I have no plans to join millions around the world viewing the inauguration. I’d rather dedicate my awareness to other things. I imagine Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Chew – appointed members of the royal court. They will occupy prime seating close to the man forwarded to the oval office by a system that long since voids the individual by gerrymandered districts, by a media-faucet of lies, slander, innuedo… This is called democracy. The individual who is to swear an oath, his hand resting on sacred scripture, to defend the Constitution is – a seditionist, a serial rapist, a convicted felon.

Am I inordinately good, morally superior to my fellows who will virtually join the spectacle? I am not. The distinction (if there is one): I know a funeral procession when I see one.

I’d just rather nurse my sadness elsewhere. I read that Michelle Obama will not attend either.

…the human race
is beginning to produce itself
as waste-product,
to carry out this work
of waste disposal
on itself.

What is worst
is not that we are submerged
by the waste-products of industrial and urban concentration,
but that we ourselves are transformed into residues.

…a way of transforming our environment
into an archaic residue,
to be tipped into the
dustbins of natural history

[that is] present events,
immediately voided of their meaning by news,
transformed into crusher residues,
a charnel-house of images.

News is
of the event as waste;

It is the current dustbin of history.

The Illusion of the End, by Jean Baudrillard, trans. by Chris Turner, chapt. Maleficent Ecology, page 78