through europe

Fleeing

 

As my troops push their assault forward, the phalanx of the Seleucids opens its ranks. It is a matter of seconds. My camera angle is low, close to the back of my soldiers, and when the elephants charge I am as taken aback as my men. It’s pure chaos. I pull back my camera angle towards the sky, where us Gods belong. I order the shaken Triarii cohort to fall on the right side of the elephants and to attack them from the flanks. A red square framing a white flag starts flashing next to their insignia. In vain, I order them again to flank the elephants. It’s too late. They have lost their cold Roman composure. They are fleeing, oblivious to the world and to the orders of their God.

 

I watch them running through the pixelated foliage of a nearby forest. I am no longer able to click on them to select the survivors. I forget the rest of the battle, still raging on the dry planes of inner Anatolia, and I lower my camera angle to follow the flight of my men.

They failed me, when all they were for was to obey me. What are they feeling right now?

Looking at their square calves propelling their run towards the end of the screen, I realize the truth.

They fear and tremble, but they have never been more true to me than now.

 

Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology — where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

 



"He lives! He lives! He lives!", those hashtags accompanying the virtual coffin of Steve Jobs seemed to repeat, like a white lie. You could have memorial candles left outside Apple stores, but #iSAD, #Thankyousteve and whatever else was trending in those hours of grief on Twitter were the true keywords following the dead, joining the endless wake where the body of the Martyr was carried from hand to hand, reduced in millions of pixels, re-tweeted from fingertip to fingertip. And as the corpse of the mahatma – “great soul” – was driven through the immaterial crowd, everybody tried to stretch a finger and make contact with him. Everyone had something to say: “You’ll be missed”, typed a 14-yr-old Chinese boy. “Gracias”, typed a Mexican girl studying in Chicago. “Merci”, typed a DJ from Senegal. 

 

 

Few places in the world are more secular than the United Kingdom. The laughable origins of the Anglican church, mixed with the centuries-old hegemony of capitalist ethics seem to have finally killed the religious spirit of the people of Albion. Religion, in the UK, is a mark of underdevelopment usually reserved for impoverished ethnic minorities or for the inhabitants of rural areas.

 

As a migrant from Catholic Italy, when I first arrived in the UK I thought I couldn't have asked for more. Not only were the remnants of the church so liberal and progressive that even homosexuals were allowed to be priests, but also people did not feel the need to fight off the presence of the church by indulging in God-oriented swearing, as is the common habit in Italy. God seemed to have finally disappeared, both as an unrequested father figure and as the millenarian oppressor of all living creatures. Back then, I thought I had arrived in the promised land of ‘really existing atheism’. And yet, I couldn’t have been more mistaken.