American Hero: Detectives, Nomads, Artists, and the Future of Empire

American Hero:

Detectives, Nomads, Artists, and the Future of Empire

America is a remarkable place; this nearly everyone seems to agree on, especially Americans. 

One of the magical things about the present moment is the ability one has to instantly reach out across the earth, and see videos of nearly every kind of people under the sun. Not merely manufactured Hollywood versions, not merely posed photographs for adventurers or anthropologists, but the real thing: Amazonian tribespeople, Bedouin herdsmen, Papa New Guineans, Zulus, merely living their lives, wearing their clothes, cooking their food, doing their dances, every exotic sight that Europeans once colonized and conquered and killed to be able to see and gawk at and exhibit and anthropologically analyze. And in every such authentic, native sight, one can see these people holding smart phones.

The implications of this are vast, and in a sense unimaginable. There has never before been a cultural phenomenon quite like this, of so many peoples and languages and religious and anthropological ways of life brought into contact through a highly particular linguistic and cultural and economic and technological matrix. 

This has effects everywhere: and in the last century produced at times a very potent kind of existential terror throughout the world. In the nightmare visions of Jean Baudrillard, a deeply French and European thinker if ever there was one, the European dream of liberation was achieving its end in total, eternal hegemony: the creation of an infinite space of interchangeable symbols, where all particularity and singularity would be overcome by uniformity and exchange, all meaning and value negated in their own sign. We would no longer be Frenchmen or Arabs or Bantu or Mongos: we would no longer even be human beings, individuals, persons: our dreams and desires, lives and deaths, would simply be simulations.

Baudrillard's vision found its complement--as he himself occasionally acknowledged--in the spontaneous backlash to "Americanization" in the rest of the world: a backlash emerging from nearly every angle, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, Leftist, reactionary, religious-conservative and indigenous-cultural and nationalist movement, every ideological or economic or cultural movement of any kind, anywhere in the world. When Pope Francis spoke of the dangers of "ideological colonization," he was referencing a tradition more than a century old, one that had born fruit around the world, both within and outside the Catholic Church: and in his Magisterial social teachings, he gave this tradition perhaps its most eloquent form to date.

Yet, in the year 2025, it is hard not to feel that something has changed, something so fundamental that it threatens to render this entire century or more of discourses simply obsolete. This change is, depending on how one sees it, either the final triumph of this tradition, or its total annihilation, or its transformation into something different still, and perhaps less strange.

Since I first travelled to Europe at the age of 11 and encountered Frenchmen eating McDonalds and arguing about George W. Bush, I have been pondering this mystery, day by day and hour by hour, thinking about it, in one form or other, in nearly every waking moment, even dreaming about at night. What I encountered in France was not just France, but America: but an America even stranger to me than anything foreign could ever be. 

This was not the America of the places where I grew up, the overshadowed valleys of Birmingham, AL, not the America where my mother grew up, the intensively settled, social and familial world of the Appalachian hills and farms of Eastern Ohio, not the America of my Jewish relatives in New York or Florida or Ohio, no America that I ever found at anytime in any place, but the thing that somehow unimaginably ruled them all, that even Americans, I suddenly realized, related to as something distant, something foreign, emerging not from their hearts or souls or lives, but from somewhere infinitely far away, a placeless place, a desert.

And in that time, I have gone back and forth, many times, between rival images of what I was seeing, rival images of just what this infinitely foreign America truly was. 

The most obvious answer to the riddle is merely that America is an Empire: the greatest Empire the world has ever seen. This Empire, like all great Empires, was not merely the rule of a certain kind of settled people over another, but of an essentially manufactured breed, a homo imperialis, moving among over all peoples, including my own, with the self-assurance and strangeness of shepherds among sheep. It was not that the farmers of Coshocton, OH were ruling over the herders of Afghanistan and the townsmen of Strasbourg: there was a certain kind of people ruling over all of us, who in all of our native places had come and established their military bases and depots and arrayed their tools and entertainments. 

Wandering France in trains, and finding everywhere intensively social, intensively political, intensively French people full of outrage and discourses and opinions about the American President, the first impulse of most Americans, I think, is merely confusion. It is only when I realized that he was their President too that the picture started to come into focus. 

Still, this Empire was in a genuine sense American: and as an American, I was in some ways a beneficiary of the overwhelming, iconic power of its culture, its entertainments, its projected image of itself. Resources were taken from the ancient, settled peoples and transferred to places closer to me: to the towers and shopping malls and Internet hubs I could see emerging all around me, as if pulled out of the aether. The homo imperialis overseeing all this was a manufactured breed, true, but he was made mostly from people like me, or at least sorts of people familiar to me, so that in a sense I could understand it better than most, was closer to its cultural nexus, than a Frenchman or an Indian or an Indonesian. 

Everywhere I have been in the world, I have been mistaken for this kind of person, or at least compared to it. A beautiful Italian woman told me, with delight, that I looked like an American: a Romanian man told me, with an odd disappointment, that I did not. I have been in American-themed restaurants in Greece and Italy, with pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and scrawled English text on the walls, and in them eaten food that in no way resembled American food, but was in a sense trying to resemble it.

In a sense, this is nothing new. There is always a glamor and attraction and in the proper sense charisma to Imperial power to the people ruled over it: there is always a drive to adopt the language and culture and way of life that has in some mysterious sense enabled one people to rule over another. 

It is too often forgotten today, in a very different climate, that at its height, the American Empire had not only a breed of bureaucrats, not only an exported culture, but a certain, highly potent political legitimacy. Frenchmen denouncing George W. Bush still praised America's salvation of France in WW2, still instinctively related the French Revolution to the American Revolution, saw our President as their own not merely in power, but via some genuine political relationship.

It is hard, today, to convey precisely the sense of outrage that greeted American denunciations of French perfidy over the Iraq War: the sense, not at all of America as a hated foreign power, but as a betraying friend, almost an unfair parent. What struck me even at the time was the overwhelming gap between the reality of this outrage and the way in which it had been described to me via mass media while in America. There was nothing at all in it of the sneering disdain that all Europeans, in American art, are supposed to show for the simple and sturdy pioneers. It was in truth the exact opposite: an outrage of admiration, the disappointed anger of someone finding their moral exemplar going on the spree, going off the rails, betraying not just your principles but their own. 

Most puzzling of all was the sense of betrayal, betrayal of a relationship that I had never known or imagined we had with anyone else. This was not the annoyed regard of a servant or distant cousin, but the outraged feelings of an abandoned spouse, complaining not that we were imposing on them but that we were disavowing them, renouncing them, refusing to recognize just how much the French were truly bound to us, how much their own actions and reactions were for our own benefit, how much they belonged to us, how deeply and completely they loved us. 

