fascism Comforts Me

“It’s not night that’s the problem, it’s war.”

– Hala Alyan

i.

I dreamt I buried my farther under the black volcanic island mud.

Under the mud the family constellation shines

in a vertical lattice of iron skeletons, twined snakes

a canyon of skyscrapers blown to hell on the beach,

and where the beach was, beneath the pavement

angels form to let the light in, light out, light in.

The light breathes, can still breathe

between the buildings: breathe, hold, release. The sky is still there.

letting the war in, letting the war out.

The wars of our forebears swim in it

in the steely Pacific they wore their arms off

stroking against coral monuments of the unknown.

In the enslaved Atlantic they lay in chains and shit

and when they died or fought back they vanished, fed to the sharks.

In the pits and bogs of old riverways they walked into

caves and caverns and dreamed it all and in the oceans still

they lie there dreaming and their dream is the living world.

ii.

Again I dreamt I let my farther into the bed. My farther let

my mother live under the concrete. My mother let my sibster

live between the bombings and my sibster had no say so so she

they fled the scene. When shey came back for air

shey spoke to me of packages and pings.

Shey let the war out through sher breath and sher breath

was faint and farwaway as angels’ breath.

iii.

The air strikes my habit like a nun on fire.

In the underwater where we all are since the global crashing

there’s no money here, only the ancient holy wound.

In Palestine in Rojava in Zomia the Jews the Irish the Marsh Arabs

and I fell silent, the spine of the coral still embedded

in my sleep. In Ljubljana in Guadalcanal in Luzon the Roma the Tartars the whites

and I were sent underwater to deny everything that happened.

Since then the money thing, the silence thing – does it run in the blood?

iv.

The plunge of fascism comforts me, wraps me in flags, takes me

to new heights where I launch my old body into the national myth

like Bugs Bunny into a glass of sparkling vermouth.

When did we thtop drinking and thtart drowning? When

did all the trees catch fire and left only shadows pressed

on the asphalt alive as soft, biological clocks?

I am in a crowd, in a swamp, in a vapor. I put my arm next to the arm

of a man on the subway and we both see, saw through to the white of bone.

It’s too late for this country. Too late for a miracle.  The dull are the damned and

the rest are the scammed sd the fox in the box to the slouch on the couch.

Rafters quake in the thunder, the air quick and slow with wildfire smoke.

What farther will thinking bring? What longer will faith? What flies, what vinegar?

Its too late baby, now, it’s too late, its my country right or wrong it’s my thirty-year

mortgage, it’s the lightning of fear in your eyes when I see your tide

of white vulnerability rise. It’s the insect apocalypse cleansing your windshield,

the tiger in your tank, the trix in your kids, the stain in your drain. So sue me.

v.

Why did they thtop ticking, the thoft, biological clocks?

Was it always broken like that

or did someone cause it to happen?

What other choice did we have, someone sd,

and let the war back in.

vi.

My divergent son is my daughter telling me the hens from the roosters.

Shey asks me, why did the owl cross the toad and I laugh

though terror is tremoring my buckles, queering me.

The wealthy press grapes while the poor sit on their eggs, alarmed

by the grape jam of impunity. But because nature got broken

sometime in the last century, never to recover, we have bigger fish

to fry. When the race war finally comes my bunker will be open to you all

for misty-eyed reminiscing about the enlightened times.

At age sixteen I first felt my civil liberties waking up and I still do.

And even if the money thing has always been a problem for me

it’s the other thing that hurts.

vii.

The long moon of July gives up its body butter like a seam in the tree

where the guts seep out. The natural world, She is preparing for

the November elections, counting delegates, bringing on consultants

to shape Her agenda. But this time, even the books are banned and

there is no object permanence. The borders have come undone

and an angry God stalks the avenues clearing out consignment shops

to stock up on thick yellow copies of Reader’s Digest. For these electors and their

electorate the primitive peoples still live inside the pages, their paps

hung flat and dried like brunt toast, their babies slack and slow, their cultures nil.

But its different this time: everyone subscribes to the dementia,

believes in it like the new party platform. Under a hail of hot metal

the roofs collapse, it is a permanent tornado and not just in your neighborhood,

in all the neighborhoods, in all the places you came to know as sacred,

between your legs where the abortions are, the trigger warnings numb you

the hound dogs howl, it’s a bad moon rising, and there’s no place like home.

viii.

