File 20: On Capture
This may or may not be about Maduro.
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At a recent conference, I introduced myself to a fellow speaker as a “public intellectual.” He thought it brave of me to use the label. That is precisely why I used it. It is somewhat audacious, and it names the work I actually do: researching, speaking, and writing about society and ideas in public, with the aim “to advance freedom and knowledge,” as Edward Said once described the task.
But over the past couple of days, I found myself reluctant to do what a public intellectual might do when a major news event unfolds, such as the capture of Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Adela Flores de Maduro.
It’s not that I had nothing to say. While I lack specific expertise on Venezuela, a public intellectual is typically a generalist, and my work addresses power, paradigms, imperialism, and masculinities. But I didn’t want to add to the endless hot takes on the matter.
I found myself more interested in the meta-narrative—the idea of capture itself. It’s not only Maduro who has been captured by the graceless politics of Trump; it’s the world.
For a decade now, since Trump’s first term as president, his apoplectic antics, culture wars, and unpredictability have captured the political imagination.
When it all feels too ominous and unreal, I resort not to hope but to an adjacent emotion: fantasy.
I fantasise about the day Trump will no longer be president—a day that is (too) slowly but surely coming. Rather than capture, the fantasy makes me feel rapture. I can almost feel the exhilaration much of the world will collectively experience. It might take us years to stabilise our nervous systems, and God knows what will follow Trump, but we will certainly feel lightness and the easing of tension.
We are not there yet, though. We must still contend with this feeling of capture.
