Trump and the Banality of Satire

Of all years in recent memory, none have been richer in satire than 2016. Animated by the candidacy of a reality TV star and the deification of satire as a political tool among self-satisfied liberals–itself incubated by their trepidation regarding actual activism, the real condescension rich liberals have for poor and working class peoples,  and their enjoyment of late-night political satire such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report–satire has proliferated through liberal spheres, if often vulgarly and with little subtlety, especially when focused around the figure of Donald Trump. This, I think, is a poorly-thought-out strategy–and one which might bite the liberals back by making satire and its targets banal.

Satire is often treated by liberals as a worthy tool of propaganda. However, with our current electorate, people who respond positively to satire tend to be the people who already agreed with its stance before watching. People who did not already agree tend to instead grow more hostile towards this stance and become more defensive. Thus, satire is not an effective tool of political propaganda–it merely preaches to the choir. Remember the Kabarett, that Weimar-era institution of satire, that was so effective in preventing the rise of Hitler! Self-satisfied liberals often bemoan the “post-fact era” in American politics, but this presupposes an era before propaganda, which is naught more than myth.

Yet the myth that satire is effective remains widespread, and it breeds complacency. If the hostilities and contradictions within our society that produced figures like Donald Trump could be eliminated by merely calling him “Drumpf”, there would be no need for any other form of engagement. Furthermore, this makes things which liberals would like to show as real dangers, as real threats, into banal objects of mockery, which risks encouraging complacency.

Perhaps the epitome of this trend were the statues of Donald Trump unveiled, naked, in major American cities earlier this week. Despite clearly being in this tradition of satire, the actual message of this seems to lack any of the complexity or subtlety of proper satire. The message is quite straightforward: Donald Trump has no penis (something we can neither confirm nor deny), which, according to the normative (and highly misogynistic, intersexist, and transphobic) narrative robs him of masculinity and thus of any ability to be taken seriously. No longer is he something to be terrified of–now he is just some banal amusement, just a curiosity for the self-satisfied liberal to laugh at before preaching.

Boondoggle in Seattle

If there’s one word I’d use to summarize the tenure of Mayor Murray, it’d be “disappointment”. But perhaps that’s wrong–to be disappointed by something, you’d have to expect something beforehand. And yet, despite my general lack of expectations from Mayor Murray when he came into office, he still managed to disappoint me with a consistent pattern of resisting or rejecting worthwhile (and often vitally important) projects and pushing, or at least, signing on to, boondoggle.

Now, I’d like to begin with a disclaimer: I don’t blame Mayor Murray for all of our problems. In fact, I genuinely think that he is trying to make an effort to oppose the NIMBYs who seem to have a strangle-hold on Seattle housing policy. The problems with our housing policy are the same problems most West Coast cities seem to be facing these years, and have been aggravated not by an incompetent mayor but by the indomitable political power of Seattle’s single-family, middle-to-upper-class, white neighborhoods–a political machine as strong as New York’s Tammany Hall at the height of its power, but without even the veneer of populism and concern–and their glorified megaphone, the Seattle Times.I hope that the attempt to destroy the reactionary neighborhood councils succeeds–neighborhood activism should not be for the haves but for the have-nots. I merely want to emphasize that I’m not here criticizing his attempts at challenging Seattle’s Tammany.

What I’m criticizing here is instead those many, many times where he acts as the agent for Seattle’s Tammany, refusing funds and taxation for worthwhile projects but creating similar taxation proposals for boondoggle. Let’s begin with the best-known, and one of the earlier, examples: Bertha. The issue of the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement has a long history, but from the 2007 advisory ballot onwards, we notice a common theme: popular opposition to the building of either an elevated structure or a tunnel (with improvements to public transportation often fielded as an alternative to be funded), and hamfisted efforts by powerful interests, including Seattle’s Tammany, to push the building of a tunnel (though the state government preferred the elevated structure). Mayor McGinn, throughout his tenure, resisted the tunnel option, despite the opposition of the city council. Mayor Murray capitulated, and now it’s estimated that we’ll be spending $4.25 billion, with an estimated $223 million cost overrun to be footed by the Seattle taxpayer, who might prefer other projects, such as improvement in public transit. This is a highway tunnel, so it’s an investment in automobile usage and thus a contribution to global warming.   Let us not forget that this was never approved by the citizens of Seattle–who, after all, rejected both options for replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct in 2007. The construction is now three (3) years behind schedule.. The (nearly comical) news surrounding this boondoggle tunnel-boring project has somewhat unfairly soured public opinion on other tunnel projects (such as tunnels for Link Light Rail, a project whose time has come), which do not involve such massive and unreliable implements as “Bertha” and often finish ahead of time and under budget, despite the massive smear campaign against them perpetrated by Seattle’s Tammany and their conservative allies (most prominently, Tim Eyman).