I can still remember an older Frenchmen, born and raised in WW2, weeping as he told us that, while Americans might think that the French had forgotten how we had saved them from the Nazis, how they might think they were being ungrateful in not supporting the Iraq war, the French had not forgotten, would never forget, would never cease remembering their debt to us, their friendship with us.

I wonder at what stage the truth dawned on that man that it was we who had forgotten; or rather, who had never remembered. I wonder at what stage the rest of the world realized how little they truly meant to us.

And yet...I feel, deep in my bones, that this picture has changed since I first went to Europe: that everything has changed. A strange coldness has settled over the eyes of Europeans when they contemplate America. Their feelings are no longer the feelings of an abandoned spouse, a betrayed friend, but something far more distant. When they look at the American President, they no longer feel he is their own. 

This is not merely, or primarily, a cultural change. With the rise of the Internet, the rest of the world has in a sense grown far closer to America and Americans; the average person in France or Thaliand has seen far more American films, American videos, heard more American jokes, watched more American porn, engaged far more directly with American politicians, and argued with far more Americans on Twitter, than ever before.

Yet I cannot help feeling that the gig is up, that the trick has been seen through: that they have realized, one and all, not only that American President never cared about them, that American politics and culture were never really their own, but that Americans were never really worthy of their admiration at all. In the age of the Internet, American cultural and political power has merely become a technique, a technology: one eagerly adopted by ordinary people and elites the world over. In the age of the Internet anyone can put out a video of themselves cooking or reviewing movies or having sex: anyone can be an American. They have seen through the magic trick, in the way that all children inevitably do when they realize they can do it just as easily themselves.

In truth, I think there was always both more and less to American power than it seemed at its height. In the year 2025, America is in a sense more powerful than ever. Peoples the world over, even more than in 2003, want America to be powerful, want the American President to tell them what to do, to negotiate their treaties for them, to make their trade deals for them, to make movies for them, to run the Internet for them, to manage the global market for them, to sell Kentucky Fried Chicken to them. Yet there is a cynicism to it all that to me is somehow more shocking. The glamor is gone: the admiration is gone: the legitimacy is gone: the love is gone. 

What is true in 2025 of most of the world looking at America is something much harsher than any hatred or disdain: that the world simply does not see an alternative to America.

When I look across the world, and see everywhere the ancient, settled peoples of the world possessing and using American commodities to speak to each other and buy and sell and entertain themselves--when I look across the world, and see everywhere the ancient, settled peoples of the world using the American language as a means of trade and diplomacy across ethnic and national divides--when I look across the world, and see everywhere the ancient, settled peoples of the world using the techniques of American politics and culture and business and social media and military technology to rule over their populations--a strange, creeping feeling comes over me, and the image shifts, and the angle changes almost imperceptibly, and I no longer see America at all. I forget that there ever was such a thing as America: and I begin to think that they have forgotten too.

What is true for the rest of the world is true, to a much greater degree, for Americans themselves--that strange, perpetually shifting melange of peoples out of which the homo imperialis has been manufactured. 

Whatever American power means for the rest of the world, for Americans the question of what America means is neither economic nor political, but existential. 

But since he went a fever of homelessness will often shake me. I am troubled by rainy meadows and mud cabins that I have never seen; and I wonder whether America will endure.

In 2025, the question of what America is for the rest of the world is intimately bound up with the question of what America is for Americans, what it is in itself and for itself. Indeed, I think that in the deepest sense the latter question is dependent on the former: what America is in the future depends more on what the rest of the world makes of America than what America makes of itself.

It is the belief of Europeans, of Chinese, of Mexicans, of Bedouin and Vietnamese and Iranians and Nigerians in America that has sustained and fed Americans' faith in themselves throughout history: and never more than now. That faith has been lost again and again throughout American history; and in the year 2025 exists perhaps less than ever before. And in a way nearly unique among historical cultures, America without faith in itself simply cannot endure.

Aristotle was a very smart man, and like all very smart men said a lot of incredibly stupid things: but the smartest thing he ever said is the one most objected to by most moderns, namely that the telos, the purpose, the intention, the end, the goal, the final cause, is always and everywhere and for everything the cause of causes, the preeminent thing that makes a thing what it is. This is really, even profoundly true: and never truer than about societies and cultures and cities and nations and Empires. What defines a people is what it is aiming at. 

For Aristotle, a state's purpose is supposed to be simple one: the self-sufficient prosperity and health and virtue and happiness of its people. In this sense, America is not, and never has been, a state. Like a few other great Empires throughout history, it has always aimed at something quite different, more tenuous, but infinitely more exciting: an ideal, an image, a way of being. 

Chesterton said that America was a nation with the soul of a Church: which raises the question of just who, exactly, this Church is supposed to be worshipping. American intellectuals right and left have for the last sixty years or so said that America was a proposition nation, defined by assent to certain ideas, certain beliefs: but they have rarely agreed on just what those beliefs are.

I have come to believe something rather particular. I agree that America as a political and cultural project has always been held together by a goal, an ideal, a belief: but I do not think it has for centuries really been a belief in liberalism, or human equality, or even utopian social organization. 

Hence the thesis of this essay: that America, at least since the 19th century, has been most bound together by a religion: and that religion is a cult of heroes.

I really think that if one were to really understand the image of the American Hero, one could deduce, as if by magic, nearly everything that makes America as a project unique and powerful in history--even deduce, to a degree, its likely fate. And that is the goal of this essay.

Short Story: Election Day

Election Day

“It’s election day today…will you do your duty?”

“Of course, monsieur,” Farouk said, bending slightly over Mr. Wedgewood as he slid the gold-enameled pot of Turkish coffee onto the bone-white saucer atop the white-and-silver tablecloth with a single white-gloved hand. With his other hand, he carefully set the white sugar bowl down to the right of the saucer, with the centers aligned, then laid the silver sugar spoon on top of it at a precise 220-degree angle.

Farouk was a tall, slightly stooped man with a long thin face wrinkled like a raisin under a round head covered in tightly-packed, jet-black curls. Customers often asked him if he dyed his hair; each time they did, he would smile primly, pressing his thin lips together, and not answer. They also often asked him how old he was: each time they did, he would open his lips, revealing carefully-polished teeth, and say, “Forty-five, monsieur.” Then he would chuckle once–a quiet, rich noise from deep in his throat–and continue his rounds. These moments were some of the happiest in his days.

