Columns in the historical city of Palmyra
THE FIFTH COLUMN
We at the ministry of silly hats face the hardest task of the year: attending the annual corporate strategic futurological ministerial all-in pan-global conference. It happens every year, this conference, and it’s terribly important that our ministry be represented, yet the terror at facing it never diminishes.
You might forget some of the pain of the last one, in the intervening year, but then as the end of the financial year approaches and the conference is announced, the pain once again assaults the sensitive ideological feelers of our well-oiled machine of a department.
You see, there’s the problem right there. We are obliged to say we are a “well-oiled machine”, because nobody wants to hear we’re out of oil. We have no oil. We haven’t had any oil in some time. And we actually aren’t a machine, so the matter is moot.
But, moot or unmoot, there is that epistemological elephant in the room.
“Please attend on my behalf,” I said to my immediate inferior, though that’s a term we are no longer supposed to use.
I believe the correct term is “person who reports to me”, even if that person keeps saying they have nothing to report.
“Please go in my stead.”
“My dear chap,” he said. “I’d rather die in a hail of bullets.”
“That can be arranged,” I noted.
“Surely it’s not as bad as all that,” he said airily. “You just go and spout the usual boilerplate about your vision for the year ahead, big plans, big dreams, etcetera, and then you sit down and wait for lunch.”
“I’d have to draft something fresh,” I said. “The future has changed. Again.”
“True,” he said.
“And you forget that one also has to listen to all the other presentations from all the other departments in this vast network of life-giving ministries, their messages of support for one another, their praise songs to the glorious leaders of our everlasting movement for … What was it for again? Or was it a movement towards?”
“It’s always towards,” said my immediate inferior with a touch of asperity. Or it may have been Asperger’s. “That is taken for granted.”
“What if it is no longer taken for granted? This is what I am calling the unmentionable pachyderm.”
“Ah, but now you are getting into philosophical questions. It is not part of our, ahem, mandate to get into philosophical questions.”
I lit a cigarette while I contemplated my reply. Not really, but I felt it necessary to insert a short paragraph of non-dialogue.
“And yet,” I said, “we do. For we must if we are to go on with that great and endless and ever-changing task Nietzsche described as the production of meaning.”
There was a pause. And another short paragraph.
“What do you think,” said my immediate inferior slowly, “of the idea of a heroin milkshake?”