Now, for residents of our fair city, the Bertha nonsense should be old news. But Mayor Murray has backed another boondoggle project as of late: a $160 million (though recently shaved to the much smaller amount of $149 million) police station for the SPD’s north precinct. The first question is of course, why does Seattle need to spend more money on its police department? Even discarding philosophical and political objections to the institution of the police, there seems to be no reason to expand it, especially as the SPD (as well as police departments across America in general) is already very well-funded. Crime rates have been dropping for the past three decades (and that’s even accepting the dubious-at-best, though widely-held, assumption that spending on police has anything to do with crime rates), and the city has many other needs which perhaps deserve more public spending. Take, for example, the shortage of housing in the face of growth (and the concomitant rise in homelessness, that even Murray claimed was an “emergency”), or the expansion of public transportation at a time when the state government is trying to kill it through cuts, or the poor educational opportunities among the youth of South Seattle and South King County as a whole. Even if you do decide that you want an extra police station, $160 million is unreasonable. It, to put it frankly, is boondoggle, nothing more, nothing less. Still, five members of the City Council have decided to rush down the massively pared down $149 million proposal, with no input by the people of Seattle.

To add to this shameless frittering of public funds towards the SPD, Murray has now shown that he is indeed willing to tax businesses–not for public transportation, nor municipal broadband, nor enforcement of labour laws, or housing, though. For those, unfortunately, Murray has said there’s no money to be had, especially not from taxes on business. But there is money, to be collected from businesses (specifically, according to The Stranger, from increases to the business and occupation tax and business licence fee), for hiring 200 new cops by 2019. Again, the necessity of this seems questionable at best, even bracketing away the issues of police brutality and white supremacy in America. As The Stranger notes, this proposal is looked upon with some approval by an institution of Seattle’s Tammany, the Chamber of Commerce.

So now we ask the following question of Mayor Murray: why do you deserve a second term? For, after all, he has announced that he is seeking re-election next year. Clearly, he has shown himself to have no understanding of the issues facing this city, nor of how to manage priorities or the public purse. Unless a sufficiently convincing reason arrives in the next year, we urge all Seattle voters to oppose Murray’s re-election

 

On the Presumably Imminent Rightward Drift of the Democratic Party Leadership

After the past two weeks of inflated press pageantry, I, personally, feel quite fed up with this current election, and thus have decided not to write about voting, the relative strengths and weaknesses of the candidates, or the moral outrage that we are all supposed to perform when we hear the name “Donald Trump”. My view on the election can be neatly summed up with this excellent piece by Fredrik DeBoer, and I resist the emotionally manipulative tactics of liberals to browbeat leftists into submission. Thus, I’d like to dedicate some time talking about a different, though related, issue which may plague the Democratic party in the future. This issue is not a new one–it has, arguably, been part of the party for at least twenty years. Perhaps calling it an issue is a bit parochial on my part, though, for it is only an issue for fellow leftists and those who sympathize with us–a better term might be “trend” or “tendency”. Specifically, I predict that in the coming years, the Democratic Party leadership will drift further to the Right, especially on economic and foreign policy issues, and suppress their left-wing with rhetoric repurposed from the more antagonistic interactions between the Old Left and New Left.

As I’ve said before, there is a good historical basis for this trend, one  with which anyone who followed the Democratic primary season this year and the rhetoric that accompanied it should be familiar. Specifically, through the 1980s and 1990s, the dominant elements of the Democratic Party, including the Clintons, abandoned even their moderate, reformist, social-democratic posture (which we may call Fabianism or Keynesianism) and accepted all the key tenets of neoliberalism.

A brief aside: Liberals claim the term “neoliberalism” is a snarl word, but this is to confuse the wideness of its applicability with a looseness of meaning. Indeed, if we understand neoliberalism as a dominant political-economical paradigm within late capitalism (one which is in some sense a revival of and extension of Victorian liberalism, or Gladstonianism as we may call it), and if we understand the rest of society as being broadly based on a political-economical infrastructure, it becomes quite clear why the term is so widely used: this paradigm appears everywhere and influences everything within our society.