But Farouk would get no such pleasure today. “I’m sure you know what’s at stake this election,” Mr. Wedgewood said, eyeing him a little coldly from behind his OmniGlasses, and not picking up the cup. He was a rather corpulent man of fifty or so, with dark skin and a totally bald head that he ran his fingers over frequently, as though searching for his missing hairs. “If the Neo-Revanchists are able to get the Presidency this time…well, that’s it for Democracy. If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention.”

“Yes, monsieur,” Farouk said, smoothing out a wrinkled spot in the tablecloth. “Would monsieur care for one of his usual Pistachio Creams?” He avoided looking into Mr. Wedgewood’s eyes: though Monsieur Beauvilliers had emphatically taught the importance of eye contact with customers, Farouk had found the shifting melange of light and color that danced across the semi-transparent surface of the OmniGlasses gave him a headache. He stared as courteously as possible at Mr. Wedgewood’s star-shaped diamond lapel pin instead.

“I would think you would take this more seriously,” Mr. Wedgewood said, a little louder. “You know it’s people like you and I who will be the first to suffer.”

“Of course, monsieur,” Farouk said, bowing slightly and stepping away from the table. “Your humble servant will give you a moment to think about your order.”

He stepped over smartly to Mrs. Kumar’s table, bowing again before rapidly removing the remains of her cake and coffee. “Would Madam be wanting anything else today?” Surreptitiously, he brushed the cake crumbs off the tablecloth: Mrs. Kumar was a messy eater. 

He straightened up and waited; but after a moment realized that Mrs. Kumar had not noticed him. She was glued to the images and text on her OmniGlasses, her mouth slowly open to reveal yellowing teeth. “Madam?” he repeated, touching her lightly on the shoulder. “Would you care for anything else?”

“Dammit, Farouk,” she said, shoving him roughly away, so that he stumbled and nearly fell. “Can’t you see I’m upset? That damned Liberal Transhumanist Greenway is going to win the Presidency again.” She glared at the little screens again, her upper lip projecting, small tears glittering on the edges of her eyes. “Oh, damn you, bring me some of that what’s-em-you-call-it, the, um, you know, what I had last week.”

Farouk straightened up, then bowed once more for good measure. “I believe Madam is referring to our Vanilla-Cardamom Cream Cake. Madam has again made an excellent choice. Would Madam be wanting any tea or coffee with that?”

“You know what I want,” Mrs. Kumar said. “Just bring it to me, God damn you. Before these fucking do-gooders wipe me out and I have to start begging.”

“Yes, Madam, a rose-water tea as Madam prefers,” Farouk said. “Your humble servant will make sure it arrives promptly.”

No Artificial Intelligence!

No Artificial Intelligence!

Recently, and intermittently for the past eight months or so, there have been what are called "No Kings" Protests. In my own neck of the woods, these have mostly consisted of small knots of sexagenarians lining the major roadway by my house, holding signs that say things like "HONK IF YOU HATE ORANGE CHEETO." In other parts of the world, including in adjacent downtowns, these have been impressively large: by one account, the largest single-day protest in American history. Like all protests for the last five years, though, they have had no political effect whatsoever.

This is, of course, not an accident, but almost entirely by design: for they were not conceived of as political protests. America, in the year 2025, has never been a less political country: and has never had a less political population. Indeed, people today, in America, are more or less incapable of thinking in political terms, or engaging in politics as people throughout history would have understood it.

I am still, after five years, in deep mourning over the catastrophic failure of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was the greatest spontaneous mass movement of my lifetime, and it did not achieve a single lasting political gain. All it sufficed to do was to inspire a backlash: or, perhaps, merely give one more pretext for a deeper and growing perversity in American society, an obsession with the techniques of power and punishment, a willful blindness to the suffering of the weak, a overwhelming indifference to justice.

I don't know who came up with the name "No Kings": if they were not a GOP political operative, I certainly hope they were at least paid by one. This person did more good for Donald Trump and the Republican Party than anyone since Joe Biden: they deserve to be paid at least as much as Kamala Harris profited off her losing political campaign.

A protest is really only an effective political tool, and indeed really only a political act at all, when it is clearly and efficiently tailored for a single end: rapidly applying public and media pressure to existing rulers to get them to immediately carry out certain political acts or make certain political legal or policy changes which can be relatively rapidly achieved.

For this, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is an obvious exemplar. The NAACP carried on their campaign of popular protests and civil disobedience quite intelligently and tactically, deliberately picking fights that they could either win on the local level, or rapidly escalate and so translate into greater political leverage on a national level. In 1961, Martin Luther King made certain demands of the new President John F. Kennedy; when these demands were not granted, he accelerated protests to apply pressure. As a result, he was in the White House negotiating with the President of the United States less than six months after children faced dogs and fire-hoses on the streets of Birmingham. Less than a year later, the Civil Rights Act passed, after one of the most brilliant tactical acts of political pressure ever carried out, the March on Washington, sealed the deal. MLK and his allies certainly had their grand aspirations and utopian ideals; but they understood that protests were not a path to victory, let alone a decisive weapon, but in essence a negotiating tactic.

Another way to think about this issue would be to put in military terms: protests are a tactic, not a strategy. As a book I just read on the failures of the German Imperial military, Absolute Destruction, lays out very carefully, tactics is what wins battles, but only strategy wins wars: and strategy is inevitably and necessarily not merely military, but political. No war in human history has ever been aimed merely at military goals, or been won on the battlefield: rather, war is a political act aimed at achieving political goals, and military tactics, battles and advances and victories and defeats, merely one of many means for achieving those ends. As such, tactics are only effective where they are tailored to overall strategies and subordinated to clear political ends. 

Where militaries forget this, even tactical victories end up inevitably as means, not for victory, but for defeat. The Germans implemented a tactic of unrestricted submarine warfare in World War 1 knowing that it would inevitably bring America into the war against them: because it promised (and indeed in the short term delivered) a tactical victory over the British. Many wars have been lost by winning battles--including both World Wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the current Israeli war in Gaza.

The Black Lives Matters protests, to do them justice, were in their origins political: they were inspired by genuine, widespread anguish at the death of George Floyd, were aimed at applying pressure to politicians currently in power, and at achieving truly political ends of justice and reform. Where they failed was largely in translating their urge for justice into any widely acceptable and rapidly implementable policies and political acts. Most immediately, they lacked an agreed-upon, respected, politically astute leadership, capable of actually negotiating with those in power, as MLK and the NAACP had been able to do in the 1960s.

