Doing Undoing

Swagger replaces politics. Gesture replaces knowledge. Anger displaces art. Authority is overrun by mock-Caesarism and phony science. Catastrophe is run by the government. The world is given over to chancers, cronies and gangsters. Only the cynical and stupid are satisfied. An alarm is going off, but next door. They are throwing open shops and bars, and then all dying, but in another country. We are all, somehow, a little bit guilty, without knowing exactly how we could have stopped this happening. We are all perhaps sick without knowing it. I am, perhaps, sick. It is always tempting to see ourselves as living in a time of great undoing, and to look to history for precedents: Black Deaths, total war, the fall of empires. The western-educated look to western precedents pre- digested into western narratives in order to find lessons by comparing our present situation to that of fore-parents who were citizens of empires we now mostly revile. Yet the true precedents may be in the experience of the indigenous and ignored coping with colonialism. It is to the Ghost Dance, the Taiping Rebellion and the War of Canudos we should look in order to understand the fervour of everyone's seeking the return of an earlier dispensation. It is those who suffered the apocalypse of colonialism who are ahead of the west historically, in the same way that it is the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia and Latin America who know more than westerners about corrupt, pseudo- democratic demagogues.