If we look back at the history of the party, we can see this trend very clearly. After the 1984 landslide victory of Ronald Reagan, elements of the Democratic Party decided to acquiesce to Reaganomics and its ideological bases (economic value as the measure of all things, “dependency” and not poverty as a problem, adoption of “tough on crime” policies and posturing &c), but with a human face, called the “Third Way”, supposedly beyond left and right (not to be confused, of course, with the similar term Third Position, which refers to Nazis who also claimed to be beyond left and right). This newfound centrism, it was hoped, would win over moderate voters, which, then as now, have been largely hyped as being a huge portion of the American populace which decides elections–the Nixonian ‘silent majority’. In 1985, this coalition became a real group–the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)–of politicians and consultants. Many of these were from the South and West, and were traditionally considered conservative Democrats–if they were in power now, they’d be called Blue Dogs. Members of the DLC in the mid-to-late-80s included the Joe Biden (then Senator from Delaware), Al Gore (then Senator from Tennessee), and Bill Clinton (then Governor of Arkansas). After the 1988 election, when Michael Dukakis lost due to an intense negative campaign by George H.W. Bush (who ironically wanted a “kinder and gentler” nation) focused on crime, the New Democrats emphasized their toughness on crime–Bill Clinton, for instance, being head of the DLC in 1990 and 1991, made a point of opportunistically executing Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally ill inmate who had saved the dessert from his last meal “for later”, during his 1992 campaign for President to show just how committed he was to the “war on crime” and the “war on drugs”. When he was elected, Clinton signed NAFTA (whose premises were that white-collar professionals were worth protecting but blue-collar proletarians were expendable), the 1994 omnibus Crime Bill (where he and his wife relied heavily on racist stereotypes and which has greatly contributed to mass incarceration, but which has been, in retrospect, shown to not have had much to do with dropping crime rates), the 1996 welfare reform act (what he later considered to be his signature piece of domestic policy, leading to the further impoverishment of many people–relying on the racist, misogynistic Reaganite myth of the welfare queen, which was not questioned but furthered, and the Reaganite premise that it was not poverty to be solved but “dependency”), and the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall (a definite contributor to the massive fraud perpetrated by the financial industry and the subsequent collapse of the global economy).

All of this may seem to be old news, but I’d like to emphasize one element of this tale. While the New Democrats began as a strategic attempt to wrest conservative districts, senate seats, and states in the South and inland West, their complete acceptance of the premises of Reaganism spread to the North and to the West Coast. From the 1990s onwards, the South and inland West no longer elected New Democrats, but rather conservative Republicans–and the North and West Coast, who earlier were bases of support for progressives, would now find themselves confined to the Overton window defined by the New Democrats. While the New Democrats defended themselves as an attempt to destroy the misgivings the “moderate masses” would have about voting Democrat, quiet the GOP by making deals with them and incrementally push the country leftwards (witness the Democratic party rags glorifying this strategy through the all-too-gleeful quoting of Max Weber’s “slow boring of hard boards”, as if that were to be celebrated in an age of massive and imminent climate change among other disasters), they instead pushed the Democratic Party to the Right. The GOP would soon define even the conservatism of the New Democrats to be “left-wing extremism”; any short-term strategic benefits to be had from triangulation would soon vanish. The Left of the Democratic Party tried to re-assert itself at the turn of the millennium, but Clintonites were able to purge it of any influence it might have had first through the incessant pushing of an incredible misreading of the 2000 Presidential election (I don’t want to elucidate why this common view is a misreading just here–suffice it to say, it was Rehnquist’s decision not to recuse himself in  Bush v. Gore, the Butterfly Ballot, and the fact that Gore was, during the election, virtually indistinguishable from Bush–indeed, criticizing Bush for not supporting “nation building”!–not the few votes who went to Nader, as if Gore was entitled to those votes anyway) and the “unification” following 9/11.