There was no Black Lives Matter Act passed by the national Congress; no Executive Order by the President; and precious little even in state laws or city ordinances. Instead, local governments and police departments, lacking guidance, took their own paths of least resistance, altering their policies and enforcement priorities and tactics in unwise ways to avoid conflict and bad PR--and then changed them back once the backlash set in.

The No Kings Protests have no chance of being anywhere near that effective. The BLM Movement had political ends capable, with sufficient political intelligence and will, of being translated into tangible political and legal reforms. The No Kings Protests do not. They have a slogan, a painfully parochial slogan that, if taken seriously, poses the entire movement, not as aiming at achieving any actual political goal, but merely at preventing a transformation of the United States government into a monarchy--a defensive act that is, depending on one's perspective, either fantastically early or much too late. 

Black Lives Matter started out as a hashtag: it was still a much better and more political slogan. It expressed a positive sentiment, one with obvious political implications, and demanded political action. No Kings expresses a negative sentiment, at best personal hatred of political figures, at worst a mere stubborn resistance to political trends.

I am told by reliable informants that numerous signs at a major northeastern protest seemed to be taking the theme literally--posing the entire protest in opposition to the British monarchy of the 18th century. As Chesterton pointed out, the American colonists were hopelessly parochial and out-of-date in thinking that the British monarchy still governed England, let alone America, in 1776, rather than committees of wig-wearing Whig businessmen. In 2025, one would think the American colonists would have figured this out. But perhaps they are right; perhaps it is King Charles II who still runs America today. After all, he is on television.

I am, of course, being facetious. I am well aware that, despite occasional whimsy, the "No Kings" slogan is merely an expression of a much more basic concept: commitment to democracy, by which people today mostly seem to mean respect for the orders issued by unelected federal judges. I am also aware that most of the genuine political energy of the movement is in fact generated by, and aimed at, expressing personal dislike for one or more current politician(s). Understood properly, that is the real significance even of the slogan: merely one more hazy way of expressing one's hatred for Donald J. Trump. 

Hating Donald Trump, alas, is not a political position. It is not even, in most of its typical forms, a political sentiment: which is why it mostly expresses itself, still, to this day, in various jokes about his skin color and hair and affect. It is most definitely not a clear legal or policy goal capable of being rapidly implemented by existing rulers: especially when those existing rulers are precisely the thing being protested.

Compare this, again, with a contemporary protest movement against an unpopular President currently going on in a country with many intellectual and cultural ties to the US--but a country that, almost uniquely in the Western world, still retains actual democratic politics. I mean, of course, France. As we speak, there are people on the streets all over France protesting Emmanuel Macron, the well-groomed, intellectually-pretentious, deferential-to-investment-bankers President of the Fifth Republic. These people, though, are not merely protesting Macron as an individual: his precious mannerisms, say, or his penchant for fashionable scarves, or his inability to communicate in plain, non-meandering sentences, or his marriage to his former high school teacher, or even his famously autocratic and insular way of making decisions. They are protesting actions, real and proposed, by his government. 

In particular, Macron insists that, to reduce France's deficit and attract outside investment, the government must cut pensions and raise the retirement age. The people affected by these actions, by and large, do not want this: and so they are in the streets protesting these government actions. Some of them, mostly on the Left, want billionaires to be taxed instead; some of them, mostly on the Right, want immigration restrictions. A large majority would prefer it if Macron resigned and allowed new Presidential elections to be held. But virtually all protesters are clear on what they individually and as a group want, and all parties agree completely on what they do not want, and view their protesting as a means to communicate that to the government. This is politics.

And it has, in fact, worked: after elections handed Macron a crushing defeat, and after multiple Prime Ministers were voted out by parties beholden to the protest movement for proposing budgets that slashed pensions and raised the retirement age, Macron has backed down. He has not resigned: but then, for the protestors, that was never the main thing. They have certain political goals they want to achieve; and they want rulers to either serve them, or get out of the way. And this, too, is politics.

Americans, once again, are the least political people on the planet. They do not view protests as political acts, aimed at communicating or achieving something: they mostly seem to view them as extensions of opinion polls and online product reviews, expressing their personal likes and dislikes for particular government services and service-providers. If a service-provider gets low enough ratings, they assume he will eventually, somehow simply disappear; but they have no particular plan for achieving that goal, let alone one into which protests fit in any obvious way. 

They also, increasingly, view protests as a social outlet, in a country that is getting lonelier and lonelier with each passing year. Themed protests have been a thing for a long time, rising in parallel with the inability of Millennials to attend actual themed parties. When I was in grad school, the local protest movement held rave protests and handed out ice-cream and snow-cones. Another way to process the "No Kings" hashtag, and accompanying puzzling anti-British content, is merely as a fun party theme. Protest King George! Wear your best wig and waistcoat! Pretend it's 1776! After all, it worked for the Tea Party--and progressive politics in 2025 are among other things an increasingly desperate copy of right-wing populist politics from ten years ago. 

I should be clear, however, that my disappointment in the "No Kings" protests is in no way based on an endorsement of Donald Trump. As President, Trump has done many unjust and monstrous things, and continues to do them: and it is eminently right for the populace to take action to stop him doing these things. I not only support protests with these ends: I encourage them. Nay, I demand them.

I very much support protests calling on Donald Trump to stop his campaign of mass deportation and deliberate terrorization of the immigrant population of America. I very much support protests calling on him to restore humanitarian funding to key projects in the developing world. I very much support protests calling on him to end the war in Gaza. I very much support protests calling on him not to let food stamp funding lapse on November 1st, plunging many American citizens into something approaching starvation.  I very much support protests calling on him to stop the wave of brutal repression meted out against the poor and homeless across America.

Certainly, some or all of these causes motivated many people who joined the No Kings Protest. Nevertheless, their voices were not heard; and their protest was in vain. Fearing apparently to offend anyone, we crammed a thousand disparate grievances against Trump, real and nonsensical alike, into one overall protest whose only publicly-accessible message was a statement against the symbols of 18th century Whig monarchy--a symbolic and political regime that has about as much to do with the actions of the American government in 2025 as the empire of Genghis Khan.

This is a proem, though, to another cause that I very much wish we could protest; a cause that has far more public and universal support than condemnation of deportations or even personal dislike of Donald Trump. It is also, importantly, a cause that could relatively easily achieve its goals given popular action.

This cause is, of course, the halting of the current AI technological regime and the economic and political dominance of so-called tech companies: who as we speak seem poised to crash the global economy and destroy the natural world for the sake of bad chatbot technology.

