A shambling monstrosity crawls down Black Lives Matter Plaza. It has reached Lafayette Square and in front of it is the gleaming facade of the White House, that imperial fortress of tombstones, teeth and phallus.

Crackle-boned and sallow, it slumps and oozes onwards, leaving a trail of opaque grey slime in its wake. Ashen mouthed, it wheezes and mutters, this cursed mutant offspring of pragma, this ancient diseased relic from the end of history.

Its words, soft and insipid, barely carry through the thrashing winds of discordance and fury which wrap Washington, energising the very air with a malignant, disorienting desperation. And few of the city’s citizens can hear its vapid gibbering as they pick through the rubble of a pseudo-Camelot.

But those that do, its battered, abused servants, their eyes filled with rosé glass and their nails cut to the quick, stagger behind, repeat the monster’s madness, expanding it into a choral composition. They slip in the filth of its trailing ordure, or limp in front, sucking down the blackened pollutants which emanate from its maw, and chant, and chant …

“Decency, democracy, dignity.
“Decency, democracy, dignity. “

These poor, cursed creatures are the attendants, the apologists. They carry the beast’s stinking, sloughing train through the muck, their bloodied faces turned ever towards that icon of the American Dream, the palladian resurrection of Roman ideal. The White House.

All around is the evidence that America’s dream was never real. The city’s very foundation seeps blood and pollution and horror. The reflecting glory of its shining mirrored towers, with only the smallest shift of perspective, bear witness to endless deprivations and ruin inflicted on its lower strata. The core is festered – bloated maggots are chewing their way out through its walls and streets in a mindless quest for yet more, leaving nothing behind.

Yet the servants of the monster are blinded. They believe. And so when their monster, wheezing and fulminating, is confronted with a second beast, their chorus is whipped into a frenzy.

“LIAR” these wretches bellow in the traditional hypocrite’s challenge.

“FRAUD” comes the bald-faced reply from their enemy’s camp.

The two sides stand off, each flinging barbs at the other. The energy and vehemence of their battle draws in the weak, the desperate, the easily led, the sons and daughters of pragma, until the streets of Washington are filled with a brutal noise, so loud that it seems to vibrate the world.

At the gate, 75 million. Behind it, 71 million. Each faction claims victory, both are wrong. They scream into the ruins of a city that began to sink before any of them were born, mired in the swamp sunk by their ancestors. Their anguished conflict consumes them, drives them to a despairing self-flagellation.

By the time the battle is done, the servants are exhausted. Their crumpled forms are strewn around the square, still screaming, endlessly screaming. Their chosen monsters have grown to huge proportions, buckling under the weight, ancient piles of endlessly transmuting flesh, paper, metal and plastic rearing high into the air, as though they were stags competing in the rut.

The larger of the two, the Liberal, is greedily pushing forward. It grasps and clings, declaring itself the saviour of the city. Vindicated.

All around it, the masses begin to fall silent, returning to their wearying task of survival amid that devastated wasteland the monsters have wrought over the centuries as they swap a shining white building, one to the other. Long lines of the disinherited wind their way outwards from Lafayette, going back to the task of feeding their own bodies to the maggots at the city’s heart. They will find no succour from the Liberal and its technocrats who squat and shit and whistle in the Whitehouse, inviting the maggots to feast. Perhaps, as a consequence, the masses shall choose the Republican to squat and shit and whistle with the maggots next time – after all, something needs to change.

The Least Worst Option.

Four More Years.

-Rr

Pic adapted from a panorama by Geoffrey Dudgeon