As so many practiced diplomats, so too your vaunted laureates, whose access to the higher rungs of the cultural priesthood is hinged upon their flair for sophistry. Well, I vote you the best-equipped to shrink from speech that might suggest any thoughts your key target-market might not have already signed-off on and ratified. And I vote you most likely to clutter your language with so much deadwood that no amount of pruning will reveal your intensive, protracted campaign of saying nothing at all. Your daydreams of black tie affairs at Rideau Hall. Your acceptance speech. Your dramatic pause. Don’t forget to thank those bitter ex-musician cum embedded rock-journalists frantically applauding the latest artist-formerly-known-as iconoclast, giddy from the fumes of a fresh defection, moping to the maudlin beat of a hat rack rhythm section, a tacit understanding of mutual non-aggression enjoyed by every nauseating do-nothing functionary. Really, it’s not so much the incessant ruse of assigning profound meaning to the meaningless curios you decorate your sets with in your extraordinarily mundane fictions. It’s the (colossal) arrogance of the subtext: the province of human affairs is a field best left to dilettantes with an extraordinary gift for the feigning of paralysis. For saying nothing at all. For daydreams of black tie affairs at Rideau Hall. An acceptance speech. Sustained applause.
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