Mirrors and Magic: Fifth Business, Islam in Pakistan, Solaris

Mirrors and Magic: Fifth Business, Islam in Pakistan, Solaris 

"We don't know what to do with other worlds: we don't need other worlds. We need a mirror."

-Solaris

What are we looking for? And would we know if we found it?

I recently read and/or watched a number of works that raise this question, in rather different ways. All three also reflect on a related question: is our desire ultimately for something other, or only for ourselves? Is our desire ultimately for truth, for reality, or can it be fulfilled in illusion? Is there something out there?

This is a question central to modernity; and even more central in the much-advertised age of AI. AI, as I have again and again emphasized in this space, is mostly false advertising, and even then mostly not new. Nevertheless, it is not without its genuine effects. The rise of Large Language Models has, thus far, done little or nothing to increase economic productivity, encourage creativity, aid discovery, increase leisure, manifest a generalized god-like intelligence, or accomplish any other goal touted by its creators to garner venture capital. It has, however, helped a few kids commit suicide, driven a few more insane, and successfully imprisoned a growing number of people in obsessive intellectual and faux-religious and faux-personal relationships with mirrors. And that is not without significance. 

Hence, in this issue of my patented "Three Extremely Different Works of Art in Different Mediums Reviewed Together According to A Philosophical or Social Theme" (TM) series, I will be examining two books and a film that all, I think, ultimately center on this same all-too-human problem, this same disconnect between what we think we are looking for and what we actually encounter, out there in the world: between our desire for the other, and the comforting, imprisoning facsimile of the mirror. 

Three Prayers for Reconciliation

[I previously posted some prayers of my own composition. Here are a few more, written over many years, which all have to do with the very pressing, practical problem of reconciliation among persons: a reconciliation that always begins with personal and communal efforts to repent and grow in virtue: efforts usually fruitless without the help of grace.]

Prayer for Reconciliation

English:

Lord,
Look upon us:
Receive all of our thoughts, desires, fears, loves, and enmities,
and reconcile and unite us in the great love of your Holy Cross and Holy Eucharist.
Amen.

Latin:

Domine,
respice in nos:
recipe omnes cogitationes, cupiditates, timores, amores, et inimicitias nostras,
et in magna caritate tuae Sanctae Crucis et Sanctae Eucharistiae reconcilia et unifica nos.
Amen.

Prayer for Enemies

English:

For all those who have sinned against me; for all those who have spoken or thought or done anything against me, whether justly or unjustly:

For all those against whom I have sinned; for all those against whom I have spoken or thought or done anything, whether justly or unjustly:

I offer to you all my merits, my whole self, body and soul, as an offering; I offer to you the sacrifice of your own body and soul, the flesh of the Son through the Spirit to the Father:

that you may bless them, and save them, and never deliver them up to the will of their enemies;

I commend and offer them to you.

Have mercy on all us wretched sinners, and on me the most wretched of all.
Amen.

Latin:

Pro omnibus qui contra me peccaverunt; pro omnibus qui contra me dixerunt aut cogitaverunt aut egerunt ullum, vel iustum vel inustum:

Pro omnibus contra quos peccavi; pro omnibus contra quos dixi aut cogitavi aut egi ullum, vel iustum vel inustum:

Offero tibi omnia merita mea, totum me, corpus et animam, oblationem;

offero tibi sacrificum tui corporis et animae, Patri per Spiritum carnem Filii:

ut eos benedicas, et salvos facias, neve umquam in animam inimicorum eorum eos tradas:

eos commendo et offero tibi.

Miserere nobis peccatoribus miserrimis, et mihi miserrimo omnium.

Amen.

Examination of Conscience

English:

If I have despised any person,

do not despise me, O Lord, but humble me and save me.

If I have presumed of your grace in anything,

forgive me, and give me along with grace gratitude.

If I have not accepted anything which you willed to give to me,

will and give that I may accept it now and always.

If I have not loved and cared for your flesh, but treated it contemptuously and abusively in anything,

grant that of this I may repent with a sincere heart, and so heal the wounds of your flesh and console the pain of your heart.

I am the most wretched sinner; you are the most merciful Savior.

Forgive me these sins, and all my sins, both known and unknown:

Not because I am good, but because you are good.

Have mercy upon me and upon all, now and in the hour of our death, most sweet Jesus.

Mary and Joseph, pray for us.

Amen.

Latin:

Si despexi ullem hominem,

ne despicias me, Domine, sed me humilia et salvum fac.

Si praesumpsi in ullo de tua gratia,

mihi ignosce, et da mihi cum gratia gratitudinem.

Si non accepi ullum quod voluisti mihi dare,

veli et da ut accipiam et nunc et semper.

Si tuam carnem non amavi et curavi, sed contemnose et abusive usus sum in ullo,

da ut in hoc poenitentiam agam sincero corde, itaque vulnera tuae carnis sanem,

et poenam tui cordis consolem.

Ego peccator miserrimus; tu salvator misericordissimus.

Haec peccata mea, et omnia cetera, et scita et inscita, mihi ignosce:

Non quia bonus sum, sed quia bonus es.

Miserere mei et omnibus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae, dulcissime IS.

Maria et Joseph, orate pro nobis.

Amen.

The Urgent, Immediate Danger

The Urgent, Immediate Danger: A Brief Manifesto

There are threats in America today: immediate, urgent dangers that must be countered just as urgently and just as immediately. These dangers do not, for the most part, have anything to do with the kinds of long-range trends I discussed in a recent post: they are not things that could or might happen, or even directions things are heading. They are here, and now, already prevalent, already virulent, already spreading.

No, these threats are not "Donald Trump," or "Wokeness," or "MAGAism" or "fascism," or any such thing. They are emphatically not coherent ideologies, let alone individual people. They are things much more inchoate, and much more dominant, than that. As Chesterton says, it is assumptions more than stated beliefs that define an age: and as Aristotle knew, it is habits more than opinions that make a person what he is.

This is a work of polemics: it is by design short and to the point. Please pay attention.

Eusebius of Vercelli, Letter 2 Ad Populum

Eusebius of Vercelli, Letter 2, to the People (355-361 AD)

[As I have posted periodically on this blog, here is a translation of a historical document, in this case a letter written by Eusebius of Vercelli to the people of his diocese from exile c. 355-361 AD. This document provides an important firsthand account of episcopal exile under the Roman Emperor Constantius II, and I am using it as such for a current academic project.

