Chapter 4: From CPAC to CPAPs

The gates of hell are open night and day;

Smooth the descent, and easy is the way.

But to return, and view the cheerful skies,

In this the task and mighty labour lies.

That’s how John Dryden translates the one hundred and twenty-fifth through the one hundred and twenty-ninth lines of the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. The words are spoken by the Sibyl presiding over the temple of Apollo in Cumae, a Greek colony near modern-day Naples. With her guidance, Aeneas descends into the underworld and then to the fields of Elysium where he is permitted to behold in panoramic fashion the future of Rome, the civilization he is about to establish, complete with the direct patrilineal progression from himself down to Augustus Caesar.

Augustus, according to Suetonius, boasted that he found Rome a city of brick and left it marble; Dr. Johnson said Dryden did the same to English verse. In my mind, there is nothing more classical, more imperial, more “Apollonian” than Dryden translating Virgil’s masterpiece of propaganda: Dryden, the most symmetrical of English poets, who imported the diamond-sharp formalism of Racine and Boileau into foggy Anglo-Norman, who wrote tens of thousands of verses in perfect heroic pentameter, reproducing in this style the epic commissioned by Rome’s first emperor himself. When Virgil read the scene mentioned above to the imperial court, Augustus’s sister fainted, overcome with happiness at the mention of her deceased son Marcellus. Upon waking, she ordered that Virgil be paid ten-thousand sesterces for each of the verses.

It is certainly propaganda, but it is glorious propaganda, and I’d listen to it on audiobook at work while culling through spreadsheets. Mozart’s piano concertos were another favorite for this purpose. It was insulation against workaday despair. Those pieces, as well as his divertimentos and serenades, could turn any wretched pleb into the loftiest eagle, soaring through the great morning of man, with the world’s innocence restored, made robust and pure, all influenzas and anxieties of the conscience flushed out, chipper and hale as a child and as holy as all the gods of Olympus fusing themselves back into Nature. I remember that period by these artworks; that period was those works. Rationality, measured and yet fully intoxicated by the revelation that God is Nature and Nature is God, was about to be crowned as ruler of the American Empire, and the project of the Enlightenment was about to be completed. This is at least what I thought I was working on at night and on the weekends with my website, a literary publication that prompted my Twitter mutuals to poetize, in the purest and brightest way their powers would allow, on the theme of immanence, the identification of the divine with the world itself…

…From that perhaps too ‘perfect’ heaven of form and unity we descended into the Calamity, a kata-strophe brought on through a portal opened by the Democratic primaries, the COVID pandemic, and the George Floyd riots, which culminated in Alexandre’s complete unraveling as a human being. Alexandre, consciously modeling himself on Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just, became an agent of a great Terror, a Terror greater than the one in the French Revolution, for this one was cosmically encompassing and totalitarian at the microscopic level. My Cult of Reason gave rise to his Cult of the Supreme Being, and then to the voracious guillotine, which sliced the heads not of men but of all values and all ideals, until there was nothing left, not in the name of “Virtue” as it was with the Jacobins but in the name of “Greatness,” of “Taste.”

I could explain how for CPAC that year I had to Uber to the Gaylord Hotel with props and folding tables and handouts in the trunk. How I arrived early with the other young guys and girls in the office and set up our stand and then were free to roam around. How there were seas of ten gallon hats and women in pearls flooded the atrium, and I saw Sebastian Gorka standing over the coffee line in crutches—Gooohkaahh, as the Chapo Trap House losers would say, who likened him to a medieval berserker that would have killed and enslaved them in a past life—and after going up the elevator to the second floor I saw Alex Jones, short and fiery, marching down the hallway with an entourage of 30 conservative paparazzi recording the man who had been banned from the event. “I’m here to expose the globalists in the Republican Party,” he told the cameras. How, down the stairs, a tall drag queen in a Trump sash, “Lady MAGA,” smiled with glee as three Nick Fuentes supporters mocked him, and I turned the corner to see Kellyanne Conway being interviewed by Eric Bolling—who had recently been fired for texting a dick pic to a coworker. How I opened a double door into a gigantic stadium to see now-RNC co-chair Lara Trump, now-disgraced Trump digital advisor Brad Parscale, and CPAC chair Matt Schlapp chatting about the House’s efforts to undermine the President, surrounded by banners that said “AMERICA vs. SOCIALISM.” How, when the talks were over, we went over to a nearby restaurant where Don Jr. and Charlie Kirk were holding an open bar, the place decorated with cardboard cutouts of Trump giving the thumbs up—but we couldn’t even get in, as the line was about 100 suit-and-tie interns long.

I could explain how, in the days that followed, we found out that CPAC was ground zero of the coronavirus pandemic in America. How I had seen news reports of the virus flitting by on Twitter, like a distant rumor surfacing on the outskirts of the globe, but thought nothing of it. How I then began feeling sick, and started seeing headlines about how a New Jersey doctor holding a VIP ticket to the event got dozens of Republican all-stars sick, and now it was rumored that Senator Ted Cruz’s team had come down with the novel plague. How I was out of work for a couple days and sincerely wondered if I was going to die from it, since it was being blasted as a human-made bioweapon (this was even before the pangolin/bat story started) and I had no idea how lethal it really was. How, when I finally emerged from bed and took a walk around the city with Elizabeth, the whole city had been turned into a ghost town: restaurants we used to frequent were closed at prime hours, the streets vacated under a dark overcast sky, a helicopter with a red medical cross sounding above us. How I began to worry about being the last people left in D.C. besides the homeless population, speculating that the grocery stores would run out of food.

