Commanding and Commanded
without reference to actual scriptures
So Texas schoolrooms are going to be required to start displaying a copy of the Ten Commandments (no translation specified), presumably legible from across the room, for the edification of the schoolchildren of this benighted territory—an act not so much of indoctrination as of domination by a political party, the Trumpist Republicans, who seem to regard their recent electoral razorgain as an irreversible sea-change in governance & social norms.
They are pissing on the place to mark ownership.
These are not people of books or of a Book (certainly not to the point of expecting their leaders to adhere to it in any way, content-wise), but modern tribalists who have fastened onto the Christian Bible as one of their staunchest signifiers, right up there with the J-word, tattoos, high-riding pickup trucks, & exclusive-or PinkBlue™ gender ideology anti-gender ideology. They do not read their Book, they brandish it; their behavior reveals what they really believe in: the in-group that is above the law, & out-groups that are subject to the law, i.e. classical fascism.
This has all been said before & often better. If those of us who took the former neoliberal dispensation for granted, unequal & unfair as we knew it to be, yet cannot quite shake off a constant feeling of unreality about what has lately transpired, that is only because, for all intents & purposes, it is—for a catastrophe that took place on the level of meanings (or, the Imaginary), is being literally mirrored by actions & perceptions that take place in the real world. Call it the “Zombie Apocalypse.”
A gradual gamification had crept into processes whose outcomes & strategies remain profoundly ungamelike in nature, & it was promoted or hastened by several groups for their own various reasons. They do not even all call it by the same name. But because the replacement of social life by social media in a last desperate burst of technophiliac optimism (the true affordances of hope being denied or diverted) was early-on recognized by a handful of malign tinkerers, thence weaponized by algorithms & monopoly-consolidation, we have galloped to the point (with a little help from old-school mendacity & actual cheating) where it seems like reality itself has been fractured into mutually-incompatible belief-domains.
One declares itself victor. The other struggles to pin blame.
Looking back, it’s obvious where we could have refused this path, at numerous points where a choice was presented & everytime the wrong direction ended up being embraced. And as alternatives fell by the wayside, the final outcome began to gather its aura of inevitability—on the symbolic level, marked by terms we all (regardless of affiliation) feel obliged to use to describe this scene.
It wouldn’t be enough to refuse the vocabulary (in images as much as in words); we also need to address the reasons why it felt so right to gamify. The things that weren’t working anymore, that we turned away from in disgust as irreparable (even before their replacements loomed). This involves reinterpreting false histories in which things were alright & we ourselves okay-citizens, menaced suddenly by an irruption from the Nineteen-Thirties.
Fortunately material conditions depend on a matrix not subject to the vagaries of our delusional wishes, & when false ideas are enacted mistakenly, their Nemesis punishment does not wait on being called or named. Planes fall from the sky. The rightful anger of people who were robbed will erupt. A period will ensue in which we go on using words without much basis in the things we see, till at last a few of us start calling them more truthfully, & later the rest take them up. And they will become the shapes we always knew. And this will be called a bad dream we awoke from.
The Commandments on the wall, unread throughout this whole debacle save by an occasional puzzled pupil, we shall see in a different light. I can’t say now what that light will be, for it doesn’t yet exist. I only know it will not be the same.
3-23-25