Intellectuals of the Establishment

by James Miraflor


Premonition of Civil War. Salvador Dali. 1936. Oil on canvas.

Today as yesterday,
we wage war against the
Intellectuals of the
Establishment.

They are the "libertarian" academics,
who, in fierce legalese, "activist"
defense of our "freedoms",
threatened by the onslaught of
anti-democratic socialism,
seek to engage us in an
annihilative war, a war for
ideological hegemony.

They are the self-styled
descendants of the freethinkers,
who, after dismantling
the atavistic system of feudalism,
in their arrogant nihilism,
finally declared the "End of History",
convinced of the inevitable
immortality of the reinvented
Establishment.

They are the mobilizing agents
of the "options"-driven universe,
tweaking social variables with
technocratic, cast-iron efficiency.
They talk of neoliberal justice,
of low inflation, low interest-rate
regimes, on how Darwinian evolution
is only possible in their competitive
free market model.

They understand
and they speak, with epiphanic grandeur,
of humanity's tolerable obligatory suffering,
of inequality as irreversible law of nature,
an amoral byproduct of a blind
and random universe.

And thus, seeing with their cold
and calculating vision, they chart
the fate of an equally blind and amoral
society, confident that
their spectacle of imagery,
their reengineered religions,
their commoditized revolutions,
will perpetually stimulate their
soulless post-industrial
institutions.

We are at war against
the intellectuals of my age,
the last blood and flesh
of the moribund, unrelenting
Establishment.