Doxology: A Novel

by Nell Zink

He just up and died of gunshot wounds in Brussels.

Even on the Left it was held that oppressed, disempowered people would turn to terrorism. Yet oppression was nearly universal, while terrorists were measured in parts per billion. Maybe if state terror had been included along with civil war and genocide by neglect, the body count could have attained statistical significance? That was not the point. The point was to imagine terrorists as great men, originators and bearers of epochal ideas, ritual scapegoats worthy of custom-tailored deaths. Great men were rare. That was something great men could always agree on.

They didn’t carry signs. The cleverness of some signs annoyed them, while the simplicity of others—for instance, rainbow flags saying PEACE—bored them. They considered clever signs symptomatic. All present were delighted with one another. It was the heyday of the SMS and profile-driven online dating, when people got a lot of practice formulating zingy ad copy.

“Those people aren’t socialists. They’re liberals who trust capitalism to give them a living wage and health care.”

There was a certain frightening logic to an unelectable candidate in a nation that was half nonvoters.

“Comet Ping Pong. I haven’t been there.” “I don’t like their pizza. It’s too cheesy.” “For the record, ‘cheese pizza’ is how we Democrats say ‘child pornography.’” “So in Democrat I guess I just said, ‘I don’t like their pornography; it has too many children’?”

The personal is not political. It can become political when abstracted and generalized, stripped of identifying markers. The political subject is a depersonalized subject: This could be you. This could be you being lied to, spied on, shot at, searched without warrant, convicted without trial, executed without appeal. Could be, but isn’t. When it turns personal, it’s too late.

I love you, Flora, you fecund slut.