By Dana Jerman

The following essay was originally written and performed for BUGHOUSE! #40 in Las Vegas at the Bunkhouse Saloon on February 10, 2020. The topic of debate was Democracy Post-Impeachment: Dead or Alive? Dana Jerman went up against Joshua Fisher. Jerman lost the argument.

It does not make me happy to be arguing this particular topic, and especially to be offering anecdotes that speak to this side of it. I do this with great reluctance. It brings me no pleasure whatsoever to consider recent events, which feature a shyster head official operating freely under the current law. To ponder the negative elements brought about from our collective suffering under the effects of getting pushed out, our voices drowned out by the weakly-elected, drastically unqualified few.

Democracy: The mother load of loaded words in this day and place.

In this scenario where the Huxleyian disruption is taking hold, there is certain chance that more than our money- our pleasures and pains and very souls of now and far flung future then, are damned be recruited to power the GAFA conglomerate: Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. These are your newly elected leaders, my people. Now it’s up to you to accept or attempt to block their deliciously toxic elements from your feed.

We cannot separate our lives from politics. Unfortunately, if the ideology of democratic thought is dead then so are we. 

The bright side to this breakdown, if there could be any at all, (and smash-the-state anarchists with their direct action modus would disagree with me entirely here because they know it is your very life that is at stake and I surely love them for that) is that, because of the inflated bureaucracy in place, the breakdown of the laws of living in this land, initially based on the spirit of liberation and the decency of the common man, as the systems meant to bulwark them fall slowly away and out of place, they will go the way of the dodo in an extremely slow and agonizing fashion. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Thomas Jefferson suddenly comes to mind, as he referred to knowledge in his thoughts and writings as “Light.”

You best believe when our forefathers were sitting in a Philadelphia courthouse day after day for months during a sweltering summer trying to birth this country, every minute felt like a pressure-cooked eternity of Light.

Knowledge as Light. Light as Power. Light is rife with truth, striking as uncommonly uncomfortable…

I have the sinking feeling all the time that democracy is dead because of people like me. People who are terribly interested in freedom and liberty and rights, but possess sheer contempt for most everything else that surrounds it.

Have any of you ever seen the documentary A State of Mind about the mass games phenomena in North Korea? It’s not a new film, I think I watched it sometime in 2006, so Bush Jr. Administration frustration was high. It is an incredible piece of filmmaking, and moreso for what it says about the people who are in it—namely beautiful, starving athletes who possess such a pride for their country and its high-handed kingdom, that they work themselves to a noble premature death for it.

Mass Games are a rally designed to please a “great leader” and his glorified family. The kicker in the film is—we don’t even think this fucker and his heinous haircut, Kim Jong whomever, even showed the fuck up. 

However, I found myself genuinely in tears after watching it, (not too long after that I read Nothing to Envy By Barbara Demick and donated to libertyinnorthkorea.org) and I said to my partner at the time, “As much as I know this too to be an empty, blind sentiment, the people touched me. I wish I could genuinely be as proud and openly supportive of the leader of my country as these people are. I earnestly wish I could have that pride and joy and sureness of purpose, and confidence in my country’s chosen leadership.”

I can tell you about the precise moment I dropped out for good. You probably have a moment like this, too in your life where you realize, “I have better tools and more faith in my instincts, I don’t need any more of this.“

I dropped the ball completely. Like, not off-the-grid checked-out, but no more news really of any kind. No more investing in a modern world outside of what fiction I chose to read and what my friends were into and my parents and immediate family and what was happening in my own daily life… 

I was in Martyrs Bar and Grill music venue in Chicago on Lincoln Ave around 2010. We were there to see Jah Wobble. In between sets talking to my boyfriend of a few months who was also a few years my senior, we began a dialogue about past presidents and political decisions and for the first time, with the help of his lens, I zoomed out a bit and began to see with more clarity the truth inherent in this sick myopic democratic cycle. A pattern had emerged which meant society would be held hostage to this unthinking loop for as long as it had memories to make to forget. The push of progress would be stymied by the pull of nostalgia. The chicken-or-the-egg conundrum result of a two-party accident of existence would go on hijacking our national consciousness and conversations forever and ever.

And when this dawned on me, I didn’t feel betrayed or offended like I did after watching A State of Mind, so much as I felt duped and mostly ridiculously at a loss for not understanding this aspect of our grotesquely ludicrous and obesely encumbered farcical government sooner.

Now grok this:

Democracy is dead.

But it has not lived in vain.

As Thomas Jefferson might say “Long live our Light.”

Long live what remains of our Constitutional Republic.