Today is November 3rd, 2020.
I want it on the record that never, in the last four years, have I heard anyone around me ask themselves this question: “If I were in power, what kind of political opponent would people vote for in order to get rid of me?”
We don’t seem to realise that “four more years” of anything now also means four more years of us as a self-cognising hive. These elections are festivals, whereby we judge the humanity and competence of our future objects of scorn. In our world of endless public ridicule, we can elect only people who fear the world so much that they must rule it. We are all part of the world that the paranoid politician dreams of destroying.
It has become the function of the politician to embody the disavowed arrogance of the voter. When someone — however implicitly — gives us their vote of confidence, they have their own safety in mind first; they want their suffering made legitimate. Only predators and saints take this for granted, and only saints suffer by knowing it.
Well-fed animals forget what it means to starve; starved animals forget what it means to have enough. These are not mutually exclusive truths, unless you present them as alternatives in a ballot box.
We are never simply voting someone out of office; we are declaring ourselves superior to the past, while pretending to have mastered the present.
BEATING THE POISONED DRUM 