St. Eusebius of Vercelli is one of the more obscure members of the group of exiled Nicene bishop-ascetics from the mid-4th century of the Arian Controversy, but perhaps one of the most important. A prominent Italian bishop and ally of the bishop of Rome Liberius, he was exiled by the Emperor Constantius II at the Council of Milan in 355 AD after refusing to subscribe to the condemnation of Athanasius of Alexandra and the Creed of Sirmium offered by the Emperor. According to our one contemporary narrative, this happened after Eusebius arrived late to the Council and demanded that everyone present sign the Creed of Nicaea before proceeding with any more business. He remained in exile in the East until the death of Constantius in 361 AD, when he played a key role in the Council of Alexandria chaired by Athanasius upon the Emperor's death and attempted without success to resolve the bitter schism in Antioch. He then returned home and died circa 370. He also played an important role, like his close ally Hilary of Poitiers, in establishing early monastic and ascetic institutions in the West, likely inspired by Athanasius' ally Anthony of Egypt.]

To my most beloved brothers, and very much desired priests, but also to the holy peoples of Vercelli, Novarium, Hippo Regius, and also Dertonium who stand firm in the Faith: Eusebius the bishop in the Lord wishes eternal salvation. 

1. Although our Lord comforts us, separated in body from you, with many good things, and shows your presence to us at least through the arrival and visits of very many brothers; nevertheless we were sorrowful and sad and not without tears; because for a long interval of time we did not receive writings from Your Holinesses. Indeed we were afraid that either some diabolical subtlety had taken hold of you, or human power had subjugated the unfaithful.

Therefore, while we were afflicted with these thoughts, and I was turning all the consolation of brothers who were coming to us from various provinces more to sorrow at your absence than to joy: the Lord thought it right to bestow this, that I was able to learn the very thing about which I was worried, not only by the letters of your sincerity, but also by the presence of our dear ones Syrus the deacon and Victorinus the exorcist.

And so I have come to know, dearest brothers, that you, as I desired, are unharmed. And, as though I was suddenly snatched up through all the breadth of the earth (as happened to Habakkuk, who was carried by an angel all the way to Daniel [cf. Daniel 14:33-36]), I judged that I had come to you, while I was receiving the letters of each person, while I was racing to your holy friends and the love found in your writings. 

2. Tears were mingling for me with joy: and my mind, eager to read, was constrained by being occupied with tears. And both things were necessary, as each of my senses was desiring to anticipate its duties of loving for this fulfillment of desire. Thus each day while occupied with this I was judging that I was spending time with you, and I was forgetting my past labors: in this way truly joys were encompassing me on every side, offering from here stable faith, from here love, from here fruitfulness; so that in so many and so great established goods, suddenly I was judging, as I said above, that I was not in exile, but with you.

I rejoice therefore, dearest brothers, in your faith: I rejoice in your salvation which follows faith: I rejoice in your fruits, because from this they have not only been established, but also have travelled far. As indeed the farmer has grafted on that good tree, which does not suffer the axe, is not given up to flames, for the sake of its fruits; so also we want and desire not only to show to Your Holinesses service according to the flesh, but also to spend our lives for your salvation.

You have extended, as I said, branches strong with fruit, and you have labored to reach through such long spaces of the earth to touch me. I rejoice as a farmer, and gladly pluck the apples of your labor, because you wanted to do so much: not only I, or those very holy priests and deacons or other brothers who are with me, but also all of us who are longing for you.

For you filled up, as the most blessed Apostle says, my heart when you fulfilled the divine commandments which it is right that Christians fulfill towards a bishop or ecclesiastical men who you know labor in exile because of the Faith. You have fulfilled the things which it is right for brothers to do for brothers, and for sons to show for a father.

But when we were wanting you, according to divine commandments, to produce heavenly fruit from earthly things, stable fruit from fleeting things, eternal fruit from fragile things; in suffering by necessity we began to sow seeds daily. The poor were rejoicing at your fruits: not only were the people of the city itself glorifying God, but also everyone: and these people were able to see from the fruits themselves the love you have for me, and in seeing were glorifying God, and naming us with all honor with your blessing. 

3. The devil seeing this, the enemy of innocence, the rival of justice, the opponent of faith, because God was being blessed in this work, inflamed against us his Ariomaniacs, who now for a long time were raging not only over this work, but also over their own infidelity, to which they were not able to persuade us, so that they violently erupted; in this way that he has always used, those whom he was not able to persuade, he terrified with force and power.

And so he gathered the multitude of his own people, who seize and bring us to the factory of their infidelity and mock us: and they say that all this power has been handed over to them by the Emperor. Therefore when they were saying many things and boasting about their power, in this I wanted to show them that the things they were able to do are nothing, while I handed over in silence as though to executioners my body, which the Lord was saying was able to be handed over in persecutions. How free in mind I was, while I am suffering from these things, and am imprisoned, and am preserved through four days, and hear the insults and persuasions of different kinds of people: in this I have shown that I have not spoken even one word.

They wanted to add to their malice, that my brothers would depart from me, that is, priests and deacons: but also they said they were going to prevent the rest of the people from coming to me. I, in order to not accept food from the hands of unbelievers, or rather of transgressors (which is worse) who are unbelievers, as the Apostle says, made a petition to them in this way. 

‘The Servant of God Eusebius with his fellow servants who labor with me for the Faith, to Patrophilus the prison-guard with his people:

With what violence and rage of many people you carried me off, not only dragged across the ground, but at times even prostrate with a naked body, from this guest-house which you gave to me through your people and agentes in rebus, which I have never left except through your violence, both God knows, and the city knows, nor are you able to deny it now and in the future.

Therefore I reserve my case for God, so that, inasmuch as he himself has ordained it, he may be able to undertake the end. Meanwhile, I want you to know that I have decreed this (so that the reason may be able to stand now and in the future, even here), in the guest-house where you are holding me imprisoned, in which after first carrying me and thrusting me inside very cruelly, you dared to carry me from there in the same way, and to throw me into a single cell, that I will not eat bread nor drink water, until each of you have promised, not only by word, but also by hand, that you will not prevent my brothers who are willingly suffering these things with me from offering me necessary food from the guest-house where they are staying–and also others who have thought it worthy to ask for it.

Indeed, it was right to go out from the body, so that I would not be compelled to often tell those who want to know what a great crime you all have committed against divine and public law. But so that no one from among the unbelievers may call you cruel towards us, and think that we are ignorant of the divine commandments and did not want to avoid confusion more than to obey the Lord, for this reason we wanted to presume this: again I say that unless you make a promise by word and in writing, you will be murderers by preventing [food from being brought to me]. 