This process is repeating itself in 2016. Many commentators have noted that the 2016 DNC reminded them quite eerily of past RNCs–anti-war activists were shouted down with chants of “USA! USA!”, for instance. The only person allowed to criticize the platform was Michael Bloomberg–from the Right, of course–because Clinton is not portraying herself as a genuine alternative to conservative Beltway politics but instead embracing the Beltway establishment and pandering to it. The neo-cons which the Democratic Party denounced in the Bush Administration are now its top foreign policy advisers. As the Intercept notes, Clinton and her Party are using the age-old Far-Right tactic of McCarthy and the John Birch Society, from where all enemies–opponents on the Right, critics on the Left–are either active agents or “useful idiots” of the Kremlin, despite Clinton herself having just as significant ties to Moscow, as if that were in itself a sin.

Now comes the part where I’m supposed to give some prescriptions to solve this problem. But unfortunately, I don’t see a way out of this. No amount of explaining that pandering to Beltway conservatives is not only cynical careerism but also ineffective as an electoral strategy (the rise of Trump on a mixture of economic anxieties and “economic anxieties” itself proves this) will change the basic modus operandi of the Democratic Party: be just mildly less bad than the Republican Party.

What Lies Beyond Ashcombe

Have you ever come across knowledge that you wish you had never had? Knowledge inaccessible to humanity–and for good reason, too. Things, to use a well-worn turn-of-phrase, Man Was Not Meant to Know. They exist and I know them: at least, I know them as much as a human being, or what was once a human being, can say truthfully to know. And I still doubt as to whether what I know can be said to be knowing, or just merely another shadow-play upon the cave wall. As of late, I have had experiences that have convinced me of these views, and I am writing this document in an attempt, however feeble, to communicate what has been revealed to me. It occurs to me that this may not be quite possible: that now I breathe a different air than others of my kind, and that these experiences may not be communicable, but I will not forgo an attempt. The conclusions I have reached may appear mundane in our 21st century, when the pessimist philosophies of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Cioran et al are already old hat, so to speak, but that is merely because we have only read them–understanding them as nothing but thought-experiments: to grasp what I know now is far more unsettling. One might say that “the world is not ready” for pessimism–and indeed, never has been. I understand that most people, when reading this, will consider it no more than a delusion, or, at best, a clever fiction. I do not blame them, it’s a perfectly natural response, especially when this is all the evidence one could present. But consider this: if (say) the voice of a God were to speak to you and you alone, would not others consider you deluded if you were to share what you heard–especially if it is something they do not believe or want to believe?
Then comes the question: can I trust my own senses, that which I have seen and now know to be true? For the history of my consciousness betrays my unreliability as a narrator of experience. Perhaps indeed I was merely “seeing things”, though I can scarce understand how: it certainly would reflect better upon the world.
Let me start over. I am a student of philosophy at Fincliffe University, in the city of Ruesvale, in the county which bears its name, north of Anacortes but south of Bellingham. My disposition towards the world has always been fundamentally optimistic. Yes, even though I saw little to justify it philosophically, I could not help but remain convinced in the myth of progress, of human importance and the infiniteness (or rather, unboundedness) of our understanding, and of the primacy of the natural sciences and of their methodology in driving forth progress. In short, despite philosophically and intellectually understanding the world differently, at heart I instinctively believed in a liberal, optimistic view of the world, and acted in such a manner: I was a perfect Whig, though I would deny it.
But though I am a student, it did not devour the rest of my life: I had friends and hobbies. In particular, I enjoyed hiking, camping, and road trips–and Ruesvale is perhaps the best place on Earth to partake in these activities. Of course, I didn’t do them alone, but with a group of friends, though unfortunately, I am quite sure that they will not be able to corroborate this experience in particular. We had decided to make plans on one particular June afternoon. June in Ruesvale is very pleasant: instead of being the first trumpet of a harsh and humid summer, it is instead the last flowering of the flourishing greenery of Spring. One could count on a fresh breeze of cool air, the chirping of birds of all sorts, and, occasionally, the wonderful odor that heralds a light rain. The vegetation, far from the estival brown grass, is in a wonderful, lush greenery: a greenery that surrounds everything. So when my friends asked me if I should like to join them camping just after finals’ week, I whole-heartedly agreed. We had decided to eschew our usual grounds and explore throughout the valley for our campsite, though specifically in the more secluded, wooded areas near the foothills to the East, far from significant settlements.
