Welcome! A Bridge of Magpies is a blog about culture and politics. Comments are welcome. Also, prophesies, curses, symbolic executions. Presuming I survive, I will always respond.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Paint a Devil and Laugh



We find ourselves caught once again in a presidential election that is a game of unmasking.  A kind of  masquerade in which all candidates are too obviously costumed: adorned personages who hide the mundane or even hideous faces of a true politics beneath their finery.  The game becomes unmasking them by midnight—secret scandals brought to light, secret words that betray their true cynicism, moments of weakness, moments of hypocrisy.
This is the side show of shame—the electoral process of a nation filled with contempt for its government,  weary of its militaristic adventures, and shaken by the irreversible tick of history— a history that was once thought to have ended but has eerily continued on a posthumous basis.
Only the comedy of carnival redeems it, the feast of the flesh, the deep hollow laughter of our souls.  We need this release, this public catharsis, this unmasking of fools.  Secretly we understand that the democratic will exists now only as farce.  It is best forgotten, left on the other side of history. Our deepest demand now is for the comedy denied in the twilight of our techno-feudalism
Mitt Romney was sure to be unmasked.  He is nothing but masks and the only game with him is to get to the final mask and there find the ‘no face’ that is supporting the entire apparatus.  
But that ‘no face’ is not merely his lack of authenticity.  It is the face of empire and techno-feudalism.  We had best paint a devil over it, and laugh.

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