𝒱𝑜𝑜𝒹𝑜𝑜 𝐸𝒸𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓂𝒾𝒸𝓈

Fight for your right to fight for your right [2/24]

I dreamed of a classified ad, haunted by vagaries: “Seeking Seventy-Two Versions.” Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin believed the two significant questions in politics to be “who?” and “whom?” For personals like the one above, I’m left instead with “of what?” and “what of it?” But if the personal is political, how many questions will it take to deduce a cogent answer, and can the inquisitor seduce a rightful heir?

For more linear musings, you can order a fresh copy of my newly published novel The Charlatan here. Below is another telecast beamed from regions beyond.

At the corner of my desk is a stack of interdepartmental memos that weren't visible yesterday. Red crayon appears on policy updates: a supply shortage or a complete breakdown in professional standards. Signatures from unrecognizable names. Familiar handwriting triggers phantom dental pain. I've started keeping a list of staff members whose existence I can verify. The list is too short.

Annie Madoff is not a product of clichés so much as she is a literal product,¹ the first of a new breed of screen actor whose every little role is subsidized by a bigger business looming visibly in the wings, at times stepping into the spotlight themselves as financial incentives thumb the scales in favor of bold, obvious strategy—yeah, sure, the masses are hip to their manipulated opinions, fuck you bugger, gimme somethin’ good to eat² and allow us to unlock the full might of our purchasing power.

She does it different, less seamless shifting between art and commerce, more promotion rendered as performance.³ Her path was predestined: mother dearest was a manager, not in the child star bankrolling careerist sense, but merely a classic usage of the word, having delegated tasks and balanced the cash register while serving as guardian of the night shift for franchise stores across the land.⁴ Papa was a Rolling Stone, or at least he played one on TV,⁵ his evenings spent impersonating Keith Richards on the Emmy award-winning program Classic Rock the #Vote (please don’t pronounce the hashtag),⁶ an hour-long variety show where a coterie of credentialed experts—from industries as disparate (neé Closely Related)⁷ as entertainment and counterintelligence—take time out of their busy schedules fighting to save democracy from darkness⁸ in order to lecture the population on why Federal Elections Matter.

The 1% of viewers not swayed by the daily dish of propaganda assign the derisive acronym F.E.M.-bots to the network stooges broadcasting platitudes in shrill registers,⁹ earning spots on the Misogynist-Terrorist watchlist shared between the government’s carapace of networked NGOs and a long index of prospective employers both blue collar and white.¹⁰

The writing shifts here. I can’t pinpoint how. Greater assurance emerges from the absurdity, a willingness to let sentences sprawl into elaborate constructions without losing control. Chaos operates with surgical precision, suggesting complete authorial vision.

The corporate entertainment critique hits with the force of a ten-ton truck. It doesn't lecture, instead showing us a world where the merger between art and commerce is so complete that we've forgotten there was ever a distinction. Annie isn't a victim of the system, but the system itself, walking around in human form.

The plausibility disturbs me most. The watchlists, the acronyms, the casual fusion of government and corporate surveillance. I keep checking the news to see if F.E.M.-bots are real.

I'm thinking of Annie's mother again, the retail manager. That phrase—"guardian of the night shift"—lodges in my brain, a splinter. Maybe it's the maternal protection angle, the idea of gentle entities watching over reality while the world rests. I haven't slept well in weeks.

The red crayon memos are still sitting on my desk. I should probably stash them somewhere, but I can't find the filing cards anymore. It was all here before the transition. Time unfolds strangely during institutional reorganization.

Wanda

1. That surname alone deserves a dissertation. Bernie Madoff, meet your granddaughter! We’ll call her Annie! Ponzi scheme as performance art, financial fraud as family business passed along the bloodlines. Not metaphorically influenced by market forces, but manufactured by them. It suggests that she was created specifically to eliminate the borderlands between embodied person and commodity. Marx coined the term—while writing about how social relationships between people appear as relationships between things under the tattered flag of capital, that alien God from futures unknown, snaking its infernal tendril backwards through time to tickle our toes, to paraphrase Land—commodity fetishism, where the human labor that creates value is mystified and hidden. Here the process has reversed: the thing has become the person, or the person has become so thoroughly commodified that there's no meaningful distinction left, a logical endpoint—not just interpersonal affairs disguised as economic relations, but a human being, or a characterization of one, literally produced as a market force unto herself. Commodity embodiment. My own hiring process is a faint recollection that fades by the day.

2. The sudden profanity bursts through the analytical voice like blood through bandages. There's real desperation, the insatiable hunger of people who know they're being fed garbage but can't stop the unholy swallowing.

3. The selling becomes the entertainment itself. More honest than traditional advertising, though failing to mask manipulation doesn't make the colored strings less taut, only more efficiently tethered to the source.

4. “Across the land"—the word choice is almost mythological, as if she's guarding sacred sites rather than brick ‘n’ mortar storefronts. Protecting, maintaining a perimeter, keeping the candles burning. I feel a knee-jerk reaction coming on, inexplicable defensive reflex in the name of this unnamed woman who spent her nights balancing registers and managing staff, the quiet heroism of maternal labor appropriately undiminished. Why I should care about a fictional character's fictional mother lies within locales unimagined. The phrasing circles my mind, a prayer half-remembered.

5. Deliberate uncertainty. In a world where everything is performance, authenticity becomes impossible to verify. We're all playing versions of ourselves for invisible audiences, a laugh-track legion.

6. A collision of digital typeface and articulated reality, the awkwardness of translating online culture into physical space. Collusion between code and throat. How long have hashtags existed? Language evolving faster than we can speak, symbols with no oral equivalent. We're creating words that exist only on the page, in the screen, glyphs for a civilization that's forgotten how to talk.

7. The parenthetical correction acknowledges what everyone knows but can't say directly: a perfect ouroboros, a script running on repeat.

8. Oddly religious for a political program. Democracy as light, opposition as darkness. Manichean thinking dressed up as civic duty. When did politics become theology? I remember when entertainment was entertainment and news was news, though that memory feels increasingly unreliable.

9. Too quiet and you're ignored, too loud and you're shrill, too analytical and you're cold, too emotional and you're hysterical. The narrow band of acceptable female discourse shrinks until silence is the only safe option. The robotic analogy suggests women expressing political opinions are malfunctioning rather than thinking. The acronym turns dissent into diagnostic category, protest into pathology. See also: Feminine Emotional Manipulation-bots, Federal Emergency Management-bots, Feminist Electronic Media-bots. The beauty of acronyms in political discourse is their ability to shift meaning while maintaining the same surface structure, like verbal Russian nesting dolls, hiding extremely specific accusations inside increasingly generic labels. Orwell would have loved this, Newspeak for a merry band of hashtaggers.

10. I’m nervous in ways I can't fully articulate. The casual merger of surveillance and job screening, the way questioning narratives becomes grounds for the unemployment line. Who reads these annotations? Are my editorial comments stored somewhere sinister, indexed and cross-referenced ad infinitum? I should be careful about what’s scrawled in the margins. Are there cameras in corners of the office I might have missed?