Avert Your Gaze
They built a fighting cage on the White House lawn for the emperor's birthday, and then told us to look away. On bread and circuses, and the end of an empire.
The Text Over Tea
I was making my morning tea when the text came in.
It was from one of my dearest friends, and it said: look what is happening now. This is how Emperor Trump is celebrating his eightieth birthday. And underneath it, the photographs.
WTAF.
That was the whole of my response, for a good minute, standing in my kitchen with the kettle still going. I am a mystery school teacher with three decades of training in holding the wide and patient view, and what rose up in me, fully formed, was four letters, and not one of them holy.
Because there it was, in the pictures. A steel cage, an actual eight-sided fighting cage, put up on the South Lawn of the White House, under a black canopy that someone had decided to name The Claw. Men inside it, beating each other bloody, for the eightieth birthday of a president who sat at the front in a box beside the man who owns the spectacle and the man who owns the platform it streamed on. The fighters had walked out through the doors of the Oval Office. One of them appeared to skim a copy of the Declaration of Independence on his way to the fight. Jets crossed the sky. The closed captioning, and I truly wish I were inventing this, was sponsored by a cryptocurrency with the president’s own name on it.
My friend called him Emperor Trump as a joke. Standing there with my tea going cold, I did not think it was a joke.
Because if you have been waiting for a sign, a real one, that we are in the last days of this particular civilisation, I think we can stop waiting. This is what it looks like. We have all read about this part in the history books, and somehow assumed we would be spared having to watch it live, on a Sunday, over breakfast.
So I did the only things there were to do. I stood with the old cold drop in my body. I said a quiet prayer to all of my well ancestors that what I was looking at was the fever of a dying thing, the malaise before the end, and not the rude good health of something that means to stay. And then I asked the question that actually matters, the one underneath the WTAF.
What do we do with this?
We Have Seen This Film
We have seen this exact film before. We have just forgotten we were in it.
When Rome could no longer feed its people, it learned to entertain them instead. The phrase the poet used was panem et circenses. Bread and circuses. Give the crowd enough grain to keep it standing and enough blood to keep it cheering, and it will not ask the harder questions about who has taken everything else. The Colosseum was not built at the height of the Republic. It was built as the thing underneath was rotting. The gladiators, the emperor in his box, the roar of the stands, the coin with his face stamped on it. That was not a civilisation at its strongest. That was a civilisation learning to perform strength because the real thing was draining out of it.
So when I watch men brawl on the lawn of the most powerful house in the world, for the birthday of one man, with his face on the money and his name on the captions, I am not watching something new. I am watching something very, very old. The empire has reached the part of the story where it stops governing and starts staging.
The poll, for what it is worth, told the same tale. Most Americans, asked, did not think this belonged on the White House lawn. Even most of his own side did not. This was not a hungry people demanding its games. This was an emperor throwing himself a party and calling it the nation’s.
What the Spectacle Is For
A spectacle this size is never only a spectacle. It does a job.
Its job is to fill the frame. To be so loud, so bright, so impossible to look away from, that the eye never drifts to the edges, to the quieter footage of what is actually happening to the country while the jets are roaring. The prices people cannot meet. The corruption running in plain sight. The slow, methodical taking apart of the things that were supposed to protect ordinary lives. A cage match on the lawn is a very effective way of making sure you are looking at the cage, and not at the hand deftly going through your pockets.
And there was one line, from the government’s own lawyers, that told the whole truth without meaning to. When people went to court to stop the fights, the Justice Department wrote that the objectors could always just avert their gazes for the weekend.
Avert your gaze. Look away. That is the instruction the dying empire gives, every single time. It is the one instruction we must refuse.
The Hungry Men
Now. I want to be careful, my loves, because the easy thing here is to sneer at the men in that crowd, and I will not do it.
The men cheering at the edge of that cage are not my enemy. They are hungry. And not only for the brawl.
I have written before about the boys we are losing, the young men handed a culture that offers them no rite of passage, no elders, no initiation, no honourable way to become men, and then sells them a counterfeit.
The cage is the cathedral of that counterfeit.
It speaks to something real and ancient in the male soul, the longing for the test, for courage, for the heroic, for a threshold you cross and come out changed. That longing is holy. Men have always needed it. Every culture that loved its men built them a true version of it.
Ours did not. Ours tore down the temple and put up an Octagon. It took the deep hunger for meaning and sold it back as blood and branding and a flag draped over a shoulder for the cameras. The men are not contemptible for being moved by it. They are being fed junk because the kitchen that once made the real food has been boarded up. The hunger is true. The thing being served to it is not.