5. The omnipotent God knows this: also his Only-Begotten Son, indescribably born from him, knows, who as God of eternal virtue for our salvation put on a perfect man, wanted to suffer, triumphed over death and rose on the third day, sits on the right hand of the Father, is going to come to judge the living and the dead: also the Holy Spirit knows: the Catholic Church is witness, which confesses like this: because I will not be liable in myself, but you all, who have wanted to prevent my fellow-servants from ministering necessary things.

And if you have prepared this, you ought to despise yourselves: not as though I fear death, but so that after my departure you may not say that I wanted to depart by a voluntary death and may not find a certain cloud of accusation for us. Know that I am going to communicate with the Churches which I am able to reach with letters that have been for a time locked up; I am going to communicate also with the servants of God, so that the whole world might be able to recognize, through these persons running together, how the complete faith which has been approved by all the Catholic bishops is suffering from the Ariomaniacs, which it condemned before. I, Eusebius the bishop, have subscribed in the same way [i.e. to the Nicene Creed].

I adjure you who read this letter, through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that you not suppress it but [allow] it to be be read by others.”

6. Therefore these men, softened on barely the fourth day from this letter [libellus] compelled us, hungry, to return to the guest-house in which we had stayed. They saw from within how the people, returning, received us with joy. They surrounded our guest-house with lights.

We begin, with the Lord approving, to again minister to the poor. Their inhumanity did not endure this, and they destroyed our love for their hatred. They were able to tolerate this for around nearly twenty-five days. They break out anew, and with the destroyed hand of many they come to our guest-house armed with clubs, they break the wall through other people’s doors, and they come to us with violence. Again they grab us, and they lock us up in a narrower guard-house with only our dear priest Tegrinus.
Also our brothers, that is all the priests and deacons, they grab and lock up.

After three days by their own power they send them into exile throughout various places. Other brothers who had come to visit us they send in the public jail and hold them locked up through very many days. Rushing again to the guest-house, they destroy everything which had been prepared either for expenses or for the poor.

But because this their public crime was known by all the citizens, they used this argument, that they were returning some less important things, and were trying to return to us our own property. But they kept the expenses in their own possession: and after so great a crime they were seeking, if it was possible, to deny this, that they had permitted nothing from my property to come to me, I who was trying to bring necessary food to my body. Barely on the sixth day, with people everywhere shouting against them, they permitted one to come. In all that pertained to them, they showed that they had the minds of murderers. At first, they sent away this person, so as not to cease from their malice: afterwards, barely on the sixth day, when we were failing, they allowed him to come once with some food. And so these are the works of the Ariomaniacs. 

7. See, most holy brothers, if this is not persecution, when we who keep the Catholic Faith suffer these things: and think more deeply whether this persecution is not very much even worse than that one which happened through the ones who serve idols. Those men were sending people into prison: nevertheless they were not preventing their own from coming to them.

How much, therefore, has Satan wounded the Churches through the cruelty of the Ariomaniacs! People who are obliged to free men send into public guard-houses. People who are taught to suffer for the sake of justice commit violence. People who are taught by the divine law not to demand back their own property when it is stolen steal others’ property. I pass over how much cruelty has invaded them, while they rejoice in their temporal ease. The ability to see their own people is not denied by torturers or judges to bandits shut up in prison: our people are kept from us: and not only are they forbidden from the guest house in which we are held, but they are terrified by threats so that they will not approach the prison. In this way they have subjugated everyone, as I have very plainly known.

I will begin from the bishops: while certain of them fear to lose their office, they themselves have lost the Faith; while they do not not want to lose their earthly faculties and immunities, they have judged the heavenly treasuries and true security to be nothing. In the same way also the rest have been led astray, while they see the bishops fearing these things perish, and have begun to love the things which they cannot have forever.

8. In this way the Ariomaniacs frighten the rich, since they threaten them with proscription: in this way they frighten the poor, since they have the power to shut them up in prison. And how great this insanity is! In the place in which we are held, they not only send the men who serve us into prison, but also they shut up the holy girls [sanctiominales=consecrated religious] in the public guard-houses without any fear of God. But as the the evil old men who sought to violate the chastity of Susanna did not rejoice: so neither will these rejoice always, who try to subject the Church to their infidelity with various persecutions and excessive oppressions. For the holy Daniel said to those men: ‘In this way, because they were afraid, the daughters of Israel slept with you’ [Daniel 13:57].

But let human fear, Most Holy ones, depart from your minds, since you have the consolation of the Lord, who says: ‘Do not fear those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul’ [Matthew 10:18]. This is the time of testing: the time exists so that those who have been tested and proved may be made known and manifest. Therefore they have received human help, because they do not have divine help: because if they did have it, they would never subjugate innocent souls to themselves with earthly power.

9. We were obliged to write many things about those men’s evil deeds, by which not I alone, but very many are oppressed: but it is so that we might not be able to do this, and communicate their cruelty by letters, that we are kept in this very confined guard-house by them. For this reason also our other people and friends are kept from approaching us.

But the Lord has granted to me to send this letter to you through our most dear deacon Syrus, whom we have in our power to send; because by the providence of our Lord at that time he approached to see the holy places and was not discovered with the rest of the brothers. 

10. As for the rest, we have with difficulty written this letter in whatever way we could, always begging God that he would restrain our guards for a time, and grant that the deacon might bear more the announcement of our labors than what letters of greetings are usually like.

For this reason I beg you all sufficiently that you keep the Faith with all vigilance, that preserve harmony, that you lean on prayers, that you remember us without ceasing: so that the Lord might think it worthy to free his church which labors over the whole earth, and so that we who are oppressed might be able to be freed to rejoice with you: the Lord will think it worthy to grant this since you ask for it through our Lord Jesus Christ, who with him is blessed from the ages and into all the ages of ages. Amen.

Requiem for the Homeless in Age of Cruelty

Requiem for the Homeless in an Age of Cruelty

[As I've repeatedly tried to emphasize in this space, one of the biggest issues in 21st century America is our treatment of the poor and the homeless. Like many trends, it has been made much worse by the presidency of Donald Trump; but unlike most things Trump has done, it has generated virtually no conversation, resistance, or backlash. At the present date, poverty and homelessness is simply not a political issue, for the simple reason that there is no partisan polarization around it. Rather, there is an emerging, near-universal consensus at practically every level of government and society around a model of 'solving' homelessness through a combination of criminalization, forcible interment, performative cruelty, practical indifference, and continual, localized expulsion. In response, I've resurrected a personal essay that I wrote a number of years ago, but shelved due to my own discomfort. I hope it will do some good.]

