US elections: The barbarians are within

I have been reading J M Coetzee’s novel “Waiting for the Barbarians.” It concerns a magistrate, a servant of Empire, stationed on a remote frontier, who watches with mounting indignation as fear of barbarian encroachment is used to justify a brutal and self-defeating imperial campaign of violence and torture. It is a portrait of an ageing man, stung by his conscience, bewildered by his times.

In one passage, Coetzee writes: “Every year the lake-water grows a little more salty. There is a simple explanation — never mind what it is. The barbarians know this fact. At this very moment they are saying to themselves, ‘Be patient, one of these days their crops will start withering from the salt, they will not be able to feed themselves, they will have to go.’ That is what they are thinking.

That they will outlast us.” Barbarians come in different guises. Coetzee’s novel turns in part on the fact that the barbaric presence in his pages is the Empire, not the Empire’s imagined enemies. It is of the nature of declining powers to imagine foes, to flail, to produce zealots, to embark on doomed wars, to flex the atrophying muscles of dominance. It is of the nature of life that imagined enemies, once provoked, turn into real ones. On horseback, ragged mirages in the dust, Coetzee’s barbarians do not really need to do anything.

Hardly more than chimera, they suck the Empire into their labyrinth. This is because the Empire is dying, just as the magistrate is dying. He is an ageing libertine with an agile mind and a love of knowledge — a speck, as he sees with unforgiving insistence, on history’s tide. This is a novel about the desperation of mortality. Surveying the American scene in the run-up to the midterm elections early next month, it is hard to escape that word: desperation.

This time the barbarians are not shabby. They are well groomed, well heeled, loudmouthed; and they never heard a chord, or read a phrase, or saw a sensuous line on a canvas that caused them to pause in wonder. These barbarians chose their moment well. The Empire-lite has not known a victory in farflung wars in all the 17 years since it was attacked. The millions who served at distant, tedious frontiers were scarcely recognised on their return.

They trudged their trauma home in sullen silence. They watched, these unacknowledged servants of the imperial Republic, as certainties evaporated and precariousness spread and words lost meaning and money rode roughshod over sacrifice. The mood in the Empire was restive, ripe for a self-declared saviour ready to deploy the language of violence and identify scapegoats. In due course, along came the barbarian saviour, marching across the ramparts, through the gates of the capital, and declaring the rapt crowd to be the largest in recorded history.

He had been chosen to blow up the whole place. He set about his task with vigour. What can be said at this point about the self-styled saviour? He is a man of fiendish energy and malicious intuitions who gets the blood up by appealing to the barbarian in us all. He says he wants to make the Empire great again, but all he really wants to do is to loot it on the way down. His Republican cronies enable him because their love of power blinds them to the contagion they propagate.

The barbarian saviour loves to see a reporter body-slammed, to parade his ignorance, to strut his lies, to broadcast his bigotry, to empower rich Middle Eastern murderers, to humiliate a woman traumatised by sexual assault, to incite his followers to violence, to sap civilisation, to toy with nuclear Armageddon as a distraction from his scam. The barbarian game is clear: to blind Americans to the fact that the United States is a self-governing enterprise. To say government is evil, government is terrible, bad government is what Democrats do — so just leave it to us! In short, the objective is to outlast us, and to eviscerate the institutions that make us, us.

But no! We Americans are self-governing, and in the face of malevolent and feckless and corrupt people, there are better options. That is what the vote on Nov. 6 is about. In Coetzee’s novel, the magistrate encounters a zealous officer, Colonel Joll, who has been dispatched to the frontier to crush the barbarians. Joll is a torturer, a man of implacable certainties, blinding “barbarian” prisoners, crushing their feet.

The magistrate-narrator strives to maintain a certain civility in his exchanges with Joll, but grows disgusted: “Throughout a trying period he and I have managed to behave towards each other like civilised people. All my life I have believed in civilised behaviour; on this occasion, however, I cannot deny it, the memory leaves me sick with myself.” There comes a moment, when the barbarian is within, to draw a line, to say enough, to speak out, to make a stand whatever the cost. The desperation of mortality can also yield the lucidity of courage.