A Civilisation That Forgot How to Feed Its Soul
This is the part I keep coming back to, the part underneath all of it.
A civilisation reaches for blood-spectacle when it has forgotten how to feed the soul.
And ours forgot a long time ago. This is the world I have been calling motherless across all of these essays, the one severed from the Great Mother, from the sacred, from the feminine face of God, from any sense that life itself is holy and worth tending rather than conquering. A culture cut off from that does not know how to nourish its people, so it learns to distract them. It cannot offer meaning, so it offers spectacle. It cannot give bread, so it gives circuses.
I will say, because I always do, that this is one way of reading it and not the only one. But it is the truest reading I have. What is staging itself on that lawn, the dominance, the conquest, the worship of the strongman, the cage as the highest sacrament a society can offer its young men, is the late, decadent face of an order that was always going to end here. An order built on power over rather than care for. It has run out of everything except the show.
What Is Actually Dying
So yes. I think we are watching the dying of a civilisation.
I want to be honest about that, because I think a lot of us feel it in the body and have been told we are catastrophising.
We are not catastrophising. Something is ending. You can feel it, the way you can feel weather coming.
But here is the thing I need you to hold, because it is the whole of why I am not in despair.
The end of an empire is not the end of the world.
Those are not the same, and the empire would very much like you to believe they are, because if its death feels like the death of everything, you will fight to keep it alive. You will cling to the very thing that is crushing you, out of terror of what is on the other side.
An empire is not the world. It is one arrangement of the world. A brutal, exhausted, four-thousand-year-old arrangement that is finally, visibly running out of road. And in the oldest story I carry, the one of Inanna going down through the seven gates into the underworld, the death is never the end of the tale. The death is the middle of it. She has to be stripped of everything and hung on the hook and undone completely before she can rise, remade, as Queen of both worlds. Things have to be allowed to die so that something truer can be born from the compost of them.
That is where I think we are. Not at the end. In the underworld. In the long dark middle, watching the old king stage his last and loudest games while the ground shifts under all of it.
Do Not Avert Your Gaze
So here is what I would ask of you.
Do not avert your gaze. They told you to, in writing, and that alone should tell you it is the one thing worth refusing.
Watch it. Witness it clearly, name it honestly, and do not let anyone convince you that the spectacle is the same thing as strength, or that the noise is the same thing as a future.
And then turn, with whatever you have, toward the other work. The unglamorous, deeply unspectacular work of building the thing that comes after. The tending. The feeding. The remembering of how to care for one another and for the living world. Everything the empire forgot. Everything the Mother never did.
Empires fall, my loves. They always have. They are falling now, on a lawn, under a canopy called The Claw, with the cameras rolling and the captions sponsored.
Let it fall. And then let us go and build the thing that actually feeds people.
In love and devotion,
Elayne Kalila
The good news is that Rome fell—there still are Italians. Every dominant empire (Turkey, Greece, Germany, France, England, Spain, Egypt, Persia, Judah, the Mayans, China, Japan, etc etc…) has gone through that process of desecration, disintegration, and putrefaction at the stained hands of the greedy rich in power..And those people and cultures are remarkably still here; and perhaps richer for having been humbled in their own shit for a little while, integrating it into their soil, and growing something heartier as a result.
Thank you very much, Elayne - yet another great article! Your reference to the final years of Rome’s decline yielding the public spectacles is very insightful. It also brings up the responsibility of the public to not be fooled, and this is, as we know, a tragic flaw of many citizens today.
I also appreciate your reference to the ancient story of Inanna, and how she endured and was transformed in the underworld. What you well know, but did not mention, is that her own sister, Ereshkigal, goddess of the underworld, had Inanna stripped and put on the meat hook to die. The myth tells us Ereshkigal was consumed in her own grief and jealousy that caused her to harm her sister. Tiny beings created by the sisters’ ancestor weep with Ereshkigal until she feels comforted. This empathy she receives heals her to the point of releasing Inanna, who has grown through suffering. Both sisters are transformed. Thus, the divine feminine is made whole in the world.
Of course, Elayne, you know and understand this ancient tale more than most. I mention it here because the “spectacle” of a declining society is not only generated by men. Healing our society requires whole souls, across genders, with depth and integrity. Women’s empathy for other women, men’s empathy for other men, and soulful empathy across the gender spectrum is a transformative need we must not ignore. Empathy requires strength. It is not weakness. Your work supports this.
Elon Musk’s attacks on empathy as “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization” belies his ignorant mind and heart. Our nation must grapple with these lies and rise up to the challenge of “liberty and justice for all”.
Thank you again for your profound work and voice in the world!