On the appointed day, we had gathered at eleven, grabbed lunch, and loaded our van with all that we had packed–all that we needed–for the trip. Our camping spot would be near the Eveswold Hills, not too far from the banks of the Branchuck River. We’d be just a few miles east of the village of Ashcombe and right next to a wonderful woods. As we drove out of Ruesvale (the university town, not the valley it’s named for), we noticed that each subsequent road we turned on seemed ever older and in worse repair than the previous one, though, of course, only slightly. Quite quickly one could see the population growing sparser and sparser as we moved from city to town to village, settlement to settlement–and the grasses and marshes and woods surrounding both sides of the road growing ever wilder and wilder. The chain stores slowly thinned out, the restaurants disappeared: the last to go were the gas stations and convenience stores, but soon even the latter were replaced by their ancestors, the general store of yore.
Finally, we hobbled across a rickety old bridge across the Branchuck to Ashcombe, a village that, it would seem, was preserved in formaldehyde, for its derelict buildings seem not to have been replaced or repaired for decades. They were all built in the vernacular form of the Gothic Revival: Carpenter Gothic, as it were, betraying an origin in the late nineteenth century. This was the quietest of all the towns we drove through: indeed, it seemed suffused by a silence altogether unnatural. Still, it was clearly inhabited–that is, we did see one person in the town. She was an elderly woman, with a gaunt face, shriveled and wrinkled with age, her hair white and long. All the grace and warmth one might typically find amongst the elderly was absent in her face, which betrayed nothing: no emotions. One might suspect it to be a mere mask. The lack of any general store or convenience store worried one of my friends, but the worry was not considered by us a significant concern. After all, we had packed everything we needed, and we didn’t want to spend our time in town, especially after seeing its decrepitude.
Finally, at about 3 o’clock, we found that the road ended into a parking lot. We disembarked here, and began to unload the van. A hill blocked the view of the forest; we would have to haul everything beyond it to set up camp. It was grueling work, but it only took about an hour for us to bring all our supplies, and not much longer to set up the tents. The rest of the evening was our time to spend freely, as we had brought firewood. Two of my friends decided to hike with each other through the forest; they promised they’d be back in two hours. A third was in her tent, tuning her guitar. I sat near the pit where we would light our fire, reading a book of lyric poetry, though soon I grew bored of that and decided to return to a hobby of mine I’d been cultivating on these camping trips, namely, the identification of flora and fungi. All things considered, it was a wonderful afternoon. One could hear the swift, yet calm and rhythmic flow of the Branchuck, interspersed with the constant chirping of birds. A soft, cool wind blew, caressing the land and its inhabitants. The Sun was cloaked by clouds, relieving us of its usual overbearing heat, but this did not shroud the land in darkness, and indeed one could still rather easily tell where the Sun lay in the sky. The greenery we had found ourselves surrounded by was some of the most beautiful, I think, that has been seen on this Earth. That did not mean that it was harmless, for upon closer inspection, one would find an abundance of aconite, digitalis, daphne, and the invasive poison-hemlock among the vivid grasses and tall pines. Interspersed with these poisonous plants were fungi of all sorts, including a large fairy ring of what appeared to be death-caps (though it could also be Smith’s lepidella), large clusters of autumn skullcap, false morel, deadly parasol, fly agaric, wavy caps, along with two species that required use of my guidebook: Rubroboletus pulcherrimus and Pholiotina rugosa. Soon after I had noted all of these various species of mushroom down, the Sun began to dip closer and closer to the Western horizon, and I began to wonder when my friends would re-appear. As it did so, we were treated to one of the most vivid of sunsets, for the clouds had dispersed, allowing us to see the sky in all its hues, from blue, to purple, to red, to salmon-pink, to yellow and orange. The two of us who remained at camp were transfixed by it, watching as closely as we could for what seemed like hours but could have just as easily been seconds. In every moment of this magnificent procession of the Sun there was another nuanced shade or hue to discern, another tint to appear and to disappear. If I were still as limited as I were then, I might have called this sunset an ineffable experience, but that would be to devalue what is truly ineffable. Behind us, the moon had begun to rise; it was gibbous and waxing that night.
