Postmodern Saint

George Floyd has earned his sainthood. Floyd achieved in nine minutes and 29 seconds more than the collective left has achieved in the last decade, hastening perhaps the death-blow in their long fight against Western Civilization–and he did it on Fentanyl. They owe him a statue or two.

Monuments are tiny fractions of the surplus wealth eminent individuals create, given back as tributes; the billion-plus, and counting, George Floyd’s lurid and ultimate sacrifice produced can finance no end of monuments. It would be a grave omission if Floyd didn’t have several.

A cult, in the classical sense of the cultivation and “care” for Floyd as a kind of local deity, is of course already here, in the graffiti and tacky murals; in the credulous reporting and cringing essays that make up his legend. He joins a pantheon, along with Breonna Taylor and Michael Brown (another unfortunate face), one totemic head taller than those lesser deities, having achieved so much more.

George Floyd’s magnificent ugliness is no hindrance to religious veneration, and may help; the crude-featured massive head and its stony, inexpressive eyes–blank and dull, onto which the acolyte projects a sort of preternatural wisdom–remind me of nothing so much as the heads on Easter Island.

If you’re non-believer, a dissident or normie, cowed into silence, that face that one immediately, maybe furtively, associates with a familiar black malice and stupidity–an association born of harsh personal experience for most, yet increasingly unutterable due to repression; well, it just seems like the humiliation of being hectored by such a tacky prophet becomes the punitive point. Believe or suffer the misery of sight is the choice–or check out. People now cultivate ignorance, nod along to the absurd and look at the sidewalk as they walk past the gaudy, violent iconography of the new order. Insulate, insulate, insulate as the wealthy stock broker says in Bonfire of the Vanities, that’s how you get by; now a necessity for every common man, psychic insulation from the bombardment. We sit like Viet Cong in our bunkers as B-52s with BLM paint schemes drop rainbow-colored bombs on the countryside, brushing the occasional falling dirt from our laptops and phones, where we try to navigate Globohomo’s increasingly poisonous content.

Perhaps this explains why so many accept it: they see no choice, with the political, social and cultural worlds all captured by the new dispensation and dissent not just barred but increasingly perilous: why continue to see? Why torture yourself–nothing can be done after all–by considering the perverse comedy of turning over the country to its most incapable people, as a reward for their persistent dysfunction, who in turn, too dull to see the con, condescend to explain things to their moral and intellectual betters–and are we not that, after all?