Emily Gorcenski
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
It is the time of the coward. It is the age of the liar and greed and avarice and lost boys and a dopamine hit and fractals and velocity and velocity and velocity and go, go, go. Don't stop. Don't stop to realize the indecency, the disloyalty, the dishonor, the discreditability, the parsimony, the hordes hoarded behind the gates the gatekeepers keep. This is the dawn of masculine energy.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Not the energy your father taught you about measuring twice and cutting once, but picking yourself up and how the sting of hydrogen peroxide means it's working. Or your grandfather, who spent the days you spent smoking weed behind a 7-Eleven serving on a torpedo boat waiting for the sharks.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Who never failed to stop to lend a hand to those in need or say grace before dinner or to help you with your math homework or teach you not to wear a necktie at a lathe. This is the year of cutting once and never measuring. Pencil in the blueprints with whatever comes out. It's faster that way. The season of hypocrites and not of confidence, but confidence men.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The masculine energy of the con, the scam, the bamboozle, the fraud. The pulling of the rug and the begging of the question. Now is the killing hour. The clock hands float over the blood in the streets and the rage and the rage and the uncorked hatred overflows. The minutes of impotence expanding, overflowing, fizzling. Deception gives way to more deception. Not a single promise is kept.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Rapaciousness and rape and abandonment and the cutting of corners and KPIs. A newborn died in a baby box in Italy because the alarm sensor didn't work. It is an honorless time. A time of only one question. Not how or may or can or if or whether, but when. How soon. No legacy, no history, no reputation. Build the factories, then abandon them. The soil keeps the memory.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And the burn scars, and the floodwaters, and the clear windshields where the splatters of bug guts used to be, and the images in the 20-year-old magazine still in the rack in the guest bathrooms, never used, that showed how children used to go sledding, and maybe the house is too big. No one comes by.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I shoveled the neighbor's walk in the snow and salted it so he didn't slip on the ice and could receive his mail. He's an old man. One of the few black men left living in this neighborhood that was theirs once. He sent me a letter. It went all the way to Richmond to come to my door. He's the last man with dignity.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
In the letter, he told me he has a new toy, a laptop, which makes him happy because he's a big lover of history and he can go online and read about it. and I weep for this last dignified man who proudly wears a cap honoring his service, because this is the era of synthesis and generation and revision and content, content, content, and inverifiability and manipulation. This is the pseudo-scene.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I bought a bottle of wine from a centuries-old vineyard destroyed in a devastating flood. An unsellable bottle in the retail market, a fundraiser souvenir, I kept it as a memento mori of our changing world, a mud-covered reminder of how we all must work little by little to give the world forward. It broke when I tried to move it home on my 72nd flight of the year.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
It is the decade of hypocrisy, even for those who can see hypocrisy. They made me a vice president, and with every title change, I moved farther from God, a God I never believed in. I was raised in New England towns named for biblical places by people who thought working the rocky soil brought them closer to God. The only holy men left are those in the fields.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
Basra and Lebanon and Gilead and Hebron. The people who named those towns committed a genocide to name them. And 400 years later, in their namesakes, the same. It is the epoch of cadavering. It is the night of bonfires and feuilles. The twilight of stories that dared and poems and albums.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
And I tried to sell a book, and I learned that there's only interest in a book when you put yourself into it to be consumed. Words are calories measured in the amount of heat they give a flame.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
I walked over the Westminster Bridge one night with a journalist who told me that they can't publish two good stories at a time, because if one goes viral, it punishes the other, the arcane footfalls of the algorithm dance. It is the sunset of craft and skills handed down and heritage.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The waxing of a crass and pandering moon, of pantomime, a frictionless night, a night where nothing dared, nothing gained, a night of shutters and locks. These are the dark ages, ages of embarrassing the future. There is a shame here that penance cannot satisfy.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
The sturdy, empty shelves, the blue hyperlinks to nowhere, and a generation lost must be lost because profit cannot be taken from an idea. I think of the mimeograph machines stuck under the floorboards of the Saladera Nosh houses,
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
and the punks and the whores who copied radical zines in the public library Xerox machines, and the Yugoslavian Galaxia, and the novels now considered some of the greatest of all time once banned for obscenity. In Ceaușescu's house, the original TV remains. The revolutionaries didn't bother to steal it because there were only 30 minutes of broadcast TV each day.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 166
In the crepuscular light, birds dare to sing even though they know the cats hunt below. In Vilnius, there is a tile in a square. They say if you make a wish and spin around it three times, your wish will come true. At this tile, a human chain formed and spanned three countries and they sang.