As so many practiced diplomats,
so too your vaunted laureates,
whose access to the higher rungs of the cultural priesthood
is hinged upon their flair for sophistry.
Well, I vote you the best-equipped to shrink from speech
that might suggest any thoughts your key target-market
might not have already signed-off on and ratified.
And I vote you most likely to clutter your language
with so much deadwood that no amount of pruning will
reveal your intensive, protracted campaign of saying
nothing at all. Your daydreams of black tie affairs
at Rideau Hall. Your acceptance speech.
Your dramatic pause. Don't forget to thank those bitter
ex-musician cum embedded rock-journalists frantically
applauding the latest artist-formerly-known-as iconoclast,
giddy from the fumes of a fresh defection,
moping to the maudlin beat of a hat rack rhythm section,
a tacit understanding of mutual non-aggression enjoyed
by every nauseating do-nothing functionary.
Really, it's not so much the incessant ruse of assigning
profound meaning to the meaningless curios you decorate
your sets with in your extraordinarily mundane fictions.
It's the (colossal) arrogance of the subtext: the province
of human affairs is a field best left to dilettantes
with an extraordinary gift for the feigning of paralysis.
For saying nothing at all.
For daydreams of black tie affairs at Rideau Hall.
An acceptance speech. Sustained applause.
- :
- Failed States
- Supporting Caste
- How To Clean Everything
- Miscellaneous
- I Am a Rifle
- Less Talk, More Rock
- Live From Occupied Territory: An Official Bootleg
- Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes
- Live from Occupied Territory
- How To Clean Everything (20th Anniversary Edition)
- How to Clean Everything (Reissue)
- How to Clean Everything (20th Anniversary Reissue)
- Hellraisers Moto XXX 2
- I’d Rather Be Flag Burning
- Where Quantity Is Job #1
- Live
- Where Quantity Is Job No.1
- Less Talk,More Rock
- Duplicate Keys Icaro (An Interim Report)
- VISIONS: All Areas, Volume 147: Rarities 2012