I could explain how, before I could process a plan, Elizabeth told me her brother Jeffrey was coming to pick us up the next day. He arrived in his silver KIA and we threw our bags in the trunk. He sped off toward 95, skirting under the outstretched thumbs of panhandlers. It was rumored that the state of New Jersey would be shutting down its highways to stop the spread—Jeffrey balled the jack.

I could explain how I was messaging in one of our Twitter groupchats as I pushed a cart down the aisle of BJ’s Wholesale Club in Butler, NJ. How Alexandre, in between his Deleuzean-Foucaultian analyses of the reactionary fear of life, was telling us about Montreal’s intense lockdowns, curfews set at 8 PM, a whole city gone mad with biopolitical self-surveillance. How Marlowe, the Jacobean dramatist, was celebrating the vindication of his prophecies that “TVVENTIE TVVENTIE” would be an explosive decade—although the blissful renaissance he predicted was in question. How I was now wearing a surgical mask: Elizabeth’s father had picked up a stack of them per an advisory on NJ12 News, as well as a bundle of Clorox wipes with which he rubbed down every item that entered the house, fearful the virus was going to kill his ninety-year-old parents. This was before the pandemic was politicized, and he, a blue-collar one-time Bernie supporter turned solidly Trump, was taking it as seriously as anyone else. How there were headlines crawling on the store TVs about New York City running out of respirators and masks, how the stock market started trending downward, only to crash all at once, how the German Idealist NYU guys were cheering on the apocalypse, defecting to the energy of the Democratic primaries and calling for a class war. How the conspiracists, including my mother, were already rearing in fury, calling it a controlled shutdown of America by the hands of the Chinese Communist Party to thwart Trump’s reelection.

I could explain how the musical rotation of Mozart was replaced with increasingly abrasive trap music, and how Dryden and Pope were replaced with Rimbaud and the Beats, revisiting high school favorites, and how the Corinthian columns of Washington were replaced with patio umbrellas in suburban backyards where Pabst Blue Ribbon was drunk under the whir of sleeping fathers’ CPAP machines. Stimulus checks were announced. How several police killings began filling the social media feeds until the ultimate one, Saint George Floyd, occurred, and I recall feeling there was no way the cops would get out of this one after viewing the footage, and how I remember there was a lull before the explosions began. How all my high school peers uploaded the black squares to their Instagrams, the AP Style Guide announced that you must capitalize the B in Black, but not the W in white, and how the protests kicked off, and then the riots: Minneapolis ablaze, livestreams of stores being looted and burned, highways blockaded, a truck driver pulled from his cab and beaten as dozens of phones record—and he got charges! Alexandre defended this—I knew he had fully lost it. He had been mainlining Anti-Oedipus and Foucault for a year, ceaselessly trolling the frogs by mocking their fear of estrogen on receipts and insisting that there was never a historical period without sexual degeneracy. They raged. How RAJ went full bore after me. How I publicly questioned if it was true he was connected to the Zionist war machine. How he backed off, but then a friend released his dox in defense of me anyway.

How all hell was breaking loose: all our local towns were seeing protests, as well as the homes of Senators like Mitch McConnell, and I wondered if Antifa would get wise and destroy the Wall Street servers housed a few miles away from us. How a group of morons took over Portland and tied to form a commune but couldn’t manage to grow basic crops, and then a local rapper took over and declared himself warlord. How they had to order Domino’s to the commune because they didn’t know how to feed themselves. How BLM took over DC, torched it, looted all the outlets. How Trump came outside the White House with a Bible after they vandalized a church. How the street leading up to the White House was renamed Black Lives Matter Boulevard. How protestors toppled a statue of Albert Pike, a freemason Confederate brigadier general and classical poet in an amateurish mold of Dryden, sending the granite tumbling into muck and protestors’ sneakers. How they tried to topple Jackson but failed; his poetry was too strong.

I could also explain how meanwhile Elizabeth and I were preparing to our wedding reception which was to be held in her backyard, since all the venues were refusing us, and how I took a three-week detour by flying to California for a conservative fellowship where we read the Federalist Papers and sailed on a colonial ship and drank champagne as Trump gave his Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore decrying the erasure of American heritage, and how I wondered if the rioters would travel there and denotate the stone colossi with TNT. How I came back and we transformed the house into an A-class venue with her brothers, how we used her grandparents’ defunct greenhouses to raise a thousand flowers, and how we got a tent and built a bar and arranged lights and everything was in constant motion and how my father got mad at me for not inviting his new wife to Elizabeth’s bridal shower to prevent a fight with my mother and how my grandfather died and how some old friends got mad they weren’t invited to the wedding and how angry old relatives were outraged we didn’t impose temperature checks at the reception doors… how I kept true to the course and tried to prevent the chaos from distracting me. How, as I drove past the wide lawn of my high school the night before my wedding, I glanced over at it and thought of the numerous days spent there, and how all of this, from Trump to the reemergence of high culture to the nihilist rioting sweeping the streets of the nation, owed its origin in some way to the 4chan pages I would surf on my phone bored sitting in those classrooms.

I could explain all of that, and sprint as quickly as I’ve done here to the explanation of Alexandre’s downfall and the great Calamity and what I mean by the decapitation of all values and ideals. But as Virgil says, the descent to hell is easy; it is the ascent out that is hard. What I must do, in order to properly make sense of it all, is to go back to the beginning, to those high school years, and recount how I met Alexandre, and describe how we were introduced to the art of the Terror together, as well as to the Halcyonic—I must explain all of this first, because from such a vantage point I will be able to see the thread through our first conversations to the Calamity, a straight line of ascent and descent, like the line from Aeneas to Augustus and from Augustus to the fall of Rome.