It was only when our friends returned that I stopped staring at the sunset and the festivities began. We lit up the campfire, and as it roared, cooked our dinner. After eating, we serenaded each other with songs and listened to stories of our friends’ hikes. We opened bottles of beer, and began to drink; all was joyous. Then suddenly, one of them pointed towards the stars. All of us, in unison, looked up, and saw an uncommon, but not strange, phenomenon: a shooting star. But this was different from other shooting stars, as its color seemed to shift moment after moment, and it moved along an irregular, wobbling path, until it suddenly disappeared. At first, this did not seem to us an omen–indeed, if one were to ask us of its significance, it might be considered a good sign, or a sign indeed of drunken hallucination. But in retrospect, that can be said to have been the start of all our troubles.
My friends all slept soundly that night, and I would have as well, were it not for the fact that at some ungodly hour I was awakened. At first I heard the loud sound of a hunting-horn in the distance, and it startled me from my sleep. The snores of my friends attested to the fact that I alone had been awakened, which I found strange, for the horn sounded loud enough to wake up anyone. I attempted to return to sleep, but, after only a few minutes of rest, I was interrupted again, this time by the rhythmic pulsing of drums in the distance, accompanied soon after with horns and flutes. After another attempt at ignoring the sound, I unzipped the tent and decided to investigate it. Almost immediately, I could smell the faint odor of ozone, emanating from the same place as the sounds. Taking my flashlight, I followed the odor and the sounds, which grew ever stronger and ever louder, until I found myself at the edge of the woods. I looked back, in the vain hope that my friends might have woken up, then continued through the dense and dark woods, with only a flashlight, whose battery, I feared, might fail at any given moment. Eventually, in the distance, I found a third sensation to accompany the sound, which by now had become comprehensible as an utterly discordant and pain-inducing form of “music”, and the smell, which by now had driven out all the scents of the forest: dancing lights in the distance. I looked up at the stars once again, and noticed that something, something–a something which I could not place, neither now nor then–was wrong about them. They had been re-arranged; this was not the sky I had grown up seeing, nor the sky I saw on camps before. I discarded that information and walked ever quicker towards the dancing lights. Soon it all began to overwhelm me: the dissonant, pulsating, terrible “music” rising to a fever pitch and growing so loud that I put my fingers in my ears, the dancing lights growing so bright that I closed my eyes, letting only that overpowering scent guide me.
Then all sounds and lights and smells stopped together. What was left was an eerie silence; not even the normal night sounds could be heard: not the hooting of the owl, nor the croaking of the frogs, not even the slow whistle of the wind. All I could perceive was that the trees that were in front of me were dead. I walked past them and was suddenly confronted with a clearing, with a path marked by two columns of withered trees. Suddenly, it was no longer night, but bright midday–and yet the sky was neither clear nor cloudy, but in a vibrant mixture of ever-changing hues. In front of me was a magnificent city with spires that rivaled even the tallest redwood. And around the city were seven great walls and gates, each of a different color and material, all of which were open. The first was black, then red, then orange, then blue, then green, then yellow, then white. But none of the materials were those I could readily identify: indeed, they seemed dissimilar to any I had ever seen or heard of. Each gate was yet grander and more commanding than the last, from the simple black exterior rampart with a checkpoint to the ostentatious white gate, complete with extraordinary carved details and a portcullis, half-open. As I walked through the gates, I noticed that the dirt of the forest had been replaced by a cobblestone floor. In front of me were a whole array of buildings with some familiar architectural features on their facades (though with an eclectic mixture of styles from across history, from the Cyclopean masonry of the ancients, to classical Greek and Roman orders, to the Romanesque arches, Gothic windows and buttresses–some, it seemed, coming from nowhere–and vaults &c &c), but bizarre and complex shapes. Resulting from this, the streets of the city seemed quite like a maze. As I walked through these hardscrabble streets, I noticed that the buildings were so tall that one could not see past them. The sorts of stones used to construct these buildings resembled none I had seen before, and there were so many different types of them that I could not list them here. None of the windows showed anything, it seemed, besides pure blackness beyond.
Soon I began to realize that this city appeared abandoned. No one else–nothing else–walked the streets. There seemed to be no evidence, besides the existence of the city, for inhabitance. As I turned, I looked behind me and saw that the city seemed to have shifted–and as I went around a pole, I did not see where I had come from–I concluded, then, that the geometry of this dread place was non-Euclidean. And then suddenly, after walking through a winding street, I stubbed my toe on a stone. Bending down, I saw that I had not hit a ramp or a set of stairs: rather, what had hurt my toe was a gravestone–or what appeared to be a gravestone–in the street. This seemed curious, but not noteworthy, at the time. I continued to walk, and after what seemed like an hour of navigating this surreal, eerily quiet, city, I came across a town square. To my horror, then, I found that it was studded with gravestones, which did not form neat rows but instead were scattered about, jutting out at odd angles, often so close to one another that one might worry about collisions. It appeared no longer to be a town square, but a cemetery–but the buildings and the paved streets remained visible. I wondered, idly, if this was a trick on my brain–a hallucination caused by alcohol–but I couldn’t accept this conclusion. I’m fairly certain now as then that alcohol does not cause one to hallucinate dead cities. In front of me was the tallest spire in the city; a great tower of white stone, whose grotesque shape defied classification.
