So they shall make their own tongue to fall upon themselves

Newspeak 2018

Blame Descartes or Derrida,
blame the right, blame the left,
blame religion, blame secularism
it’s all the same to me.

Argue with me,
or not.
It makes no difference.
(Although I prefer argument.)
I will mirror your resistance,
multiply my insistence
and ratchet up my volume.

Argue with me,
or not.
Your words are lost to my tour de force of factual derangement.
Call them lies.
I will deny it,
in ALL-CAP SUPERLATIVES.

I am fluent in Newspeak
and continue the great work of translating
the Declaration of Independence
using less than 140 characters.
While you in your arcane civic literacy accommodate the demise of democracy.

Justice, respect, honour:
I use these words as well;
and within my righteous little tribe,
they mean just what they say.
It’s your squandered liberalism that deceives you into thinking they can be applied equally across all these divides.

Critical thought.
Informed debate.
Engaged citizenship.
Quaint.

Welcome to celebrity, money, pageantry, political theatre.
Welcome to a careening autocracy beneath the appearance of populism.
Welcome to a populace, preened, 
lulled to acquiescence
by my towering tongue.

Welcome, while it lasts,
to the age of saviours.

The title of this post is from a line in Psalm 64. I thought it an apt foreshadowing of the eventual collapse of our current form of (Orwellian) Newspeak. That is, that distillate of “fake news,” nascent fascism, and its distain for literacy; all in service of hyper-nationalism and “casino capitalism.” Of course we have been subject to this for some time now, but at no time has it been more obvious, or pugnacious, as in the past couple years. How the collapse will manifest, what direction it will take no one knows. But its fall (take it from that ancient Hebrew poet), as all forms of despotic deception and authoritarianism before it, is assured.