Heart of The American Darkness

I knew this day would come.

The day of the Shadow.

I felt it, ever so long ago, in that inexplicable and almost unthinkable way that picayune events in our daily life anticipate world-shaking catastrophes to come. One day, you will be able to read about my own personal discovery of the Shadow -- but the time for that is not yet.

On November 8, the Shadow came to America -- the Shadow that feeds on torment, on cruelty, on misery and violence. It is the Shadow which carved an empire out of the dungeons of the slave-castles and the prison-ships of the Middle Passage, which turned the Caribbean islands into a gigantic engine to convert cheap human blood into profitable sugar, and which transformed the broken bodies of those who picked cotton and who rolled tobacco into an ocean of annuities. It is the Shadow that rolled across an entire continent, which built a world-spanning military-industrial complex, and which neoliberalized the world after its own liberal image.

It is the Shadow of America's imperial capitalism. Yet its appearance in 2016 heralds no imperial rebirth, but only its own wanton self-destruction. No second American century slouches beastlike towards Bethlehem, but only the zombified parody of its former glory. Glenn Greenwald nailed this contradiction in his wonderful election postmortem, which describes in devastating detail how the Clinton machine, that hellspawn of neoliberal think-tankery and Wall Street crookery, opened the gates of revanchist hell. The forces of this revanchism are unable to produce anything new. Instead, they will commit fearsome violence on the electorate that gave them power. With typical perspicacity, the videogame artists saw it first: Id Software's famous third-person shooter, Doom, warned us of what was to come all the way back in 1993.

But that is a discussion for another day, or more precisely, for the book I'm writing on videogame culture.

Today, I want to talk about the Resistance to the Shadow.

It is a small thing. Infinitely small, infinitely precious. It is the sliver of non-identity we carry around with us, often unknowingly. It is the nugget of conscience which quivers in the direction of freedom like an iron filing in a magnetic field. Against this nugget, the flint of consciousness strikes sparks.

Theory is the light kindled by these sparks. Through it, we see further than the Shadow. We see that the American Shadow, seemingly all-engulfing, is but one among others. There is the Shadow of Putinism, that failed petro-colonial reboot of the collapsed core of the Soviet empire; there is the Shadow of Brexit, that xenophobic unraveling of the no-longer-United  Kingdom; there is the Shadow of Ottomanism, which has destroyed Turkey's fragile democracy; there is the Shadow of Minotaurism, which has destroyed Greece and now threatens all of Europe with perdition; there is the far smaller but no less deadly Shadow of the Daesh, the warlordists, and the Assadists of Syria -- the Assadaeshists. Shadows all, ravening towards destruction.

But the light of theory, the labor of collective cognition, allows us to see even further. The light of this small thing, Resistance, hums with unquenchable power. In it shines the power of the stars: eye-dazzling, steadfast, radiant. Through it we see the Resistances battling the Shadows. We see the activists and peacemakers, the healers and poets, the authors and remixers, the digital artists and fan communities. Against the American gangsterism, there is the scorching satire of Fallout 4, which accurately predicted not the atomic catastrophes which never happened, but the catastrophic revanchisms of 2016 which did. Against the geopolitical closure of euroliberal Minotaurism and Eastern European ordo-liberalism, there is the magnificent open world revolution of The Witcher 3. Against the Shadow of the Assadaeshists, there is the light of Rojava; against the Shadow of Putinism, the light called the Maidan.

For every Shadow, a Resistance. For every Resistance, a constellation of stars. And as the Shadows begin to congeal into a single monster, so too must the very constellations unite. Against the One Shadow, there can be only One Resistance. In the gloom of prehistory, the light of the stars shall guide us towards the first, faint glimmer of the Sun.