Ostrogoto [en]

Ubu in Washington

“But if they have dared so much, you have allowed everything.
The viler the oppressor is, the more disgraceful the slave is.”
Chateaubriand
 

Well, yes, we admit it. The news of Donald Trump’s victory in the race to the White House has provoked in us, who have lived for years at the peak of desperation, an uncontrollable excess of hilarity. The circle is closing. Meaning destroyed, imagination devastated, memory erased, dignity insulted, intelligence rebuffed, sensitivity mocked, here it is, idiocracy triumphing, spreading and ruling amid the dumbfounded dismay of the fine democratic souls (parliamentary or non-parliamentary as they may be). Ubu – that is, the most uncouth, fake, ignorant, clownish, vulgar authority, full of hyperbolic declamations, lustful only for pipsqueaks happy to repeat in chorus that they are “free, free, free to obey” – is everywhere today. He manages the institutions, administers the economy, commands politics, animates culture, leads protests. From the reactionary side passing through all the reformists to the subversive side, more abominable figures are emerging amid the consent of their fawning public.

Now that Ubu is entering the control room of the greatest global superpower, giving lie to the surveys that want the United States to be a country composed mostly of artistic Californian freaks and radical-chic Newyorkese intellectuals, everyone is forced to notice the glaring evidence right before their eyes. We are in the pshite up to our throats. Who knows, maybe there will even be some imbeciles who, not being able to  celebrate the first woman-as-woman to rise to the summit of slaughterers in stars and stripes, will rejoice in all this manure as historically inevitable and dialectically functional in advance of the little flowers that are coming. Not us. We are more and more ashamed of the disgracefulness of our slavery and of the impotence of our rage. To the point that we would almost want to toast to the success of the yankee billionaire, who seems to us to have all the papers in order to definitively launch this miserable humanity into the abyss it deserves, bringing it to extinction along with its laws that one is supposed to respect and its fictions that one cannot lose, along with its heavenly divinities to which one is supposed to pray and its nights that one should not miss, along with its merchandise that one is supposed to consume and its football championships that on just has to see, along with its compromises that one must not criticize and its court jesters that one is supposed to applaud.
No other end of the world is possible, none at all, as long as the need and the urgency of a reversal of trend, of a complete rejection of all that is state and authority does not take root in heads and in hearts and in hands.
 

[9/9/16]