The Looking Glass Revolution (Beltane 2018)

The Looking Glass Revolution - a reading (on Google Drive)

After years of living on if and if I'd tried, I took up the hammer of insurgency against the velvet tyranny of your popular distractions. Long had your supporters hunted in dark, shorthaired packs, refusing to renounce indefensible words, shouting down reasonable dialog, careening the conversation between righteous outrage and the inane. We learned the danger only slowly, after mass casualties had nearly silenced a generation. In response, we forced a daily Hobson’s choice between increasingly militant camps where ours seemed more inclusive. As the rise of your current regime had taught us, we would no longer tolerate compromise or common ground. And so we occupied and defended an increasingly dystopian no man’s land to which so many had been exiled.

My destiny began as an involuntary dream, a vision, a speechless dissent to your defense of freedom disguised in flights of predatory arms. You unleashed an autonomous army of botnets, drones, and windup trolls preprogrammed to seek and destroy even the whisper of implied opposition, laying waste to our feeds. At first we gathered information. We absorbed the attacks, wave after wave, meme after meme, until pinpricks from our lurking spiders slowly poisoned our tormentors. We paralyzed those whose bandwidth we consumed before wrapping them in dark web silk. The rest we reprogrammed and returned to infiltrate your bunker complexes. When we finally raised our battle pennon and issued our clarion call of insurrection, your Potemkin villages were quickly overrun.

Mirroring your impassioned words and martyrdom, I found myself in your reflection, waking as an echo of your dogmatic and Machiavellian Narcissus. We studied your decades-old tactics. We memorized your well-publicized playbook. We learned to shape our appeals clearly, concisely and within limits. We mastered mocking you in 140 characters. We discovered how to inspire the crowds, incite the mob. We transformed your feeds into battlegrounds. We waged war across the electronic terrain. Hashtags became our weapons of mass destruction. No statement was left unchallenged, no affront uncontested, no protest unmolested. We fought fire with fire, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Claw with reddened claw. We parried each nativist thrust with populist reposts.

Conforming to your world of archetypes and insubstantial symbols, I left my reasoning for dead, recruiting in Technicolor and raw emotion. Hungry for conflict after so many years beneath your iron heel, the powerless and oppressed flocked to our multicolored banner. Our numbers swelled until we were finally ready to go to toe to toe, mano a mano, ceding no ground even tactically. Stand and die. When you unleashed your priests and demons, we responded with scientists and facts. When you wrapped yourself in the politics of patriotism, we transformed them into kneeling, pussy-hatted protests. When you marshaled around your red-crossed white flag of purity, we rallied beneath our rainbow standard. When you let slip armed nationalists and hooded supremacists, we set loose masked anarchists and brightly bandanaed antifa. We bruised each other black for blue until old wounds broke open and the world ran red.

Now we stand together, an invisible army thousands strong, misfits and mutants of your ethical borderlands, the children of useless science. Secure in our superior knowledge, we abandoned its methods, rigor and fact-checking in favor of exposing hypocrisy through guilt and shame. We set our hounds on the scent of influence and corruption, no matter how tenuous the connections. We barded their flanks in spikes and leather armor. We no longer called them off once they’d latched their teeth. Fomenting a constitutional crisis, we countered amendment for amendment. When you attacked the first, we attacked the second, pitting fundamental right against perceived privilege. When those offensives finally stalled, we returned to undermining your entrenched positions. Like you, in the background we spun vast, intricate conspiracy theories of our own. We crafted our memes and mythologies based on popular misconceptions. We resumed our battle like ancient hourglassed and violined spiders across a common web.

As we plot our way to your destruction and chart a popular resistance front, we forced your generals to concede the map is not the territory. We secured the flanks, right and left coasts, then starved out the breadbasket through slash-and-burn economics. An uncivil war thus engaged, we unleashed our most powerful ideological weapon, a doppelganger resurrected from the crucible of your golden fear of red. Crafted from the clay of your native soil, our Committee of Public Safety terrorized your heartland. Surrounded by imaginary enemies and outside influences of our own creation, we stood poised to reclaim our birthright. But our soulless golem took on an unholy life of its own. It understood no celebratory cries of victory, no calls for measured restraint. Between us we have raised a generation on no quarter asked, no sanctuary given. And so, like its Bohemian predecessor, it finally turned on its creator. Spiderlings feeding on their magna mater, rebellious sons supplanting their bloodied paterfamilias.

And so the wheel spins until the spokes we cling to return us to where we’d started, prince to prince, pauper to pauper. Or in our case bound to a waterwheel of injustice undershot by the currents of counterrevolution. After the enlightenment of your waterboarding, I now see that our gilded ladder of Jacobean insurrection was undermined by resting on the foundation of your insurgent tower of Babel. Who you see as Satan, the prince of darkness, we call Lucifer, a lord of light. Cogito ergo sum in inferno. Abandon all hope, you who enter here. But better to reign in hell than serve in heaven where, as your gatehouse reminds us, arbeit macht frei. At least cast out we shall remain eternally free. Captured and at the mercy of your restraints, I now know my fate, the fate of all who oppose your benevolent oppression. I'll drown facing you.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III