This week I received an email with one of the irregular posts by the Public Professor, whose writing I cherish. Akim Reinhardt, whose shifts in careers and locations exceed even mine, has the gift to combine learnedness with humor and a way of simplifying complex issues in his writing so that pretty much everyone gets it. What could be easily didactic and preaching, instead often elicits a “Man, so clever and so true!” reaction in me.
When I saw the title – The Barbarians Won – I immediately thought of one of my favorite poems, C.P. Cavafy’s Waiting for the Barbarians, prescient lines written in 1898. The poem inspired Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) a novel by South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. Both poem and novel are considered crucial metaphors in literary reactions to western colonialism and the war on terror.
But Cavafy’s poem was sardonic, while Reinhardt’s latest musings seemed atypically pessimistic (and they were written even before the abysmal farce happening at the SKCOTUS (Supreme Kangaroo Court) hearings this week.) He grants the Barbarians their overall victory and ends with a line, “I should leave.”
I agree that an occasional time-out, a pause to replenish, is restorative and necessary to keep up the good fight – to wit my last month which filled me with joy, among others, watching the ravens. But leave?
The barbarians have won.
The barbarians and their fascination with gadgets have won, the newest one appearing daily. Our eyes forever fixed on blinking toys.
The barbarians and their craving for the now have won, clocks all clicking in time. We march, bedraggled, to the sound of clanging bells.
The barbarians and their printed words have won, page after page stacked and bound. No matter what we want, they cite a passage of denial; no matter what we avoid, they read a mandate.
The barbarians and their lust for shiny trinkets have won, their new world a wasteland of flashy baubles. The stars are washed out above us.
The barbarians and their cars have won, sleek tonnage racing along endlessly. Road kill marks the miles.
The barbarians and their lines have won, squares and rectangles laid about and stacked all around. The circle of life has been shaved and shoved into corners.
The barbarians and their foods have won, boxed mac n cheese and flour tortilla tacos washed down with Diet Coke. We check our cholesterol and blood sugar.
The barbarians and their fashions have won, fast and ready to wear. There’s elastic in our jeans and advertisements on our shirts and hats.
The barbarians and their time have won, clocks spinning and blinking and buzzing. We march on their schedule.
The barbarians and their bar-bar talk have won, countless languages stricken from mouths and ears. We can think only this way.
The barbarians and their arrogance have won, their shouted assertions offered up as commandments. No one can be right who disagrees with them.
The barbarians and their freedom have won, forever doing whatever they want. Individuals left alone to fend for themselves, to decide what miseries they will inflict upon others or endure alone.
The barbarians and their colors have won, white and gold exalted. The black and brown discarded.
The barbarians and their bureaucracies have won, victory in triplicate. We stand in line, waiting to fill out forms and be bound in red tape.
The barbarians and their erasures have won, clean scrubbings of the past. Can we still remember what the barbarians did?
The barbarians have won, and now we are waiting for them to leave.
I should leave.
Generally, I think departing and declaring victory for the bad guys is premature. Let’s focus on some positive occurrences across the last weeks to keep us from despairing:
- Ukraine Aid made it through congress, better late than never.
- More student loan forgiveness
- The FTC banned the use of non-compete clauses, huge bonus for labor.
- The DOL strengthened overtime rules
- The FCC restored net neutrality
- The DOT expanded protections for airline passengers
- The School Voucher scam in TN failed to make it through this legislative period.
- The Arizona house repealed the 1864 law (even if it took three tries to get there.)
- Major American Unions endorsed the democratic Presidential candidate.
- Trump LOSES his bid for a new trial or a judgment overturning the more than $80 million verdict for E. Jean Carroll in the second trial.
- Even though it looks like a majority of SC judges are perfectly happy to reinstall a monarch (as long as he is not a Democrat) the proceedings in other law arenas seem to indicate that accountability is still on the table. An Arizona Grand Jury charged 11 AZ Republicans and seven former Trump aides with felonies around a fake elector scheme. In NYC, the trial proceedings reveal a flailing, shrinking, feeble defendant – regardless of outcome, the image of a cult leader is starting to crack.
If you have time to read, here is a fascinating essay by John Ganz on the ways Trump embodies two different personae – the actual banal criminal (as seen in the Manhattan proceedings), and the sovereign king with impunity for all crimes (as discussed in the SC proceedings.) The man will eventually succumb, but the idol might very well be enshrined into our laws, if the extremist have their way.
If this is not enough of cheer leading, we can always turn to Marc Aurelius, who was born on this day in 121 AD: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I’ll go watch the birds some more…. while listening to music about ravens.
