Crick, crack, crick, crack.
The crackling corrosion of my oak fire-door paralleled the withered dreams of my own Mamikonian martyrdom; the hemorrhaging of gallant notions serving as the Polaris of my early morning venture. Anxiety tautened my heart as I wringed out of my brimstone home. Slammed door.
Crack! Out, Out and on my way.
Right then I held two politicos in my purview;.” I think the average American would rather Bush;” This was not so offensive, but after investigating their commentary, a condescending slip recharged me from my clandestine behavior “;but that’s just rhetoric.“
There;that most mocking maneuver to which I could not languidly lament;”rhetoric”.
Rather I be at the end of the flayer’s filet than watch or hear this. That word which abridges all drudgery into one amalgamation, so demeaning, so undermining; a vaccination of vigor. Black rhetoric, Liberal Rhetoric;Armenian rhetoric. I could barely bide my anguish, if I were so encountered.
Rhetoric;.But if that noose must wrap with such volatile viscosity better it be for some pilgrimage, some remnant of an ideal written in such abstract touches only doses of ignorance can decipher them. Better I not retread the ethos sown in syriana imperialism, some broken, brutal neo-conservative-Straussian ideology; better to let the glow of a Horatio Alger myth burn out, then begin at the rubble.
This is not Rousseau’s Geneva, this isn’t Vartan’s trance, this isn’t the divine comedy;this is apotheosis of Washington and it is here worlds are destroyed, and so we venture into a dog and pony show with the single exception that there are no ponies.
I had been so passive in previous years; soaking in Sadaf chais and Rushdie Novels to have noticed my settling cholesterol. Some steady unknowing recession of zealotry. Getting soft while these people composed as tersely as concrete and kerosene mix paint in colors contrived from old annals of admiration; the new culmination of generations spent massaging their lineage. And from there party lines were drawn by some unsteady logic. But they stand for something, so they’ve already fallen for something. They are not my concern, so much as my obstacle.
All that aside; what initially chipped away my own braggadocio, what incinerated the glimmer of ideal-my Davit Beck dreams, my Raffi reverie–was Washington’s thwarting instrument; that image with recounts all travesties, all villainy, all hoaxes and reduces it with grandeur. The darting enamel-colored Colossus, a pervasive reminder that the murderers and enslavers, can stand as figures of freedom;that the Kemalists are not so far from those who take October 21st as a holiday. The consolidators of the state, with "consolidation" a perverted syrup poured as the thrust of a morality-redux.
This ganglion of denizens accrued in the city upon a hill, upon a swamp; the same staid sycophants still garnering and gleaning their Jacksonian sensibilities;at every step mutating time and space to draw that out as something admirable. Washington D.C. like some glowing moth trap, pulsing the sensuality of a saber tooth.
These are not our terms; these are the terms written like the drunken passions of a heart-failing fascist; and this District of Colombia stands like some radiant neo-Rome for the hinterland hicks to hold pilgrimages. These are the terms we are given, like drawing a biosphere from the shadows of the cave, and yet, we trot out our martyrs, overwrought and demeaned;to pray to sycophants, war-voters, and arms dealers;in the sunken, solemn hope that we can wrinkle time.
So what does this city mean for the throngs of the hoi polloi, should we lay the finest cloths before its feet, or should would seek to break the gears of a seemingly clockwork orange? Ultimately we can only ever reconcile our ideals with national histories in through one tool, calculated delusion, oversight or ignorance. So in that space this city stands, as a symbol of our daily compromise; how much we ignore to believe in something.
It’s against these intimidating odds that the idealist, the philosopher, the lobbyist become so distilled and opaque;that even their most vibrant words return to that omniscient demon;rhetoric.
Crick, crack, crick, crack.