Canyons of Mistrust

The superintendent of state struggling to meet winter, raising a circle out of oblongs, was struck to the head with future dread. Bread returned to its silent pile, but rarely with as much gravitas as in Dusks of the Illiberal Liberal Empire. This film is disintegrating in its own ancient nitrate content — patiently losing narrative from its spliced frames. 

Imagine a leader at an icy seaside brothel testing flumes and ratcheting loose crampons — independent clauses flying this way and that.  Imagine his speech — his friable ideas — crumbling in the wake of his hubris. 

Insert cracking rivers, dust-storming praries, swamping of coasts here.

His country grieving, begging to check his speeches and seeking penance for his cowardice. Nary a redemptive arc in sight. Insight to nothing. Cataclysmic auguries in situ — the site of postwar torn sock battles, ripped silences and diminished mental acuities. I’ll cite this alone:

We are allergic to palliatives, and the downward spiral that ensues, emblazoned with a flurry of exclamatory sins — this is the  bleakest of moments before the fall.

What I’m Reading:

My favorite postcards are from the 2030s and 2040s, the last decades before the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself. They featured pictures of the great ocean beaches before rising waters took them; images of the Southwest before it turned to embers; photographs of the Midwestern plains, endless and empty under bluest sky, before the Inland Exodus filled them with the coastal displaced. A visual reminder of America as it existed in the first half of the twenty-first century: soaring, roaring, oblivious.

— Omar El Akkad / American War