FROM FATIGUED TO FATIGUES

Mrs. Begonia Contretemp’s

Cultural Autopsy

Darlings, I am positively marinated in fatigue. Not the charming sort one acquires after a waltz or a weekend in Bath, but the cultural kind that leaves one gagging on the fumes of civilization’s decline. Permit me to ventilate.

Celebrity Fatigue.

Hollywood has declared war—on leaf blowers! The ever gaunt Cate, sent from cosmic central casting, born to portray Queen Elizabeth the First, has been denouncing the gardener’s hum as “everything wrong with the human race.” What is wrong, my loves, is not noise but the hypocrisy of false aristocrats, who play at refinement while relying on their ground crews. The leaf blower is the democratic gong of suburbia, [They asked for it!] reminding them that lawns—those absurd open-border monocultures of grass—require labor, not poetry. And these people are not true aristocrats; they are actors cosplaying nobility.

Pet Fatigue.

Dogs, once our servants, are now worshipped like minor household gods. I cannot cross the park without tripping over a poodle in a parka. The Council must needs revive our past initiative: Pet Emancipation. Let us emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of canine idolatry! Down with birthday hats for bulldogs, farewell to Labradors with monogrammed bowls. Enough treacle! We are drowning in sentimental slobber!

Shoot-’Em-Up Fatigue.

Endless spectacles of bullets and flames have desensitized the unstable. To say otherwise is as silly as saying rain does not dampen silk. The berserkers of old howled on mead and mushrooms; our new crop—nourished on first-person shooter games and pharmaceuticals—drive into churches, torching and killing with the same numb reflexes taught by cinema. Our faux aristocrats in Hollywood call this “content.” I call it cultural ammunition.

Black Fatigue.

And here is the hardest truth: crime in America is grotesquely out of proportion. Euphemism cannot hide it. The horrendous aberrations play nightly across the news, and with cruel irony, they vindicate the sneers of long-defeated Confederates. What fatigue is heavier than watching history’s ugliest creatures prove themselves nightly in the flesh?

Banned Book Week Fatigue.

And because I am part Norman, permit me a library aside. Banned Book Week! The librarians in their cardigans preen as though they are storming the Bastille, when in fact they are minding the till. They parade their “courage” in defending volumes that have become the very blueprints for our collapse. And let us recall: Orwell himself knew suppression firsthand—his Animal Farm was smothered by his publisher during the war, not by goose-stepping fascists but by polite English mandarins who didn’t wish to offend our Soviet “friends.” False aristocrats then, false aristocrats now. And now the same class waves 1984 about as a talisman, when in reality they have made it their instruction manual. Surveillance, censorship, thought-policing—it’s all there. Which is why “Banned Book Week” is the cruelest joke of all: these books are not banned anymore, darlings—because they’ve been adopted as the blueprint.

Connecting Fatigues.

One sees it everywhere — fatigue in the cultural bloodstream, fatigue in the civic nerves. And what history teaches, darlings, is that when a people can no longer endure the exhaustion of the everyday, they often turn outward. The emotional release is war.

So I ask you: how many fatigues can one civilization endure before the fabric unravels? Celebrity, pet, crime, cinema, books, lawns, blowers—fatigue upon fatigue, a mille-feuille of exhaustion. But now a final note, darlings: it is becoming apparent we are headed toward another world war. And when that day arrives, we shall not only complain of cultural fatigue—no, we shall all be wearing creased and starched fatigues. How apropos.