He lent us his spectacles and we looked at Europe

 He lent us his spectacles and we looked at Europe, and we were saddened and shocked and 

                         angered all at once. But some small, hard part of us, some interior iron, was glad. And 

                         eventually we were able to persuade our heart, to wake it to the gladness of the great work

                         to come, the great uncompleted work, the fostering and waking and tending of the seeds of the 

                         previous great works, the great works of Athens, the great works of Florence, the great works

                         of Paris.  And we were able to perceive in that flourishing and in that work of destruction

                         after all a wild joy, and a stern one, a double-helix twined upon itself, composed of contradictory

                         impulses, spinning like a top, full of dynamism and orgasmic potential. 

His gaze is the gaze of the bourgeois divested of illusion. Thus it is both noble and frightening, like the gaze of a fallen Zeus, divested of his splendour and somehow cynical. It is the gaze of Moses who has after all seen that there is nothing upon the mountain-top, and that the stones he holds in his hand are mere dross matter, come to tell us all, that he is after all still a prophet, and that there is after all still a Promised Land. 

We have given authoritarianism a chance, a million chances. We have tried the pyramid power structure, for thousands of years. It's given us pyramids of skulls, rivers of blood, obscenities of piled-up cash, rubble of broken lives. It's time for God's sake to dismantle it, somehow, by all means and any, to dismantle it, even if we have to become angels, even if it's impossible, even if it's the last thing we do. 

It's time to laugh at it and mock it, to fight it tooth and nail, to take up arms against it, to banish it, to undermine it, to fanatically attack its weakest points. It is ridiculous, therefore laugh. The more it demands to be taken seriously, laugh at it the more. The more it surrounds itself with mysticism and shadow, shine a bright light on it the more. To its pomposity and seriousness and ritual, laugh like you would at a clown, for it is clownish. Exalt small brave acts of disobedience and cynicism, exalt small honesties, exalt what is heartfelt, exalt what is whole-hearted. 

It is the Zigurrat of Ur, the pyramid of phraoah, the ridiculous and ungainly, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the monuments of Moloch, the tombs of the City of London, the military barracks, the sacred leader principle, the holy pyramid, the priest in his inner sanctum, the lofty priest caste, the banker caste, the proud stockbroker caste in his inner sanctum office, the celebrity-god, emblem and unwitting symbol of the hierarchy, symbolic sacrifice-victim of the priesthood. It is the missile, the phallus, the indestructible granite tomb, the needle of Cleopatra, the prick of profit, the cold hardness of cash, the glorious bank vault.  

It transumted, and became a friendly face, a falsely smiling face, and expressed itself with borrowed Venusian luxury, and false frontages of glossy pastel colours and perfect teeth. It transmuted, and clothed itself with mixtures of subcultures and glamour. It transmuted again, and became a jester with a mask of rebellion. It traded in these images as in all else, it traded in souls, it traded in hopes, its wares were like so many glittering and deceiving jewels in an endless fair, a fair that never let you sleep or left you in peace, a fair that was insistent and multifarious, and that colonised all your space, and lied to you, and maniuplated you in a sweet voice, and endlessly transmuted like a demon-nymph that could not be held. 

"I will this" it said "and I will traffic in everything, and all things shall be laid out upon my stall, and I will be the merchant-god, and turn all men to the shades of Mercury, with deceit, with conjuring, and with commerce. I will be the mask of mammon, the false face of the zigurrat-pyramid, the mountain of skulls. Behind me will be open sores and wounds, ugly corruption, sickening violence, which I will surreptiously traffic in as spectacle. Behind me the vacuous tomb-memorials, the marble pillars, the sparse bank vaults. Behind me every desire and impulse cheapened and parasited, every ugliness made concrete and sprawling and vast. I am advertisement, I am a perpetually grinning mask".