Cheney's death march

 Fred Licht begins his essay on Goya’s Charles IV and his Family with this exemplary paragraph:

“Ever since Theophile Gautier described Goya's Charles IV and His Family (Fig. 1) as "the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery," scholars, amateurs, and casual visitors to the Prado have asked themselves how it was possible for Goya's royal patrons to accept so degrading a portrait.1 Even if one takes into consideration the fact that Spanish portraiture is often realistic to the point of eccentricity, Goya's portrait still remains unique in its drastic description of human bankruptcy.”

I was reminded of Goya by the photograph of the bipartisan ghouls sitting in attendance at Cheney’s funeral. From Bush to Biden to Pence, it was a panorama of the essential, sublime silliness of the American empire as it flops, all of them mourning the man who helped blow a hole in the ship of state and has left us all worse off than we would ever have been if he had not been born – and how often can you say that about someone?

Truly, Dick Cheney was a ghoul who would have satisfied Goya’s painterly criteria: the obliterating self-satisfaction of his face, the faux-studliness of his attitude, even the habit of hunting (which he did famously badly, injuring a man in his hunting party and infamously extracting an apology for the injury from the injured party) - which surely would have reminded Goya of the string of unfit Bourbon hunters. Yet the photograph was not of Cheney, whose image I can, unfortunately, conjure up from the dark 00s. It was a portrait of an incompetent and murderous political and corporate elite, whose faces are set in what I suppose they suppose is a solemn look, fit for a patriotic occasion. These people are, in truth, the undertakers of patriotic occasions, in as much as patriotism is some kind of reverence for republican virtu – not a single player here has a drop of it. Like a batting average to a baseball player, one feels the casualty average should hover over these geriatric heads. Behold Biden, a man who helped bury under the rubble of Gaza at least 10,000 or more children! Behold Bush, the glad recipient of many a torture memo, an incompetent whose epitaph should be the words he uttered to the men from the CIA who came to warn him, in August 2001, of the upcoming terrorist act: “"All right. You've covered your ass" And is that our lady of losses, Katherine Harris, next to Biden? And Pence? Lusterless eminences, the Rosencranz and Guildenstern of the neo-fascist farce we are currently seeing enacted.

Death has a way of concentrating our minds, and this death – the death of a deadly and toxic figure – should remind us that the U.S. elite is a numbskull-ridden horror comedy, But at least they are bipartisanly turning out for the man who once claimed to be, as Vice President, neither executive nor legislative, but in his own branch of government, untouchable. The claim which serves as the root for the current Trump interregnum.

Denunciation cannot wither what nature and our social order has withered already, but I don’t denounce because it will do any good to others – it is just that if you don’t spit the poison out of your mouth, if you swallow it, you will find yourself swimming among cancers sooner or later.

As Goya knew well, the master of the secret sketchpad, the painter of those black paintings in his final atelier outside of Bordeaux.