Suddenly, the bells of the tower began to ring. Their sound was at first quiet, but as more began to ring, their tintinnabulation grew louder and louder, and still louder. What was worse, they were not in tune with one another, and so the result was a dissonant, loud chiming of ever-more unpleasant–indeed, painful–sounds. The white sheen of the building began to shine with such brightness that I felt I might go blind. I closed my eyes and my ears, only to open them again when there was quiet. But when I did, I was no longer in the dead city, but back in the forest, dark and deep. I looked behind me, and I saw the campfire. It had grown large and, in fear of danger, I began to run back to camp, as quickly as my legs could carry me. It was by a stroke of luck that I was able to get through without tripping over a root, stone or bush. Frantically, I woke up my friends; one of them had packed a fire extinguisher. Groggily, he opened the zipper to his tent; I grabbed the extinguisher and put out the fire. Slowly the adrenaline dispersed as I returned to my tent, and we returned to sleep. Everyone was safe, the danger was dispersed.
The next morning, I awoke somewhat earlier than my friends. All of a sudden, the memories of last night came back to me, but I had trouble deciding whether they were real or a dream. On the one hand, it had appeared too detailed and to have engaged with all avenues of sensory perception, so it seemed real–but on the other hand, its contents were surreal and I couldn’t ask anyone to corroborate it. I decided, then, to settle the issue by seeing if I could find the dead cities once more in the light of day. Once more I entered the woods, trying to track the direction I had walked in, but soon found myself disoriented and lost. Each direction seemed just as good as the next, and it was impossible to distinguish one growth of trees from another. When I realized this, I decided to head back instead of getting lost. I rationalized to myself that this must have been a dream, and for a few weeks, I could believe that.
But three weeks ago, this theory began to crumble. One after the other, each of my friends fell ill to a mysterious disease. No one else fell ill–or at least, others who fell ill clearly did not have the same disease, for not only did they exhibit different symptoms from those my friends experienced, doctors could easily diagnose the diseases others faced. No, when my friends fell ill, their disease had extremely recognizable symptoms, but these symptoms could not be easily correlated to any known disease. Nor did the disease seem contagious. First, the afflicted would develop coughs–but their temperature was uncommonly low. This would be accompanied by a mild, but chronic paresthesia. After a week or so, they would begin to develop nausea, a dry mouth, and a light-headedness. They would begin to complain about not being able to hear properly–sounds were both too loud, and also ringing in their heads. Soon this would be followed by ataxia and mania, and then swollen lymph nodes before finally developing a number of unique symptoms, each far more serious than the last. Doctors tried to find the cause of this curious illness, but have not been able to, as of yet, find a credible explanation. None have yet died, but I worry they are close. Only I have been spared, and the only explanation I can think of was that this had something to do with the city I visited. I am unable to ascertain why that might spare me–or at least, I was unable to ascertain why that might spare me. There is another friend of mine, who dabbles in the occult. I have told her this story, and she claims that this is an auspicious sign for me–that I have been transformed in ways I might never be able to understand–that I have witnessed evidence of what humanity has been fundamentally unable to subconsciously accept. There is a lie at the heart of our experience. No matter how much we consciously realize our insignificance in the grand scheme of things, subconsciously we still hold to the tenet that man is the measure of everything. We have been unable to come to grasp the nothingness that underlies everything–the nothingness whence we came and to which we will return. That there are things older and grander than us, beings whose presence we cannot see or smell or touch, for they express themselves as nothingness, but whose effects are quite visible. The Earth is not our belonging–and those elder beings will return to take back what was once theirs, and what will be theirs. I am to be the vessel by which this will reach humanity, for our imminent destruction, for our cities to be reduced to the dead city found in the woods. I do not like this burden, but it is mine to bear. Now it is time for me to meet my gods.