The Microcosmic Death Spectacle

An essay poem by Adam Lehrer about America, capital, psyops, and the media

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is lurid and seductive
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is a smokescreen designed to distract, distort, and corrupt

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
creates an image you can’t look away from
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
preys on empathy, and exploits idiosyncrasy

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is enraging by design
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is wielded by power to silence its critics

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is a state execution in the news
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
“tears at your heart strings,” with reductive, head fucked “analysis”

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
Brandon Bernard on death row
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is Dylan’s burger, “how could they feed a killer?”

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is orchestrated by the media
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
has suspiciously become consensus amongst the populace

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
a half true embellishment
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is all the psyops, built upon useful tragedies 

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is fetishized victimhood
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
obscures the real story. You’ll never hear who shot first. Or why. Or how.

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is Donald Trump’s presidency and its critics in the media, the security state and the activist industrial complex
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is the hyperreality, “fascism, “communism,” terrorism, Proud Boys, Charlottesville, Russiagate, Putin, Coronavirus, and your iPhones are

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is identity politics, ephemeral and metaphysical, impossible to understand in any substantive way because there’s nothing to understand, it’s a simulacra, a spectacle, a microcosmic death spectacle
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is reality TV, and your fellow man selling themselves out to trash entertainment networks to feel seen and less alone in this putrid existence, it’s snorting oxycontin in a dank apartment that you can no longer afford enslaved to the fantasy of a life that you’ll never have

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is Black Lives Matter money
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is Floyd protests, cities burning for no reason

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is a rich white family’s decorative graveyard
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is the necropolis in their yard, tombstones signaling their “virtue”

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is NSA surveillance
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is your right to privacy blissfully stolen

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is the corruption you’re allowed to see
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is the corruption they want you to see, when it doesn’t matter

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is “Assad” and “Kim Jong Un”
the Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is mutually assured destruction baby!

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is Antifa’s performance of dissent
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is the “activist artist,” not an artist at all

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is BDS, as if the refusal to buy fruit juice and yarn will yield real change; it’s Ilhan Omar’s “woke imperialism”
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is the illusion you desperately cling to, your delusions of reform, your refusal to grasp the downfall of dying empire, it won’t come back

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is a fracturing of the walls that separate the real and the fantasy, Baudrillard called it a perfect crime, it murders reality itself, conspiracy, mystery and unknowability are its shields
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is the assassination of JFK, or the World Series of 1919, or the corporate sponsorship of activism, or Elon Musk’s marriage to Grimes, it’s meaningless and oh so meaningful, by design, forever, it’s a leech, it drains

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is morals marketized
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is corrosive, shameful conformism, a void

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is a socially enforced belief set
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
gives you no choice, an abolition of the subjectivity 

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is a cruel strangulation
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
Is a denial of the will…… of TRUTH

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is both the doomed Bernie Sanders campaigns
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is a hammer masked as hope, the state pulverizing its subjects

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is the painful death of art
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is Kamala’s obvious imposter syndrome

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
Is the left, and the right, they don’t exist
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is the poets, the philosophers and the artists cast aside

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
there’s no place for the modern
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
replaces a theater of cruelty with apathy

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is transgression coopted by dullards
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is weak people with manufactured ideas and stolen valor

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is so embedded into civic interactions and social relations that it’s fucking impossible to understand, don’t try
The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is a seismic Cthulhu, it alters the fabric of reality and swallows towns and families and digests them as unrecognizable ghouls

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is your friends turned into cops policing your thought on behalf of ideas that are total abstractions, it’s the political and the personal intermeshed and woven as a noose from which you hang before thirsty crowds

The Microcosmic Death Spectacle
is a new world order, the last world order, the liquid modern, the fluid landscape, the banality, the horror, the fraudulent justice, the kingdom of capital, no monarchs only managers, don’t resist, you’re exhausted, take the knee, behold the spectacle, its perfection, its triumph!

It’s the collapse of the transcendent, the erosion of the sublime, and the death of truth. It’s a pill they crush and cook over a spoon and inject into your pulsating veins against your will. There is no will. Your weakness is your only strength. Refusal will get you killed. Gun in mouth, swallow the bullet. There’s no alternative.

It’s everything, it’s nothing, it is what it is. What is it?

the Microcosmic Death Spectacle.

Illustration by Adam Lehrer

I wrote The Microcosmic Death Spectacle during the summer of 2020, when it became clear that activists, the media, and corporate America were working together to engineer consent for the eventual election of Joe Biden. I’ve waited to publish it this long because, for some reason, this piece became very personally important to me. I can’t even be sure if it’s good, in the traditional sense, but I do know that it captures some changes in my subjectivity and cultural awareness that have had profound impact on me as an artist. And now that I know my intuition about the psyops of 2020 was correct, it feels like it’s time.