Fakehead

Look how they sway, the public, the mass, like the innocent grass in a field grown of cow dunged fertilizer! This particular segment and speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Ceaser was the first piece of art that really revealed the hypocrisy of democracy to me, but perhaps it is simply just that Marlon Brando is delivering the message. I will propose a question: what does Marc Antony understand about the republic that Brutus doesn’t? Brutus believes in giving the people the government they want. But this monologue reveals that the mass is a reactive and quick acting force. If the people do not know what they want, than what is the role of the government? Is it to let the people know what they want, what they need to live? Antony, in this monologue, knows that the government will always be an authority, will always suggest a vision to the people, and that the vision of a mass is only reactive instead of proactive. How could it not be reactive? How else does a mass organize out of a sea of individuals? It seems that thought itself, thinking before acting, dissolves a mass. All conservatism or war mongering prefer the mass and try to create a popular understanding because it will support decisions like war faster and with greater ferocity. “The public, the public,” as Garcia Lorca said on the eve of The Spanish Civil War to a hustler hiding in an entrance hall, “is never, never wrong.” “And why is the public never wrong?” Responds Roberto Bolaño in a much later work “The Myth of Cthulu”, “Because the public understands.” It has a sensitivity of its own, but it is mobilized to respond, respond, respond.