Dispatches from empire’s end #1

I’ve never lived through the end of an empire before, but I can imagine the beginning of the end is signaled by absurdity.

This is the first in an installment “Dispatches from empire’s end.” 

I’ve never lived through the end of an empire before. And I didn’t watch the debate but as  I read the highlight reels, I couldn’t help but think of the legend of Nero’s fiddle. It is the story of the incompetent, unhinged emperor who carelessly plays fiddle as Rome burns. I could picture scenes as absurd as the unsubstantiated story of Nero playing out with both Trump and Biden as Trump recited what sounded like slogans from an action-figure replica of himself and Biden drooled, blinked, and mumbled. The last two hundred and forty-eight years of violence, greed, and corruption have boiled down to two octogenarians with hair implants, one deranged and the other demented. 

I can see how part of the natural progression of the beginning of the end is the empire becoming a farce of itself.  As Nero played the fiddle, I can imagine that to anyone witnessing the scene, it seemed unreal. If apocalypse simply means to uncover here, in the example of the first presidential debate, we have the uncovering of all the nonsense that lies at the rotten core of this illegitimate nation-state. As the charades and corpses concealing its illegitimacy are excavated, the farce at the foundation of nation-states and empires that should not have ever existed is laid bare. I can see how near an empire’s end it becomes a mockery of itself so blatant for its citizens, its victims, to ignore. The line separating comedy from horror and tragedy has always been a thin one, in itself, troubling the comfort humans have been conditioned to find in binaries and bifurcations. As I look at the farces of both Biden and Trump, I see the inevitable continuation of this empire’s horrors in both of them, who shamelessly support the genocide of Palestinians, who inflate policing budgets to control and dissuade civil disobedience and necessary trouble, who dispose of immigrants behind the caged walls. Both of them have and will send the military to blow up others' homes to keep the pockets of fat bosses lined. Both stand as emblems of the tragedy, horror, and absurdity that founded and sustains this empire. And both, the deranged and the demented will act accordingly in this role.

The stakes may vary, but the game is very much the same. 

I’ll admit I laughed at the tweets. “Black” jobs. Alley cats. “[He] doesn’t know what he said.” Great one-liners. But I chuckled with an awareness that my laughter was likely a stress response stemming from some primordial evolution of the brain that causes humans to chuckle in the calm before the storm, to cling to moments of levity before the onslaught of panic. Between jokes, however, the underlying unease and uncertainty popped out. There was laughter and confusion, but there was also consternation. I read a lot of tweets about how “fucked” things were, how “fucked” we were or would be.  

But maybe we’re not “fucked,” maybe because the facade has finally begun to disintegrate we have the opportunity to actually break free from its chains. To claim a more just future. To be pushed beyond the limits of our imaginations and the confines of what we’ve known to actually create a different system. 

Maybe we’re only fucked if we keep depending on this system to save us. And once we realize it never has and never will, we have the chance to dismantle it and claim new freedoms beyond its limitations. 

I have not been invested in this system as legitimate for some time. I stopped believing it was capable of saving us from the ills of its creation years ago. As I witness the unraveling of lies and legends that had been so neatly wound, for the last two centuries, I am enveloped by an eerie calm. In this shroud, there is worry and there is hope. And I don’t think hope can find a home or truly take root without the former. I imagine what it felt like all the many times before when people have lived through what seemed to be the absolute destruction of their reality. I imagine the ancestors who witnessed this destruction finding the strength and will to keep living. I imagine the same wells of strength and will cradled somewhere deep within the center of my being. I reframe this laughter not as a means of looking away from the horror lurking around the corner of the future and lingering in the shadows of the past but as a way of underscoring it. 

Not too long ago, someone asked me why I would choose to have children in these times with a climate crisis and the fall of the sham some once believed as democracy and the empire at its helm. But if hope cannot seed itself unless there is the presence of uncertainty and if I know this reality is far from as good as it gets, if I vehemently still believe in the possibility of a better future and encourage others to see the openings of this collapse as crevices for the fruit of that better future to sprouts, if I truly believe that, why would I not believe in the capability of my descendants to be part of bringing that to fruition?