Plunging into the cold water, ripples stir the universe splitting matter

between what’s possible and what’s merely likely. Stumblestones are laid

in the path of the waves so you don’t hit bottom without hitting

your head. The crack of gunfire makes this fourth of July different

each of us taking to our own archipelago, each of us in debt

only to our personal racial heritage, no hyphenated people here,

no civil liberties, only the sheer bliss of terror bringing us all together

in one mass grave. It is from here that we do our slow work like termites.

When the rains reveal the shallow pit our bones collapse into cages

and we remember the cages of our little lives, the vast libraries built

in our insides and then bulldozed to make way for the interstate.

Seneca Village, Gaza, Roanoke, Warsaw ghetto, Fillmore, Black Wall Street

the city’s Equity and Empowerment Commission defunded and

a shallow pool of flame retardants 10,000 acres big installed instead.

Wherever there is infrastructure now there was a Black neighborhood before.

Current identity overtrumps past identity. It is the season of the witch. 

ix.

The drunken man is president and he is the one who first walked

this neighborhood before it was light, before it was what it was, is, now.

And because he is president he deserves what he gets –

a palatial steak and a fucking monster of a hangover after the NATO summit.

His blood meal over, he crawls back in his drunken hole and practices

perversions that would make Prince blush and Dick Cheney weep.

But he is not a snake, nor is he a child. He is me, the thug whose flag

will never surrender, will never negotiate with terrorists, will never never ever

x.

The shot that grazed an ear has raised a child, and the child is a monster

and the monster is a man, an army of men, their sites trainted on

an unbelieved motor of destruction and ebullient maliciousness.

Prince blush is rushed to hospital, his lung collapsed, the green stain

of his rivers navigating the stars in stones set like exploding flowers blossoming

across the sky of his body. He is nowhere to be seen, his hot stones hitting the

stratosphere like tumors from space, the scale of this gaian intelligence sweeping

the floor to remove the shattered glass. And because no stones were laid to mark

the names of the enslaved their chains still rattle in the dark.

The work of their hands is carried on by phantoms, byte by byte and dose by dose

ensuring their suffering sustains itself, taking pains to puddle in the blood gutters

of the West. My farther the air strike is buried in the sands of Iwo Jima

in the Halls of Montezuma in the shores of Tripoli near where that taxi driver

immolated himself. Plunging into the canyon of stars he sends ripples

out beyond the starlink, back to the time of the dream temples.

xi.

It is a living universe and I, a swan, afloat upon it. The water lily’s purity,

the wetness of the rain, the glaciers swimming south to meet their fate.

Not that the lie will be accepted as truth, but that the swan will cease

to shimmer on the horizon, the currents we drift upon be undone

like the north Atlantic gyre, or overdone like the south Pacific garbage patch.

Ya habibi, the straits of Hormuz are strangled by Houthi missile strikes.

The plunge of fascism massages my tired eyes, gives me hope to hate,

holds my hands through trying time. The seeds of discord anchor in my belly,

help me rise from bed each day, put me to sleep each night. I, like you,

dislike it but, like the rain in Bladerunner, the heft of hate is here to stay.

This is what my farther fought for, fate for, fote for. Oy! It is a living universe and I,

a diatom, stand to profit from the tears of sharks, the sharp edges

of seashells, the bastard atoms that run the physics lab. Hey Francis Bacon

with your cosmic scalpel and panoptic macroscope, I’m looking at you!

Renee Descartes with your dysphoric neurotype and your mirrored shades,

discarded by history, dismissed by destiny – come drown in my sorrow, tomorrow.

xii.

I am a victim in this white place. A witness to my whiteness. I am an Arab,

a dead one. My neighbor is garbage. My friend is garbage. I don’t care

what you do to your country, in mine we have crustaceans we eat

by the bucketload in summer when the tide is up but hurricane Ida

took our buckets out to sea where they will drift

among the stalled icebergs in the polar vortex, forever.

Is there a sea in your country? Are the crabs tender or tough? If we could do 911

all over again, what would we do differently? To answer that we must revisit

the crusades, wash our arms in petrol, read the tablet of Hammurabi,

trace our steps back at least to the Cuban missile crisis.

Perhaps avoid the Daily News?

Put on your mask, you look like a Republican. Like a woke sleeper, waking

to the horror of what you’ve done, what you’ve undone, like a cattle eating away at

the rainforest until the power goes out. Like a cattle in the post-world darkness

you believe a living universe begins at conception and ends at birth, yet

I will have to pull the gun from your cold dead hands before you’ll admit that yes,

men can have babies. All they have to do is wish upon a star, and

they happen to live upon a star, their skeletons an iron latticework of stardust.

Stars should be easy, that’s my point. But how can you see the stars

if you never look up, never look down, never look around?

You simply can’t. Until you can.