Not everyone makes it.

    We all know this, intellectually, on some level. There are the obituaries, the statistics, the crime reports on the nightly news. “At least five people froze to death overnight...” “A man was found dead yesterday...” From the opioid crisis to the suicide crisis to the homelessness crisis, we all recognize that, well, in a crisis, some people make it and some don't. Some people get revived and quit drugs; a lot more die of overdoses. Some people get the help they need and live happy lives; some people kill themselves. And, well, some homeless people eventually “get back on their feet” (what an odd saying, as if they had only tripped over a rock and needed to wait a second to get their balance back); and well, some don't. A lot of people die, every day and every year and every hour, because of the Issues with our society, Issues that exist to be discussed by pundits on television or politicians in a debate, discussed and debated and analyzed and finally solved by appropriate applications of public policy. In the end, we all hope, every Issue will be solved, and every crisis resolved; and in the meantime, a large number of people will die alone and cold and in the dark. 

We all recognize that on some level; but I can still remember the precise moments when I realized it was actually true: that in this life, when people are knocked down on the ground, cast off, forgotten, overlooked, hurt, some of them never do get back up and smile at you and say hello.

His first name was “Bob,” but of course that's not his real name. I didn't learn his last name until I finally read it in the paper, three or four months after he died.

I think the first thing I noticed about him is how sad he looked. This in itself is not uncommon; if you've never stood or sat on the street begging passersby for money, for an hour or a day or a week, it can be hard to understand just how dehumanizing and horrible an experience it really is. Put simply, every one ignores you—ignores you even if you speak to them, even if you look at them, even if you shout at them. Even then, it's not even really that they ignore you, that they forget about you or overlook you—they act as though the mere fact that you are there is the most shameful and horrible thing in the world. They studiously avoid your gaze, studiously avoid speaking, studiously avoid taking any action that will acknowledge that you exist and are standing in front of them. After a few hours, or an afternoon, or a week of that, anyone would go mad—or at least get a little depressed.

Death of the Son, Episode IX: Dinner with a Murderer

Death of the Son, Episode IX

Dinner with a Murderer

[Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three; Episode Four; Episode Five; Episode Six; Episode Seven; Episode Eight; Episode Nine] 

[This episode concludes the serial novel 'Death of the Son.' Until the sequel!]

They were back in the cool of the Imperial Palace, walking through the endless marbled corridors: Theodotus, the eunuch of Constantine, and a single soldier. 

The men in front of him showed no concern; the eunuch sauntered slowly, swinging his hips theatrically from side to side, and even the soldier slouched as he walked. Again and again, Theodotus had to abruptly slow his pace to keep from bumping into them; and each time he did, he gripped the dagger stowed at his waist, making sure it did not jostle or fall. He could not fail now through impatience; too much was at stake. 

In a few minutes, he told himself. I am going to have dinner with the Emperor Constantine. Then I will kill him. 

But somehow, none of it seemed real; he was in a dream, sleeplessly wandering the corridors of the haunted palace. Any moment now, the dead Empress would emerge from a doorway and speak to him again. "For my children," she had said, her mouth dripping blood. But where were her children? He shook himself, and nearly stumbled into the eunuch in front of him again; then nearly did so again as the eunuch stopped completely, then turned slowly to face him. 

Theodotus looked around; they were in front of a small door in the corridor. As he watched, the eunuch gestured him, with a complex, flourishing wave, to enter. Steeling himself, he stepped inside.

But he was only in a small storeroom, lit with a single, wavering oil lamp. The eunuch tittered, covering his mouth with one hand. "Did you really think we would take you to see the Emperor looking like that?" His thin hand traced its way across Theodotus' dirty black tunic, stained with blood. "Here's what's going to happen; I'll leave, and you'll put this on. Then we'll go to the Augustus." One hand touched Theodotus in the chest, while the other gestured towards an ornate silver-and-black assemblage set in the corner. "And you should really clean yourself up while you're at it," he added, gesturing to a bowl of water and a brush beside it. "You clerics...no sense of propriety." He shifted his hand to touch Theodotus on the arm, then shut the door, leaving Theodotus to dress in the flickering darkness.

As he reached for the robe, a stray memory flickered to life: the first time he had put on his deacon's robes, in the little sacristy of the cathedral in Antioch, just before his ordination. Those robes had been linen; these were silk, and the crosses were woven of real silver. He put on the heavy tunic, then the chlamys, clasping it with a golden broach. Apart from the crosses and the richness of the fabric, it might have been a military cloak; a reminiscence cemented as he reached down and slid the pugilo into the leather belt, under the chlamys, fastening the clasps just as he remembered.

But which was he, the soldier or the deacon? Or was he somehow both? 

He shook these thoughts away, and stepped out of the room to find the eunuch and soldier lounging against the wall opposite, laughing together. The eunuch looked him up and down, then stepped over and began adjusting small parts of his robes, pulling out a part there, tucking it in here, and clucking gently to himself all the while. As his hand strayed toward the belt, Theodotus grabbed him roughly. "Enough," he said. "Take me to Constantine."

The eunuch tittered again. "Why, deacon..." he said. "I don't know what you've heard about eunuchs, but...I have standards." He withdrew his hand. "And you didn't even touch the brush...well, the Emperor has no one to blame but himself. Very well. Come." His sauntering air gave way to sudden brusqueness, and he was away, walking faster this time, and gesturing impatiently for Theodotus and the soldier to follow. 

The soldier brought up the rear this time, his armor clattering as he walked; Theodotus barely suppressed the urge to seize the dagger at his waist. The corridors were nearly empty now, as bishops and courtiers dined and rested from the effort of the morning's assembly; but here and there slaves moved silently about, cleaning and carrying out small errands. A slave holding a large tray pressed himself against a wall just in time to avoid the eunuch, who was racing forward with small steps and did not slow his pace or look at him. As they passed by, Theodotus glanced at the slave: it was the German, Flavius. Theodotus felt the man's eyes narrow, and for a second saw reflected in them the strange scene he must be: the unkempt appearance, the rich robes, the soldier and the eunuch and the deacon.

Then Flavius had disappeared again, and abruptly they were there, outside the large, ornate door of what was obviously a dining room. The eunuch stopped, and gestured Theodotus forward. "Go on," he said, frowning. "The Emperor's been in a mood all day...I'm not going in there. And if he complains about your appearance..." The eunuch raised his hands in mock frustration. Theodotus, though, needed no reminder; he had already wrenched open the door a small crack and stepped through.