The Monster That Now Pursues You

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 21 October 2015.



I don't think this will go in the blog either because I'm not going to be able to express what I feel about this coherently. You may be able to understand what I mean.

I think the so-called uneducated people of America are just pissed as hell having been essentially ridiculed for the last 8 years by everyone from the POTUS to Bill Nye the Science Guy. I feel some of that anger, even though I am not a Creationist or automatic weapon owner or even someone who has smelled sawdust or animal entrails in the last month. But I feel like this is a reckoning. The vengeful, silenced masses are now sending us their inarticulate messenger. The basic message is:

You have banished us from the table, from the public square, from civic discourse. You have been unwilling to engage with us in dialogue, preferring instead to use your monopoly of major media outlets and the bully pulpit of the presidency to shout us down, to proclaim us unclean, to paint our demands and desires as ridiculous, unconscionable, or worse. We, for our part, have attempted several times to present our arguments coherently according to the terms of engagement. But you have killed our most articulate messengers, replacing them with straw men whom you burn in effigy all the day. You have successfully demonized us, silenced us, and caricatured us. And so we now send you the only messenger you can recognize: the caricature, the demon, the vengeful, inarticulate angel. Its exaggerated, grotesque, almost comic features are a function of the toxic underworld from which this monster emerges. Had you extended the warm embrace of civility and dialogue, you might recognize in it a brother or sister or friend. But it is too late for that now. No, you didn't create this entity, but you are the one who turned it into the monster that now pursues you, wordlessly and inexorably.

In my prophetic imagination, this isn't Trump. This being would actually overtake and kill Trump at some point, Trump being far more articulate than the underlying impulse the entity represents. At best, Trump would be a perverse John the Baptist figure:

I am baptizing you with water...but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. (Matt 3:11)

I am not saying anything about the relative validity of issues such as flying the Confederate Flag, espousing traditional views of marriage, believing in the Genesis account of Creation, etc. I'm just saying that it's been relatively quiet lately. Voices have been summarily and successfully silenced. Hillary Clinton is the odds-on favorite for the presidency, Bill Nye has parlayed his Bachelor of Science degree into a second career, and Barack Obama is taking victory laps.

Drop the mic, right?

But you are a fool if you think those voices that raged so violently are just gone. They fester in the fetid darkness, their individual voices echoing, melding into a cacophony of incoherent rage. To be clear, if this were a horror movie, I would be killed along with everyone else. I'd be that traditional character who thinks he understands the being, who thinks he can reason with it, who is fascinated with it, who tries to explain to others how it became what it became.