(RNS) — There is a strange and prophetic poem, written in 1898, that tells us much about our lives as we approach Inauguration Day. Its author, Constantine Cavafy, was born in Alexandria, in Ottoman Egypt, but by the time he was 22 had moved to England and Constantinople (now Istanbul) and back to Alexandria, where he wrote “Waiting for the Barbarians” when he was in his 30s. His was a time of ascending and crumbling empires, colonization, treaties made and treaties broken.
Here is a synopsis of the poem:
Everyone has rushed to the forum! Why? Because the barbarians are coming today. The Senate grinds to a halt. Nothing gets done. The emperor has moved his throne to the city’s main gate, put on his crown and has a scroll to present to the leader of the encroaching intruders.
The highest-ranking officials are decked out in their finest togas and are adorned with bracelets with amethysts, rings with emeralds and canes of silver and gold. Why? Because the barbarians love things that dazzle! The leading orators, however, do not clear their throats and rise to make speeches because the barbarians are “bored by rhetoric and public speaking.”
Then, rapidly, the streets empty and everyone goes home, “lost in thought.” Why? Because the barbarians never arrive! Some even claim the barbarians don’t exist any longer! The poem ends, “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.”
What does this poem have to do with Jan. 20, 2025, in America?
The poem is about people preparing for an invasion that never happens. They made a big fuss over nothing. Perhaps. But the last two lines are particularly intriguing. Just how do we live without barbaric threats that keep us up at night? And how could invading barbarians be “a kind of solution”?
Think about who might benefit from keeping us constantly vigilant about an impending invasion by intruders, barbarians, “others” — whatever we choose to label them. The emperor gets to don his crown, sit on his throne and revel in regal splendor to awe, impress and possibly intimidate hostile foreigners. The emperor’s counsels get to wear their fine scarlet togas, bracelets, rings and elegant canes.
The orators don’t bother showing up because the barbarians are bored by “rhetoric and public speaking.” But we might assume that the orators still make a decent living reacting to real and imagined enemies predicted in sacred texts.
The military is armed, fed, housed and paid to defend against potential foes. It also vanquishes the “enemy within” — disgruntled peasants, marginalized citizens and others who may be plotting insurrections or other mayhem.
Could the emperor, military, senators, officials, pundits and newsmongers keep us pumped with fear of the barbarians so we continue to pay taxes and enact legislation that results in the powerful becoming even more powerful, and the fearful becoming even more fearful?
A strategy often employed in politics, religion, media, medicine and business is to instill fear so that people are more easily manipulated into believing what they otherwise would never believe and doing what they would otherwise never do. Fear is a great motivator; so is getting people caught up in speculation about enemies within so they are less likely to demand accountability.
Sometimes the barbarians really do arrive one abominable day. People fear they will be toast. Fight or flight kicks in. Should they abandon ship because all hope is sinking or stay and fight to the death? What do present-day “barbarians” look like anyway: Muslims? Undocumented Latinos? Climate refugees? Creatures from the Land of Woke or the Continent of Queer? Should we deny them schools, the covenant of marriage, driver’s licenses, Senate bathrooms?
Many people believe the barbarians are coming Jan. 20. A new regime is on its way. It’s time to get ready for conflict and chaos. Some of us are beating our plowshares into swords.
Others are abandoning their watchtowers, dropping everything and moving to another country. Clergy are retiring. Many are drawing window shades and bingeing on reruns of movie musicals. Some are divesting, others investing. More are in denial that anything is happening. Some have disappeared from Substack, Twitter and other media ventholes. They sit somewhere in sulky silence.
Some welcome the barbarians! Turncoat politicians, business titans, media barons and other wannabes have rushed to the forum at Mar-a-Lago. Pundits gather at Washington’s main gate, dressed in their finest togas and lapel pins, bearing scrolls, blogs and tweets to present to the leader of the encroaching barbarians, declaring allegiance to the conquerors.
They know the barbarians love things that dazzle! They also know not to make speeches because the leader of the barbarians is “bored by rhetoric and public speaking.”
The invader barbarians might prove to be a bunch of buffoons who, drunk on power, can’t shoot straight. They might fight against each other more than they fight against us. We discover we bought into fear but neglected to lean into hope. The people awaiting the invasion assumed, it seems, that the barbarians were coming to fight. What if they wanted to negotiate?
Perhaps the barbarians never arrived because they were already here, in our souls. We didn’t realize it because we were distracted from ourselves by looking for them over the hills, the ocean or the border. What if the barbarians came from the Land of Propaganda, and we came to believe in them by people flooding the airwaves and social media with whatever messages they wanted us to believe. And we believed it.
This is how feared invaders succeed. People are conflicted. We create relationships and then sabotage them. We are victims of self-fulfilling prophecies: “The world is an unsafe place!” we say. “Barbarians can’t be trusted!”— only to find ourselves living in an unsafe world populated by people who cannot be trusted.
We engage in barbaric invasions of ourselves, allowing self-pity, self-doubt, cynicism, stereotype, injustice, superiority and other invasive species of harm to infiltrate our soul. In our resistance to the barbarians of the world we become just like them. We curse in others what we see in ourselves but cannot accept. We lunge at our own shadows.
Barbarian invaders may not even exist, but our fear, anxiety, anger and exhaustion do exist. Our insomnia, substance use, rage, blame games, I-told-you-so’s, hollow hope, pithy pontification and feigned indifference are living proof the barbarians are gaining the upper hand in our mind and soul.
Why are we so willing to turn our power over to people in power rather than a higher power? We need not offer speeches, togas, bracelets with amethysts, rings with emeralds and canes made of silver and gold and things that dazzle to God, who only wants to “conquer” our hearts.
Jan. 20 is the perfect time to take a breath, get a grip, look up, smile at each other, stay centered. Don’t be a barbarian to yourself or each other, and don’t expect the worst. This could be the beginning of a new better. Invaders come and go. Things change. Wars end but love never does.
(Dwight Lee Wolter, pastor of the Congregational Church of Patchogue, New York, is the author, most recently, of “The Gospel of Loneliness.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)